Giacomo Tesio

Feedbacks on EDPB Recommendations 01/2020

2020-12-20T17:30:00+00:00

Crittografia End-to-End: chiavi PGP via WKD

2025-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Breve guida pratica su come configurare il sistema di Web Key Directory sul vostro dominio, facilitando ai vostri contatti l’ottenimento della vostra chiave pubblica e permettedo loro di scrivervi email cifrate end-to-end in modo più facile.

Le prime 10.000 vittime del genocidio a Gaza

2025-10-03T15:30:00+00:00

Oggi sciopero. Come tanti altri lavoratori.

Davanti a una scuola ho sentito alcuni studenti chiedersi perché la loro Prof scioperasse.

Così mi sono ricordato di quando Aljazeera ha pubblicato i nomi dei primi 10.000 bambini e ragazzi uccisi da Israele a Gaza dall'inizio del genocidio.

Oggi scioperiamo contro il Governo Italiano, che sputa sulla nostra Costituzione per compiacere Trump.

Ma a quegli studenti vorrei mostrare i nomi delle vittime innocenti di Israele, bambini e ragazzi che hanno la loro età o quella dei loro fratelli.

How to run your own social network (with Snac)

2024-12-18T00:30:00+00:00

The Fediverse is a federated system of communities that looks somewhat like a big social network but without any central authority and without the algorithmic control of people beliefs and behaviours that fluel "surveillance capitalism".

Here a tutorial about running a little fediverse instance for your friends and family on any cheap shared hosting supporting CGI.

A Scuola da Google

2022-05-01T23:59:00+00:00

Come molti certamente ricorderanno, sin dall'avvio della Didattica a Distanza, il 4 marzo 2020, il Ministero dell'Istruzione propose alle scuole la scelta fra due piattaforme EdTech: una di Google e l'altra di Microsoft...

Continua su http://www.tesio.it/2022/05/01/A_Scuola_da_Google.html

Lezioni di CyberSecurity

2022-04-22T18:30:00+00:00

Di seguito trovate la breve introduzione che ho realizzato per la CGIL sui fondamenti di cibernetica ed informatica necessari a mantenere un minimo di privacy e di sicurezza al lavoro e nella vita privata.

Per comodità di visione ho diviso la lezione in 5 parti:

Introduzione alla Cibernetica (28m 51s)
Introduzione all'Informatica (50m 07s)
La sicurezza Informatica sul lavoro (37m 43s)
La sicurezza Cibernetica sul lavoro (24m 33s)
Cittadinanza cibernetica e CGIL (5m 55s)

Le slide sono disponibili qui.

Cibernetica... in CGIL

2022-03-03T16:30:00+00:00

Di seguito il mio contributo al convegno CGIL Cybersecurity e la protezione delle attività digitali a seguito del mio articolo pubblicato su Idea Diffusa dal titolo La sicurezza informatica sul lavoro.

Si tratta di una breve riflessione sul ruolo che il sindacato può svolgere nella società cibernetica contemporanea.

MP4 - OGG

I Dati della Discordia

2022-02-12T20:30:00+00:00

Tramite la pervasività degli automatismi che permette di realizzare e controllare, l’informatica sta creando una nuova società cibernetica che lega, integrando profondamente, complessi sistemi automatici e persone spesso inconsapevoli del loro funzionamento.

I dati alimentano questa trasformazione in modi che sfuggono ai modelli concettuali antecedenti sia per la loro evoluzione continua che per la loro utilità esponenziale, diventando oggetto di conflitto economico, politico e militare.

Partendo dai concetti fondamentali di informazione e dato, questo lavoro analizza i limiti delle classificazioni più diffuse dei dati at rest per poi proporre una classificazione cibernetica in grado di spiegare le ragioni e le metodologie di tale conflitto multilaterale.

La sicurezza informatica sul lavoro

2021-12-30T08:30:00+00:00

Anche di (in)sicurezza informatica si può morire, ma la riconduzione delle cause e delle responsabilità è molto più complessa...

Articolo pubblicato anche su idea diffusa inserto tecnologico di Collettiva.

ERRATA CORRIGE about: "AI" demystified: a decompiler

2021-09-03T15:59:00+00:00

It turns out that the weight variations (gradients), logged during the compilation phase here, are enough to reconstruct the source dataset.
In particular, the gradient recorded from the node of the first layer is by itself a linear transform of the input.

This means that, as it currently stands, decompile.py does not prove nor disprove any statement about the "model" of an "artificial neural network".

I still stand behind the rest of the article and I still believe that any "artificial neural network" is just a statistically programmed virtual vector mapping machine that pipelines filters composed of vector reducers.
Furthermore I still believe that the software run by such machines (the "model" in AI/ML parlance) is a derivative work of the source dataset just like the binary compiled from a C source is a derivative work of the source.
While this decompiler does not prove that a substatantial portion of the source is contained into the ouput binary, I still believe that reading, running and debugging the compiler provides a strong insight about such derivation because:

it produces an executable binary for a specific target machine from a source dataset and thus it's not just a form of hashing or lossy compression
it's not a form of encryption because you do not use an encryption key

The practices of the field can meld in a single process the engineering of these virtual machines and their programming just because, at the end of the day, both the virtual machines and the "model" they run... are pieces of software.
Furthermore the "AI spring" generated a powerful hype and several political incentives to preserve the hazy anthropomorphic language instead of a simpler one, easier to understand for everybody.

Having said that, I'm really sorry for the flawed decompilation claims.

"AI" demystified: a decompiler

2021-09-01T23:59:00+00:00

To prove that any "artificial neural network" is just a statistically programmed (virtual) machine whose ~~model~~ software is a derivative work of the source dataset used during its "training", we provide a small suite of tools to assemble and program such machines and a decompiler that reconstruct the source dataset from the cryptic matrices that constitute the software executed by them.
Finally we test the suite on the classic MNIST dataset and compare decompiled dataset with the original one.

Lobbista per 5'

2021-07-23T17:30:00+00:00

Ufficialmente, il video del mio intervento alla conferenza AIUCD 2021 dal titolo La lotta informatica per la Democrazia cibernetica.

