Quinta’s weblog

Questo è un post molto lungo, in Italiano per la sua valenza locale. La prima parte è una risposta ad un’articolessa di Franco Debenedetti e Francesco Vatalaro “La via del futuro per TIM” che era uscita su Il Foglio e che avevo preparato per quel giornale, ma è passato troppo tempo, sicchè la scrivo qui. La seconda parte è una “critica ragionata” che è il format che adottavo per rispondere punto per punto (su argomenti che credo di conoscere un pochino) quando leggevo qualcosa con cui sono in disaccordo. Risposta a Debenedetti e Vatalaro Ho letto con il consueto ultradecennale…

I must be surely wrong. could you please point out my mistakes to me ? two cases: a 30% and a 100% “fair share” : I fail to see how this could turn into a bonanza for network investments Updates: I corrected Netflix’s figures as they were in USD not in EUR These are the KPIs of the telco groups that are asking the EU commission to mandate a “fair share” levy (source: their balance sheets for last FY. – remember ? we were locked down for months in 2021 due to covid) supposing these telcos account for 50% of…

This is a transcript of a chat with some friends.What I’m about to say doesn’t mean that one can’t make a lot of money out of LLMs, yet I have some doubts that there are many sustainable multibillion-dollar businesses based on them. Several years ago, long before Satoshi Nakamoto, while speculating with a friend who now is a prominent crypto personality about a possible fully P2P decentralized coin, I argued that I could not clearly see a possible way of sustainably making substantial revenues because if there are no asymmetries in the playing field (like in pure P2P), no player…

The Musk and twitter affair should teach us the importance of considering our digital lives not from a static point of view but from a dynamic one, that is, not considering the choices we make as facts pertaining just to the specific moment but rather to consider how they might evolve after some time. Twitter was a publicly traded company with a good board of directors, a strong reputation as a well-administered system that cared about protecting users. Musk’s acquisition concentrated ownership in one person, the moderation team was decimated as well as the regulatory compliance people. Today Twitter is…

At the beginning of december, italian digital identity, SPID, has surpassed the 1Bn yearly authentications mark; I suspect it to be a european record (or more). In Italy there used to be a smartcard based digital identity (CIE/CNS/CPS/CRS) even prior to the introduction of SPID, a smartphone based Digital Identity, that I first proposed in 2013 and that effectively started after the pilot phase in 2016. The adoption grew significantly both in users and in service provider adoption. The case in Trentino (a small autonomous province of Italy) is very important because there was an ubiquitous deployment of smartcard based…

After a process lasting two years, the joint committee of the German federal data protection authority and 17 state regulators found that “”that, on the basis of these documents [provided by MS], it is not possible to use Microsoft Office 365 in a way that complies with data protection requirements”. Boom Now I wonder if and how it is possible for similar services from Google or other U.S. companies to comply with EU laws. This is particularly significant in Italy where almost all schools are using Google Classroom (wouldn’t it be the moment to use EU services instead ?) Past…

Questo post è un riassunto di cose scritte in precedenza altrove (sul mio account @quinta@mastdon.uno) , concentrate in un unico luogo perchè potrebbero essere utili o di interesse a nuovi utenti di Mastodon. Mastodon è meglio o peggio di twitter ? E’ diverso. E’ costruito per ridurre tensioni, insulti, maleducazione, tossicità… C’è meno gente, ma i contenuti di twitter possono essere mirrorati facilmente, per quegli utenti di cui porprio non potete fare a meno. Meno dopamina, più tranquillità. In questo post spiego un po’ le basi per destreggiarsi, quali sono i principali meccanismi de-tox di Mastodon e la sfida (affatto…

I may be wrong. it seems to me Mastodon has reached a critical mass, so it will exist in the foreseeable future as an alternative social media Twitter will need to invent something extremely compelling, not yet thought of, in order to prompt people to pay, vis-á-vis a free alternative This will push the adoption of activitypub (the underlying tech) and more services could emerge confronting other social media. Musk’s illogic adventure could mark the social media industry tipping point Regulators have at first given up regulating speech online leaving it to social media companies’ self regulation Now they impose…

UPDATE 2022.10.29 Hon. Simone Baldelli, Former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives has yesterday published an article stating that Meloni government: why the real danger will be the numbers in Parliament (and committees)The possible political resilience of the center-right depends not so much on the program outlined to the chambers but on the fragility of numbers in committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate (Qui la auto-traduzione in italiano) In Oct. 2020 Italy enacted a reform in the number of the members of the Parliament (Chamber of Deputies and Senate). This reform has unintended consequences for governability.The…

I am jotting down this note to myself. Few days ago I was thinking at some background trends that it seems to me are underpinning the evolution of EU Digital policies. The first one I would call “Antitrust Originalism”. It seems to me we are departing from the antitrust interpretation promoted by the Chicago School: no longer the north star seems to be the momentary advantage to consumers but rather the long term economic power and political effect of megacorporations. Antitrust was originally conceived as an economic tool to limit the political power of few self-appointed, un-elected persons. There we…