Quinta’s weblog

This is the 5-4 supreme court decision: 17-204_bq7d (pdf) that gives green light to an antitrust case based on the damage to consumers due to abuse of monopolisitic power by Apple. It is difficult to argue that prices (including 30% to Apple) would not have been lower if this 30% would not be imposed thanks to its artificial closure of devices. (unnecessary, I would add, as you can install/remove any app you want to/from other Apple products, sourcing those apps directly from suppliers). I recall when, 1,5 yrs ago, some notable persons in Italy argued in a written memo requested…

In all the recurring debate abouot breaking up facebook or making all data a commons or whatever, my point is quite easily summarized with a simple slogan make my data mine that I would really love to seeing emerge. it implies that data must not be non-rival and non-excludable. Remember Hal Varian recently argued data is non rival and only partially excludable. This implies that a way to protect user data is that a silos collects and holds it and provides authenticated access to it. Thus implying that Google’s and the likes is somewhat a ‘natural’ consequence. thanks to lockins…

Il Gruppo Guardian, grande testata britannica di stampo globale, ha pubblicato i suoi risultati dopo tre anni di una strategia di riconversione. Bisogna fare i complimenti, sono risultati eccellenti: The Guardian’s audience has grown substantially with record number of regular readers and digital traffic. The Guardian had over 1.35bn page views in March 2019, compared to 790m in April 2016. GNM has grown revenues across each of the last three years with revenue growth of 3% to £223 million in 2018/19. Revenues are now at their highest level for a decade. GNM’s target of reducing costs by over 20% by…

Jetblue  is a low  cost airline from New York https://twitter.com/JetBlue/status/1118607244290084864 The short version: customer asks jetblue on twitter how they can use her face for a boarding pass jetblue says she can opt out customer asks where they got her facial info jetblue says DHS (from an email in the IP mailing list)

Leggo qui che HTML5 added a “feature” to the web called hyperlink auditing. You can read the specification from the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). Hyperlink auditing is added to a web page via the ping attribute on an HTML anchor element (<a>), i.e., a link. Notice that when you hover over the “Ping Me” link, you only see the href URL, you don’t see the ping URL, so you don’t even know that the attribute exists unless you look at the HTML page source. When you click the link, it loads the page http://lapcatsoftware.com/ as expected. But…

This is a point I raised today at the HLEG on AI of the EC (High-level Expert Group on AI of the European Commission) Like we have the principle of “privacy by design” for systems managing personal data, we should have a principle of “redress by design” for systems based on AI which take decisions that can affect people’s lives. The basic consideration is that a perfectly functioning AI system will make wrong decisions. For example, a person could be denied a service because of a decision by an AI system. Such a system is not deterministic like, for example,…

Grazie Dr. Augias. A giudicare dalla quantità di sottolineature e dal numero di giallini attaccati alle pagine, pare che abbia trovato un bel po’ di spunti interessanti… 🙂

Riguardavo questo manifesto: Era il 1990. Nel 1987 si era tenuto a Milano l’IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Mi sembrava che questo manifesto fosse dell’IJCAI ed invece era del Computational Intelligence del 1990. Degno di nota il tutorial numero 6. Ho poi notato una cosa che pare incredibile: Era il settembre 1990, erano tutti tecnologi internazionali di alto livello in un settore altamente innovativo (AI). Nel manifesto c’era un solo indirizzo email (il mio). E, nota nella nota, non c’erano i top level domains. Un’era geologica fa.