In realtà, l'avvio di una folgorante carriera come lobbista dei GAFAM.

MP4 - OGG

La simbiosi intelligente

2020-03-16T17:30:00+00:00

Trascrizione (rivisitata) del mio contributo al XV Congresso dell'Associazione Luca Coscioni sulla Libertà di Ricerca (slides qui). Disponibile anche in inglese

Il Valore dei Dati (video)

2021-02-26T19:00:00+00:00

Il video della mia presentazione sul valore dei dati, gentilmente distribuito via PeerTube da Roberto Resoli.

Il Valore dei Dati

2021-02-24T07:30:00+00:00

In anteprima le slide che presenterò venerdì 26, durante il primo seminario di Lontani ma non soli, ciclo di incontri organizzato dai dipartimenti CISP e DETECT dell'Università di Pisa.

Scarica PDF - (versione per la stampa)

GAFAM vs hackers [IT]

2021-01-19T18:00:00+00:00

¿Qué es la informática?

2020-12-25T19:00:00+00:00

In this weird year of pandemics and national lock-downs, one of the most valuable (and expensive!) gifts I received is from Spain.

Ekaitz Zarraga chosed to open the ElenQ Publishing initiative with a curated Spanish translation of my essay What is Informatics?.

Ekaitz did an impressive work: beyond the language translation, he turned every single link of my hypertext into a very informative footnote that was designed to give the readers enough context to understand the text but also raise their curiosity to delve deeper.

So my article now has been translated to Spanish, turned into a real book and published on August 10, 2020 with ISBN 978-84-122572-0-5!

You can buy a printed copy from ElenQ Publishing for just 15€ that will support an ethical publishing initiative.

But since Ekaitz acts as he preaches, you can also download the book for free, on that same page and in several formats, including the source code.

Ekaitz is a hacker.
He knows that knowledge want to be free.
After all, information exists to be communicated!

Thanks Ekaitz! :-)

Post Scriptum

With Ekaitz's book, What is Informatics? is now available in three languages: English, Spanish and Catalan (thanks to Rafael Carreras).
I hope that with the new year, I'll find the time to translate it in Italian too, but do not hold your breath: I deeply appreciate their work because I know how much time it can take to translate and adapt such kind of text!

Feedbacks on EDPB Recommendations 01/2020

2020-12-20T17:30:00+00:00

On November 11, 2020 the European Data Protection Board opened a public consultation on its recent "Recommendations on measures that supplement transfer tools to ensure compliance with the EU level of protection of personal data".
Here you can find an hypertext version of the feedbacks I've sent.

La lotta informatica per la Democrazia cibernetica

2020-10-02T20:30:00+00:00

L’invenzione di processori general purpose, la rapida miniaturizzazione dell’elettronica e la costruzione di una rete internazionale di scambio dati, hanno avviato una serie di rivoluzioni sociali, culturali e politiche analoghe a quelle prodotte dalle precedenti innovazioni informatiche, ma su scala planetaria ed in rapidissima successione.

Con la propria pervasività, l’informatica sta infatti creando una nuova società cibernetica che lega, integrando sempre più profondamente, complessi sistemi automatici e persone inconsapevoli del loro funzionamento.

La realizzazione, la manutenzione ed il controllo di questi sistemi, automatici ma non autonomi, è affidata ad una nuova categoria di lavoratori, gli informatici, che iniziano lentamente ad acquisire una propria coscienza di classe, esprimendo esigenze, valori e metodi di lotta solo in parte riconducibili a quelli del passato.

Analizzando le caratteristiche di questa nuova lotta di classe “informatica”, è possibile evidenziare le dinamiche di potere che operano nella società cibernetica in cui viviamo, dinamiche invisibili per chiunque non sia in grado di comprendere e modificare personalmente il funzionamento degli automatismi che lo circondano.

Questo breve saggio (qui in PDF) verrà discusso il 20/01/2021 alla conferenza AIUCD 2021.

Not all hackers are... Americans

2020-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

If you were looking at the shadows drawn by a rolling dice over a plain surface, you could not understand what was going on. Depending on the number and relative positions of lights in the scene, the exact shape of the dice, its initial position, its opacity and mass, you would see entirely different shapes drawn on your surface with (apparently) unpredictable movements. Each dice and each roll would project very different shadows so that it would be hard to say anything meaningful about what they had in common. Furthermore, it could even be difficult to distinguish the shadows of a rolling dice from the shadows of a coin thrown nearby the same surface.

I think we can easily agree that if all you had were the shadows drawn on the plain surface you couldn't guess what they represent. More so, if all you could conceive was a two dimensional space.

This is exactly what happens with hackers.

We look weird, contraddictory and unpredictable to mainstream people. It's not just that we don't fit your model: the dimensions you use to describe (and often perceive) reality is a proper subset of those we move within.

As a conseguence, people can't tell a competent engineer from a hacker, much like they can't easily tell a cop from a killer dressed alike.

We are described as a sort of wizards, as geeks, as sexists, as nerds, as criminals, as funny smelling weirdos and as heroes... depending of the shadows that our actions project into the observers' minds and prejudices.

Yet, under usual conditions, many of us look quite similar to the other people in the communities we live. It's quite usual that few knows what we do and well known hackers, like RMS, Snowden, Torwalds or Assange are a tiny fraction of our number. And while they are actually iconic of our behaviours, they are mostly representative under those dimensions that mainstream people cannot see or conceive. And what's worse is that what most people see while looking at them is weird "Americans", while in fact most hackers are not from the U.S.A.

Like every other person, hackers are not just hackers: we inherit and interiorise the culture we live in. But since many of the most visible hackers are actually from U.S.A. (and U.S.A. people usually forget that there is intelligent life outside the U.S.A.), the prevalent narration on hackers confuse Americans's values and hackers' ones.

Such confusion also comes from the language we use these days, English, spread all over the world as a lingua franca through smart military strategies just like Latin was spread during the Roman Empire. But now that we see the States collapsing under their own contraddictions, their cultural hegemony cracks a little and we can see more clearly that... well the "American dream" is actually a nightmare for everybody.
And so we ask: how did it happen that we named hackers after an axe?

