You walk into a bar blindfolded.You buy a Martini cocktail.The bartender tells you it was very good and a handsome brunette drank it.No one else confirmsYou pay satisfied and leave. You go to your banker.You tell him to buy some stocks.He tells you he bought them and sends you a slip of paper saying he did.No one else confirms.You leave satisfied. You go to your advertising space provider.You participate in an auction.Your supplier tells you that it was held, that you won it, and that the advertisement was displayed and seen N times.No one else confirms.You pay satisfied and leave.…

Here’s the hard fact: Google has failed to their corporate values still published today; they have gone against all they have spent millions and millions of dollars to convince users. There is a deliberate deterioration of search results to increase ADV revenues Google deliberately makes a product worse to make more money. Long gone are the days when Brin and Page wanted interference-free advertising Long gone are the days of Google’s phylosophy, of “Ten things we know to be true”, still advertised today. 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 2. It’s best to do one thing…

OK, so basically Mr. Musk has decided to remove the text from the quotation of external sites. The EU’s Copyright directive (article 15th) allows for some copyright exceptions for online uses: Member States shall provide publishers of press publications established in a Member State with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the online use of their press publications by information society service providers.The rights provided for in the first subparagraph shall not apply to private or non-commercial uses of press publications by individual users.The protection granted under the first subparagraph shall not…

Warning: IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) much of the debate about training language models by exploiting books concerns whether these models make use of training texts in a way that is compatible with copyright exceptions here the jurists are divided and as I have written in previous posts and articles there are good arguments in support of one or the other thesis i.e. that it is permissible to use pre-existing texts because the products of LLMs are not derivative works or that it is not permissible to use these texts because the products of LLMs are derivative works that…

Today, on the anniversary of the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for using “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to maintain its monopoly power.” The FTC and the suing states say “Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.” The states suing are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and…

For those of you who are not familiar with “newspeak”, it is an artificial language idea described by Orwell in his book 1984 The specific purpose of newspeak is not only to provide a means of expression that would replace the old worldview, but to homogenize the thinking of the people. A cornerstone of newspeak was “doublethink”, which consists of accepting as true either one hypothesis or its opposite, whichever the party considers appropriate. Google and Apple are notoriously excellent at conditioning the worldview (for apple we speak of the “reality distortion field” as described in wikipedia) Now they also…

My friend Ernesto Ciorra, CO innovation and sustainability officer at ENEL (90th largest company in the world by revenue, with €140 billion in 2022 and the second largest power company in the world by revenue after the State Grid Corporation of China) published a post on linkedin on the fact that batteries+electric lines are preferable to hydrogen because energy conversion efficiency to/from hydrogen is very low. (an undoubtable fact of physics) This argument, though, does not buy me fully in. My point is: in a world where energy production in some moments has a 0 (or negative) cost, who cares…

If Bollorè will allow, at a next shareholders’ meeting, Telecom Italia could be split between network and services, Netco and Servco. If the deal goes ahead, there are talks of allocating 15 thousand employees to Servco and 25 thousand to Netco.Fifteen thousand employees is three times as many as Vodafone, which is not exactly a “very fit” company. How will Servco be sustainable? Furthermore, the company has never operated without market constraints related to its dominant position. This is not a cultural legacy to be underestimated. Allocating more people to Netco might relieve Servco, but Netco would become sustainable only…

A law passed unanimously in the Italian parliament against piracy requires ISPs to poison DNS and block IP addresses within 30′ of notification. The idea is that this will block pirate streaming of sporting events while the event is in progress. Rightholders will have flaggers who will notify the Communications Authority-AGCOM (the Italian NRA) of the ip addresses and domain names to be blocked, and AGCOM will forward them to all ISPs operating in Italy for blocking, which must take place, as mentioned, within 30′. Given the tight timeframe, AGCOM will not be able to perform any checks: it will…

From quinta@venere.inet.it Tue Jan 17 13:44 MET 1995 Received: from venere.inet.it by ghost.dsi.unimi.it with SMTP id AA19145 (5.65+/IDA-1.3.5 for ); Tue, 17 Jan 95 13:38:42 +0100 Return-Path: <quinta@venere.inet.it> Received: (from quinta@localhost) by venere.inet.it (8.6.9/8.6.9) id NAA27313; Tue, 17 Jan 1995 13:38:23 +0100 Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 13:38:23 +0100 From: Stefano Quintarelli <Stefano.Quintarelli@Inet.IT> Message-Id: <199501171238.NAA27313@venere.inet.it> To: <> Subject: I.NET – X-Mailer: AIR Mail 3.X (SPRY, Inc.) Status: RO Egr. Dr. , A seguito della Sua richiesta, Le invio documentazione informativa riguardante le fasce di connettivita’ da noi proposte, i nostri prodotti e le attivita’ a supporto dell’offerta. Innanzitutto desidero evidenziare…