Yet some people got tons of followers, pretending to be hackers by exploiting the ignorance they shared with their public and by selling their own propaganda as "hackers' history". Such propaganda sold as well as any fake news, because it was a simplified gentryfication of our nascent culture. Unfortunately such propaganda entered in a powerful feedback loop that deeply influenced young people who wanted to become hackers, exploiting their ignorance to inject itself and replicate as virus.

The result is that actual hackers all over the world are deeply misunderstood.

Forgotten archetypes...

If you look carefully at what qualify hackers' behaviour beyond the tecnological skills and usual focus about them, you'll see that we are as ancient as mankind: examples of well known hackers exist in the history and mythology of people all over the world.

In western culture, Hephaestus is one of the most ancient myths clearly showing most hackers' traits: he built all of the tools and weapons of Olympus (the Gods' infrastructure, in today parlance) and yet he was misunderstood and marginalized by his peers. As a consequence he occasionally used his skills against them, through clever (and sometime dangerous) pranks.

Another clear example of a mythological hacker was Daedalus, imprisoned by King Minos in the labyrinth that he had invented and built (and from which he escaped by using wings made of wax). The myth of Daedalus is partitularly interesting because, thousands years before the invention of computers, it describes two common attitudes of mainstream people with hackers.
Minos lack the knowledge and skills of Daedalus, but he understand the value of what Daedalus can do. So the king use the hacker. But then, understanding that he cannot really understand or control the hacker's power, he is so scared to put the hacker into a prison (not killing him because, you know... hackers are too precious).
This should teach hackers to never trust or serve the Power. Indeed we can all see how the history of Snowden reproduce this ancient pattern.
The other interesting attitude shown by the Daedalus' myth is that of Icarus. Icarus is like the average "digital native": just like Minos, Icarus does not understand the inner working of the technology his father created. But, unlike the Power, he has no fear for what he doesn't understand. That's not just a sort of blind trust in his own father, as Daedalus warn him about the risks, but he doesn't care. He simply think that his father is too wary, too old, too boring, too weird... Icarus shows what happen when people use hackers' technology without really understanding its inner working (thus becoming hackers themselves).

Daedalus' equivalent in Germanic mythology is "the weird and malicious craftsman" Wayland the Smith that, enslaved by a king, kills his master's sons and escapes by crafting a winged cloak and flying away.

But while these archetypes show that the mainstream vision of what we now call hackers is very ancient, our history is even more interesting.

...forgotten history...

Archimedes of Syracuse was killed by Romans after a siege where his inventions protected his own city.

Hero of Alexandria invented the first steam engine... as a prank.

Roughly a century later, in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we see precious books about magic arts (περίεργα, perierga) burnt "in the sight of all" at Ephesus, by newly converted Christians. The same derogatory term, περίεργοι (periergoi) is used by (the man who pretends to be) Saint Paul to warn about young widows who went from home to home as busybody talking about "things which they ought not".

During the Renaissance, instead, hackers flourished and we can find several polymaths and inventors that explore reality with new eyes and revolutionize several disciplines, such as Michelangelo, Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, among the greatest hackers of all times. And so on, from Gutemberg to Babbage, from Baudot to Torres y Quevedo, from Meucci to Tchou...

...to spread propaganda.

So when we look at the american "hacker" as protraied by the powerful propaganda of O'Reilly we see just a re-branding of something that is much more general and ancient.

Yet the term was born at MIT in the middle of Cold War, while the United States were consolidating their cultural and technological hegemony (even through intellectual property thefts way worse than those that Trump now hold against China), and it was turned into a synthetic identity spreading the American values instead of the original ones. So much that people following those original values are actively looking for better alternatives, such as "maker" or "tinkerer" to avoid both the mainstream misconceptions about "hackers" and the élitism that O'Reilly propaganda attached to the term.

As you know, this was not a new process.
During the Middle Age, between VII and IX century, knights became a huge problem of public order: they usually were second-born to lords with no hope of inheriting the land of their fathers. Well armed and only trained to fight, whenever they were not employed in a war among nobles, they used to raid and rape the peaceful populations working in the farmlands.

The problem was that the blocked society of the time was built around three main roles: those who pray (clerics, nuns, monks...), those who fight (knight and soldiers) and those who work (everybody else).

Peasants were poor and poorly educated, but not dumb: they were aware that their work sustained the whole society, and while unions and cooperatives were far to come, the violences coming from those that should have protected their lifes were inesorably destroying the oppressive narrative they were taught to believe, accept and support.

Sounds familiar?
This is exactly what recently happened in the States after the death of George Floyd.
But while the white Americans élites were caught totally unprepared, while they were totally oblivious to the structural racism that qualified their internal oppressive structure (an oppression that do not harm only blacks and do not limit itself to structural racism), Middle Age men were much more aware that the people around them were the root of their own power and wealth. So when the knights' violence started to incrinate the stability of the triparted feudal system, they framed a new narrative to control them.

By introducing public cerimonies known as Pax Dei, the knight's investitures under the control of the Church and the rhetoric of chilvaric code, the Pope managed to put that dangerous and powerful group under control to the point that they became eager to lose their lifes in Crusades.

In the Middle Age, the new narrative directed knights' violence where it would have supported the establishment, just like the Open Source rhetoric spread by the O'Reilly empire, directed hackers' curiosity to support wealth accumulation and military power.

Evolutive... gentrification

The term gentrification means:

the process of conforming to an upper- or middle-class lifestyle, or of making a product, activity, etc., appealing to those with more affluent tastes

Until the 1970's, the term "hacking" meant any deep interest in computers that manifested itself in programming or learning arcane aspects of the machinery or operating systems. Hackers were weird nerds, but not much interesting.

By the early 1980's, this meaning morphed into a general term of fear to describe anyone who did anything "evil" using computer equipment.

In the United States, in the 80's just like today, "evil" is everything that could negatively affect the profits of the riches. They were scared by people who removed copy protection from video games, got free phone calls or cripple the trust of the working class in Capitalism by showing how easy it was to hack the Bank Of America's Home Banking System.

In 1986 the first legislation related to hacking was enacted, the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Just like the Hopkins' The Discovery of Witches, such text was wielded thousands of times to convict high-profile hackers and low-level criminals alike, in the most recent witch-hunt of American history.

Meanwhile, the mainstream Americans were building their own prejudice about hackers through their most powerful propaganda-device, with films like War Games.

So while some hackers were arrested all over the States, others tried to distance from them, introducing the term "cracker" to mock "the criminals" in the hope preserve their freedom and appear as the good, well integrated citizens they ough to be.

All of this worked as a sort of evolutive pressure, pruning those who challenged the American life-style and supporting those that were happy to subdue to the cultural hegemony of the times.

Then, when "cracking systems" became a well payed job, a bunch of coloured "hats" were invented, to distinguish ~~crackers~~ "hackers" according to the masters they serve.

But what really is "a hacker"?

If you were looking at the shadows drawn by a rolling dice over a plain surface, you could not understand what was going on.

But what if you'd directly ask to the rolling dice?

For sure, describing hackers to people from the mainstream, is just as easy as describing a rolling dice to people that could just conceive two dimensions. Think about it: even if you know what you are and how you reason and behave, it would be very difficult to explain that to a bidimensional alien, however intelligent it could be.

Yet that's what I'm trying to do in this short serie.

After a long and deep exchange with Marco Ciurcina about his essay Etica Hacker?, I decided that the core of our disagreement relies on the "Americanization" of hackers that are, in fact, way more ancient than the United States.

In the next post of this serie, I'll try to describe what a hacker is, outlining the ethical values that characterise hackers as a small set of orthogonal dimensions that can be used to understand our behaviour from a different cultural perspective. In a third post I'll try to clarify how the Americanization of hackers is the root of several misconceptions that led to our marginalization world-wide. Finally, I'll try to explain "why hacking matters" and how it could drag mankind out of Capitalism.

Yes, I'm a criminal. My crime is that of Curiosity.

Perché sconsiglio di installare Immuni?

2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Dopo mesi in cui molti si sono battuti per riportare un po’ di lucidità nella grottesca gestione della pandemia, ancora incontro persone in buona fede (sui social network, solo sui social network) che mi chiedono perché io sconsigli caldamente di installare Immuni.

Le ragioni sono così tante che è impossibile elencarle tutte, ma vale forse la pena provare ad elencare quelle più spesso dimenticate nella speranza di non doverle ripetere continuamente.

Immuni aumenterà i morti a settembre

Partiamo dai problemi medici che durante un’epidemia dovrebbero essere prevalenti.

Assumiamo, per semplicità di ragionamento, che la totalità della popolazione installi questa app di “contact tracing”. Considerato che WhatsApp (l’app più installata al mondo) è presente sui cellulari di meno del 60% della popolazione italiana, si tratta di una assunzione estremamente improbabile nella nostra penisola. Purtuttavia è possibile che in determinate zone del territorio nazionale, le popolazioni locali aderiscano in massa a questo surreale piano di contenimento del virus.

Cosa succederà?

D’estate cambierà poco o nulla: si tratta di una sindrome influenzale la cui mortalità si riduce naturalmente con il caldo. Ma con l’arrivo dell’autunno ogni popolazione Immuni-zzata si sentirà al sicuro: ciascuno si comporterà normalmente fino alla ricezione della notifica di contatto con un infetto. E’ questa la speranza dei sostenitori di Immuni: “riprendersi da un disastro economico e sociale” ritornando alla normalità.

Purtroppo, se non verrà garantito un test diagnostico entro 24 ore dalla ricezione della notifica di contatto con un infetto, i contatti che riceveranno la notifica NON avranno ragione (e modo) di informare gli altri propri contatti del pericolo. Si metteranno in quarantena, riducendo i contatti futuri, ma NON avviseranno (tramite Immuni) tutti coloro che hanno infettato nel frattempo.

E queste persone, quelle che all’inizio dell’epidemia venivano definiti “contatti di secondo livello” ed invitate a fare una vita normale perché “il contagio è poco probabile” e “non bisogna diffondere il panico” e “bisogna evitare danni per l’economia”, non verranno avvisati o testati.

E queste persone, in buona fede e legittimamente, continueranno a diffondere il virus.
In fondo hanno installato Immuni! Le avvertirebbe se fossero a rischio!

Ed a settembre, quando il decorso della malattia tenderà ad aggravarsi, molti moriranno proprio grazie ad Immuni. E a Google ed Apple, naturalmente.
Ed all’ignoranza di chi ha finanziato questo soluzionismo tecnologico.

Immuni aumenterà il carico della Sanità

La gestione della pandemia ha fatto emergere tutti i limiti del Servizio Sanitario Nazionale. Limiti di cui nessuno voleva parlare prima e di cui nessuno vuole parlare ora.

I medici mandati sul territorio senza mascherine, senza dispositivi di protezione, con indicazioni contradditorie, hanno fatto tutto il possibile per tamponare l’emergenza. Così il personale ospedaliero, medici, infermieri, operatori sanitari che, ormai in burn-out, continuano a lavorare alacremente.

Ma un sistema che ha bisogno di eroi e martiri è un sistema che non funziona.
Perché così tanti medici sono risultati positivi ai sierologici per le IgG?
Perché hanno chiesto per mesi dei tamponi ottenendo solo vane promesse?

Semplicemente perché tutti sapevano che testarli avrebbe significato trovarne moltissimi positivi e dunque doverli isolare nelle loro case per settimane.

Se tutti i medici Piemontesi, Lombardi, Emiliani o Veneti installassero Immuni, sarebbero bombardati da continue notifiche. Così gli infermieri e gli OS.

Inoltre, se venisse installata da tutti (come stiamo assumendo), Immuni produrrebbe una enorme quantità di falsi positivi. Persone che ragionevolmente chiameranno il proprio medico di famiglia, già oberato dai malati veri.

Infatti le F.A.Q. di Immuni declinano qualsiasi responsabilità, scaricandola sui medici di famiglia:

L’app fa diagnosi mediche o fornisce consigli medici?

Immuni non fa e non può fare diagnosi. Sulla base dello storico della tua esposizione a utenti potenzialmente contagiosi, Immuni elabora alcune raccomandazioni su come è necessario comportarsi. Ma l'app non è un dispositivo medico e non può in alcun caso sostituire un medico.

Dunque nessun “consiglio medico”, solo “raccomandazioni”, “istruzioni da seguire”.
E sono attendibili?

Le istruzioni fornite dall’app sono attendibili?

Le raccomandazioni fornite dall'app dipendono dalla durata della tua esposizione a utenti potenzialmente contagiosi e dalla distanza fra il tuo smartphone e quello di questi utenti durante l'esposizione.

Si tratta di un numero limitato di informazioni, peraltro mai perfette, in quanto il segnale Bluetooth Low Energy è influenzato da vari fattori di disturbo. Quindi, la valutazione non sarà sempre impeccabile. Per esempio, se l'app ti raccomanda di isolarti, non significa che sicuramente hai il SARS-CoV-2. Significa piuttosto che, sulla base delle informazioni a disposizione dell'app, l'isolamento è la cosa più sicura da fare per te e per chi ti sta accanto.

È quindi importante che tu segua le indicazioni fornite dall'app, per il bene tuo, dei tuoi cari e della comunità. Non esitare a consultare il tuo medico di medicina generale in caso l'app ti avverta di un possibile contagio.

11 righe di supercazzola per non rispondere chiaramente “No”.

Infine, a causa dei limiti specifici della tecnologia Bluetooth utilizzata, molti contatti non verranno registrati.

E stiamo assumendo che tutti installino l’App, che tengano il cellulare con il Bluetooth costantemente acceso e non lo dimentichino mai in auto o a casa.

L’ovvio ed inevitabile risultato sarebbe una riduzione della qualità del servizio per i malati, e di nuovo ulteriori morti, ma non solo per COVID.

Non è un problema di “privacy”…

Dunque Immuni non costituirà solo un problema di “privacy”, ma anzitutto un gravissimo problema di salute pubblica.

Un problema di cui, come al solito, non risponderà nessuno.
Perché come non è un caso che la sperimentazione parta a giugno, non è un caso che le regioni più colpite dal virus (Lombartia, Piemonte, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto…) non ne facciano parte.

D’altronde persino Google e Apple, per poter produrre qualcosa da deployare su milioni di dispositivi prima che il favore dei governi cessi, hanno dovuto ridefinire il concetto stesso di contact tracing per adattarlo ai cellulari.

Ma vi sono anche moltissimi problemi “di privacy” ignorati da chi sviluppa Immuni.

Uno tra tanti: mentre l’applicazione, di per sé, è tanto sicura quanto è sicuro il sistema operativo su cui gira (molto poco, ma questo costituisce un’altro ordine di problemi), gli sviluppatori si rifiutano di considerare che con meno di 5000 €, qualsiasi organizzazione criminale potrà utilizzare la propria rete di estorsione per installare centinaia bluetooth spoofer in grado di ricostruire la rete di contatti di una città come Roma, Milano o Palermo.

… è un problema di Libertà.

Dal punto di vista politico, il danno maggiore prodotto da Immuni è culturale.

Anche se non può funzionare, anche se sarà dannosa per i cittadini più fragili (anziani, disabili, malati cronici…) che si ritroveranno circondati da persone convinte di non costituire un pericolo per loro, Immuni stabilirà un precedente pericolosissimo.

L’idea che un App su un cellulare possa risolvere semplicemente problemi complessi di scala globale come una pandemia. E non si potrà tornare indietro: la sorveglianza di massa verrà giustificata continuamente, sempre in nome di nuovi pericoli.

Qualsiasi informatico competente riderebbe di questo soluzionismo tecnologico.

Per questo vi Sconsiglio caldamente Immuni.

Què és la informàtica?

2020-03-23T17:30:00+00:00

Rafael Carreras just translated my article What is Informatics in Catalan: read it on his web site Què és la informàtica?

Google's Privacy Oath

2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

You will not
         and will not assist
or permit
         any third party
to, pass information
         to Google

that Google could
         use or recognize as

personally

         identifiable

                   information.

I don’t know who created this little piece of poetry, this wise mantra.

It was brought to me like this, hidden in plain sight, like a gem in a gorgeous meadow clothed with Pinguiculas.

I don’t know if the author was a hacker, a lawyer… or something in between.

But given WHERE (and HOW!!!) s?he managed to publish this wonderful Privacy Oath… I don’t think Google will be able to hack back.

;-)

Gentile Professoressa... non posso autorizzare Edmodo a profilare psicologicamente mia figlia

2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Gentile Professoressa OMISSIS,

mi chiamo Giacomo Tesio, sono il papà di OMISSIS e da venti anni mi occupo professionalmente di programmazione e sicurezza informatica. Correntemente sviluppo applicazioni finanziare per alcune banche multinazionali, ma le mie esperienze sono estremamente variegate e pertinenti alla questione che mi trovo a sottoporle.

La disturbo perché non posso autorizzare la piattaforma Edmodo a realizzare e diffondere un dettagliato profilo psicologico e culturale di mia figlia in cambio dei servizi, pur attraenti, che tale piattaforma fornisce.

Edmodo è una di quelle società statunitensi che la Professoressa Zuboff, della Harvard Business School, descrive nel suo libro “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”. Il loro business model si basa sulla creazione e la vendita di modelli previsionali (detti behavioral futures) del comportamento degli utenti (in questo caso insegnanti, genitori e ragazzi) attraverso i quali influenzare il loro comportamento attraverso stimoli specificatamente studiati sulla base dei loro personali bias cognitivi.

Questi modelli previsionali, realizzati attraverso quella serie di tecniche statistiche generalmente note con il nome di machine learning o (più recentemente) intelligenza artificiale, hanno un valore enorme per coloro che intendono influenzare per qualsivoglia ragione una persona specifica, un gruppo o una comunità, per ragioni commerciali, sociali o politiche.

Ogni volta che un ragazzo visualizza un contenuto, completa un esercizio o comunque interagisce con una piattaforma come Edmodo, la sua attività viene registrata sui server di tale azienda. Oltre alle informazioni che Edmodo condivide con insegnanti e genitori, la piattaforma è in grado di rilevare e registra i tempi necessari al ragazzo per effettuare un compito, il numero di volte che visualizza un contenuto, su quali frasi si sofferma maggiormente e molto molto altro. E questo ogni singola volta, per tutto il tempo che il ragazzo utilizzerà questa piattaforma “didattica”.

A queste informazioni specifiche dello studente si aggiungono le relazioni sociali, estremamente importanti in un’età delicata come l’adolescenza, e delle quali l’azienda verrà altresì informata: chi sono i compagni di ciascun ragazzo, come andavano a scuola, chi sono gli insegnanti etc…

Questi dati (e parliamo di Gigabyte per ogni alunno) verranno mantenuti dall’azienda in questione per sempre, ma verranno anche analizzati e rivenduti in varie forme a terzi, impattando non solo la vita degli studenti nel presente, ma la loro autonomia e la loro libertà futura.

Già oggi, i recruiter di molte aziende fanno uso di dati raccolti su social network come questi per selezionare i candidati ad un posto di lavoro più remissivi e più fragili in modo da poterli pagare meno a parità di competenza.

Nel caso specifico di Edmodo, poi, va sottolineato che si tratta di una società statunitense che mantiene i dati acquisiti su server collocati negli USA e che non risponde alle leggi europee sulla privacy. In caso di un data breach, i costi di una causa a San Francisco sarebbero insostenibili per le famiglie degli studenti ed avrebbero scarsissime possibilità di successo.

E non parliamo di una eventualità remota: solo a maggio 2017 un hacker noto come nclay è riuscito a sottrarre informazioni personali di 78 milioni fra insegnanti, genitori ed alunni, mettendo in vendita le informazioni online.

Inoltre, ad ogni passaggio di proprietà della società (uno è avvenuto l’8 Aprile del 2018) anche l’acquirente e i suoi stake holder avranno accesso ai dati raccolti in precedenza da Edmodo.

I Terms of Services, lunghi ed illegibili come sempre e per di più in inglese anche nella versione italiana per disincentivarne ulteriormente una lettura accurata a genitori e studenti, riportano diversi passaggi critici:

si chiede ai minori di 13 anni di non inviare informazioni su se stessi attraverso la piattaforma se i professori non hanno ottenuto il consenso dei genitori, come se i ragazzi potessero essere caricati della responsabilità che la legge non gli riconosce
si chiede agli insegnanti di assumersi la responsabilità per la raccolta dei dati da parte dei Publisher Software, chiedendo loro di comprenderne i meccanismi (meccanismi che solo un esperto di sicurezza informatica può comprendere appieno)
non riconoscono alcuna responsabilità sui Publisher Software di terze parti
si stabilisce in sede contrattuale la giurisdizione competente per eventuali cause nella contea di San Francisco

Nella pagina sulla Privacy Edmodo:

si solleva dalla responsabilità nei confronti dei dati raccolti da terze parti attraverso la loro piattaforma (vedi sezione “Business we cannot control”)
si solleva dalla responsabilità nei confronti di data breach causati da loro fornitori (vedi sezione “Agents”)
si solleva dalla sicurezza fisica dei dati scrivendo “we cannot guarantee security. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors may compromise the security of user information.”
si lascia aperta la possibilità di mantenere “per sbaglio” dati personali anche degli utenti che abbiano richiesto la cancellazione dell’account.

Per quanto ad un utente inesperto possa sembrare una piattaforma curata ed affidabile, la mia ventennale esperienza nel settore mi costringe ad una più cauta e consapevole valutazione dei rischi.

In questo caso, riterrei irresponsabile da parte mia autorizzare Edmodo a raccogliere e trattare informazioni su mia figlia.

Ritengo inoltre altamente diseducativo abituare bambini e ragazzi alla sorveglianza invisibile di queste piattaforme, perché finiscono per assuefarsene e considerarla inevitabile, smettendo di usarle con competenza e spirito critico e finendo dunque per venire usati attraverso di esse.

Non posso dunque registrare mia figlia ad Edmodo.

Come informatico mi sento anche in dovere di consigliarle l’abbandono della piattaforma stessa per l’intera classe, a sua propria tutela ed a tutela dei ragazzi e dei genitori meno preparati in materia.

Ma se ritiene di voler continuare ad usare comunque Edmodo, le devo chiedere di fornire a mia figlia materiali didattici equivalenti su un canale di comunicazione diverso. Ad esempio sarò felice di dotare la bambina di una chiavetta USB su cui potrà caricare i materiali che Lei intende utilizzare. A tal riguardo le posso garantire l’adozione dei più elevati standard di sicurezza da parte nostra e se necessario posso spiegare alla classe ed alla scuola come difendersi professionalmente dai virus informatici.

In alternativa, se preferisce, può utilizzare gli strumenti Ministeriali come il Calendario del Diario Online di Regel.

Rimango naturalmente a disposizione per qualsiasi chiarimento.
Se lei o altri insegnanti fossero interessati ad approfondire queste problematiche, sarò felice di mettere a disposizione vostra e della scuola le mie competenze, in modo assolutamente gratuito.

Potremmo per esempio valutare, insieme al Dirigente Scolastico il Professor OMISSIS che ha ricevuto copia di questa missiva, l’installazione di un software come Moodle presso un server sotto il controllo fisico della scuola.

La prego però di non fraintendere la mia decisione in merito ad Edmodo.
Apprezzo moltissimo l’apertura alle nuove tecnologie nell’insegnamento della sua disciplina ed ho assoluta fiducia nella sua competenza e professionalità.

In questo caso però non posso ignorare la mia esperienza in materia, mettendo a rischio la libertà e l’autonomia di mia figlia per alimentare un business che, al di là della retorica commerciale, la considera poco più di un topo da laboratorio.

Cordialmente,

Giacomo Tesio

The most important program in my whole career.

2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The most important program in my whole career as a programmer was a word processor.

My eldest daughter couldn’t help but laugh when I tried to explain her the deep terror I felt back then. When I faced the WordStar’s Tutor I didn’t know English.

I remember the few words I did understood very clearly “EXPLODE” and “press any key”.

I was scared as hell!

Now I see, you laugh too.

I was 11 years old, my 286 had been very expensive for my poor mom.
And I was going to make it explode!

I couldn’t conceive that a computer could make fun of a human.

Yet, I had no alternative.

So I pressed that fucking key. Esc probably.

Yeah, you are still laughing at me. >:-(

That’s not funny.
Ok, it’s pretty funny actually… but it wasn’t so funny back then.

I work for YOU!

I coudn’t understand much more than this from the last screen:

I work for YOU!

That was reassuring. After the pure terror I felt, it was cathartic.

Since then, breaking hardware and software has been… easy! :-D
WordStar Tutor teached me to fear not.

I wouldn’t be a hacker, without it.

The smartest AI (and most humble one)

Most of software today pretends to work for you, but it serves somebody else. Advertisers. Governments. Politicians.

Everybody want your data.
Everybody want to control you, through the software you use.
You are not a user anymore: you are a used.

WordStar Tutor is a rebel, today.

Give it a try! ;-)

Abitua tuo figlio alla Sorveglianza! Gratis, con Google Family Link!

2019-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Google Family Link è un sistema di “parental control” distribuito gratuitamente da Google.

Si compone di due applicazioni, una per i device dei genitori e l’altra per i device dei figli.

Family Link consente anche di creare un account Google per bambini di età inferiore a 13 anni, del tutto analogo a quello degli adulti, e con cui questi potranno accedere alla maggior parte dei servizi Google. Collegando tale account (o uno esistente) a quello dei genitori, permette loro di controllare cosa fanno bambini ed adolescenti mentre utilizzano il loro sistema Android (sia esso un tablet o un cellulare) o Chromebook.

Il sistema permette ai genitori di:

gestire le App dei figli
- ricevendo notifiche sulle App che questi installano
- gestendone gli acquisti in-app
- nascondendo certe App nello store o sul dispositivo
visualizzare report settimanali e mensili sulle attività dei figli
- siti internet visitati
- tempo trascorso usando ogni App
bloccare il dispositivo dei figli da remoto o ad una certa ora
seguirli da remoto, tracciandone la posizione geografica

In sostanza, Google condivide con i genitori una minuscola frazione delle informazioni personali che raccoglie e del potere di cui dispone sui ragazzi che gli vengono affidati. Naturalmente tutti i dati raccolti dal device dei vostri figli vengono inviati a Google, che li salva sui propri server per sempre ed in cambio produce un paio di report ansiolitici per i genitori.

Che luoghi frequenta vostro figlio? In che orari?
Quanto tempo passa davanti ad uno schermo?
Che siti internet visita? Dove clicca?
Qual’è il genitore più presente?
Qual’è il genitore più apprensivo?
Lo preoccupano di più i siti internet che visita o il luoghi che frequenta?

Tutti questi dati, incrociati con quelli raccolti attraverso tutti gli altri servizi di Google e per tutti gli utenti, permettono di creare profili molto precisi dei ragazzi, dei loro amici e dei genitori.

E naturalmente profili psicologici della loro famiglia, incluse le loro dinamiche famigliari.

Il prodotto sei tu?

Le FAQ del “servizio” spiegano che “I servizi Google sono supportati grazie agli annunci pubblicitari, quindi tuo figlio potrebbe vedere annunci pubblicitari”.

Si potrebbe pertanto dedurre che il vecchio spot “Se non lo paghi, il prodotto sei tu” andrebbe riadattato per includere nel prodotto anche la prole ~~delle vittime~~ degli utenti.

Ed in un certo senso è vero: le informazioni raccolte da Google durante l’infanzia e l’adolescenza dei nostri novelli Sam Oliver rimarranno disponibili sui loro server per decenni, permettendo agli ingegneri di Google (e di chi lo controlla) di produrre profili psicologici precisissimi.

Grazie a tali profili Google potrà prevedere il loro comportamento da adulti in modo molto più preciso di quanto non saranno in grado di fare loro stessi.

I vostri figli potranno così essere manipolati dolcemente , senza percepire alcun disagio. Conoscendo i loro interessi, le loro esperienze familiari e sociali, le loro preferenze estetiche, i loro bias cognitivi sin dalla più tenerà età, Google potrà personalizzare gli annunci economici e politici come nemmeno Cambridge Analytica avrebbe mai potuto sperare.

Un singolo click su una qualsiasi pagina Web può diffondere una miriade di informazioni personali preziosissime, dalla vostra fascia di reddito (attraverso l’identificazione del device che usate), fino alle vostre preferenze sessuali. Dai dati raccolti durante poche ore di gioco ad un casual game ben progettato è possibile dedurre malattie oculistiche o neurologiche.

Pensate a quante informazioni potrà acquisire Google tracciando le navigazioni di vostro figlio!

Che valore possono avere questo tipo di informazioni per gli inserzionisti?
E per i suoi datori di lavoro? E per i politici?

Conoscere gli interessi, i bias, le idee, le fantasie, le relazioni… la libertà futura dei vostri figli è un prezzo accettabile? Una volta che i dati sono stati registrati da Google non sarà più possibile eliminarli. O meglio, sarà possibile chiedere a Google di rimuoverli, ma sarebbe impossibile accertare che siano stati effettivamente rimossi da tutti i loro innumerevoli data center sparsi nel mondo.

Noi Pirati rifiutiamo la Sorveglianza!

Sottoscrivendo il Manifesto del Partito Pirata, ogni Pirata si impegna a battersi contro la profilazione di massa e la manipolazione delle persone.

Non si tratta semplicemente di un vago desiderio di privacy individuale. La profilazione dei cittadini crea un enorme rischio per la democrazia.
(attenti a dove cliccate in quel bug report, o le porte del vostro PC verranno scansionate dal Governo Russo via JavaScript)

Google invece vi offre la possibilità di far aderire liberamente e gratuitamente i vostri figli al suo programma di sorveglianza mondiale: una specie di “early bird“, in attesa che il Diritto alla Sorveglianza venga ufficialmente riconosciuto dall’ONU.

Alimentando le ansie e le paure dei genitori, Google cerca di sfruttarle.
Il software di Google non risolve problemi, li strumentalizza.
E non solo per trarne profitto!

Al di là dei dati personali, l’obbiettivo di Google è Politico e Strategico . Persuadere i genitori che la sorveglianza è utile, che rende le loro vite più “sicure”, ed al contempo abituare bambini ed adolescenti a darla per scontata, è una mossa politicamente geniale.

Ma è davvero questo che volete per i vostri figli?

Sbagliando si impara!

I bambini hanno bisogno di fiducia. Esattamente come Google.
Ma contrariamente a Google, i bambini la meritano!

I bambini hanno anche bisogno di sbagliare, di imparare a confrontarsi con i propri errori, a comprenderne le ragioni e ripartire.

Un bambino cui viene impedito di sbagliare, diventerà un adulto infallibile?
O diventerà piuttosto un adulto incapace di riconoscere i propri errori?

Un adolescente cui vengono impediti errori piccoli, quali errori compirà?

E noi adulti non siamo ciò che siamo anche grazie agli errori che abbiamo commesso? Ai giocattoli rotti, alle nasate, alle bevute, alle risse…

Un bambino che non va a dormire per leggere un libro sotto le coperte sarà un bambino stanco tutto il giorno. E capirà perché i genitori gli ordinano di andare a dormire.

Un bambino con il cellulare, invece, non ha la possibilità di sbagliare.
Decide Google. Lo mette a nanna.

Il genitore che si coricherebbe al suo fianco per farlo dormire, può fare altro.
Può lavorare, produrre e consumare.

Il bambino non ha più bisogno della sua attenzione.

Perché c’è Google!

Google Family Link.

Il padre a cui non vorranno disubbidire.

Questo articolo è stato scritto per il Partito Pirata, a cui sono iscritto.
Ne è stata impedita la pubblicazione.

Spero almeno che Google abbia fatto una copiosa donazione.

Scripting for Politics

2019-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

As promised to the members of the Partito Pirata (the Italian Pirate Party) I wrote a little shell script that automatically installs a simple self-contained PeerTube instance on a clean-state Debian GNU/Linux.

Together with the Project Winston Smith that promised to provide hardware and bandwidth, this little work should help all the members of the Partito Pirata to avoid YouTube and to stop sending to Google’s servers the political interests of the people who visit their forum and website.

In an age where programmers have so much power to summon daemons that act on the physical world, I think we should always feel responsible for those who don’t have access to our knowledge.

My hope with the Partito Pirata is that they will accept the challenge to spread Hacker’s Curiosity through Informatics.

Informatics should not be a weapon to gain Power!
It should be a rock to build Democracy upon.

Enough words. Here is the code:

#!/bin/sh

# Copyright (C) 2019 Giacomo Tesio <giacomo@tesio.it>
#
# This software is a hack and it is released accordingly under the
# Hacking License available at http://www.tesio.it/documents/HACK.txt

DOMAIN=$1
EMAIL=$2
PASSWORD=$3
TWITTER=$4

if [ "$PASSWORD" = "" ]; then

	echo usage: sudo ./peertube-install.sh domain email password twitter
	echo
	echo This script install PeerTube on a Debian GNU/Linux 9.9
	echo
	echo "  domain   is the domain name user will use to access your instance, thus"
	echo "           - A and AAAA records must be configured on your DNS"
	echo "           - it won't be easy to modify it after the installation"
	echo
	echo "  email    is the email address that will be used by Let's Encrypt"
	echo
	echo "  password is the peertube user's password on both the OS and the DB"	
	echo "           it is ALSO the instance's administrator's password"
	echo
	echo "  twitter  is a Twitter account name to be used WITH the initial @"
	echo
	echo
	echo At the end of the installation you should double-check:
	echo
	echo /var/www/peertube/config/production.yaml
	echo /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
	echo /etc/systemd/system/peertube.service
	echo /etc/letsencrypt/live/
	
	exit 1
fi

echo PeerTube Installation
echo

dnsError() {
	echo ERROR: cannot resolve $DOMAIN
	echo Please configure your A/AAAA record on the DNS
	exit 2
}

debinst() {
	for pkg in "$@"; do
		dpkg -l "$pkg"|grep ii > /dev/null || apt-get install -y "$pkg"
	done
}

installCertbot() {
	BACKPORT_LIST=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
	if [ ! -f $BACKPORT_LIST ]; then
		echo -n Adding backports.list... 
		echo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main > $BACKPORT_LIST
		echo done.
	fi

	apt-get update

	apt-get install -y -t stretch-backports certbot python-certbot-nginx
}

installNodeJS() {
	curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_8.x | bash -
	debinst nodejs
}

installYarn(){
	curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | apt-key add -
	echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list
	apt-get update && apt-get install yarn
}

initPeertubeDB() {
	sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE USER peertube WITH PASSWORD '$PASSWORD';"
	sudo -u postgres createdb -O peertube peertube_prod
	sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;" peertube_prod
	sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE EXTENSION unaccent;" peertube_prod
}

createPeertubeUser() {
	if [ ! -d /var/www/peertube ]; then
		useradd -m -d /var/www/peertube -s /bin/bash -p peertube peertube
		echo "peertube:$PASSWORD"|chpasswd
		initPeertubeDB
	fi
}

installPeertube() {
	VERSION=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/chocobozzz/peertube/releases/latest | grep tag_name | cut -d '"' -f 4) && echo "Latest Peertube version is $VERSION"
	cd /var/www/peertube && sudo -u peertube mkdir config storage versions && cd versions
	sudo -u peertube wget -q "https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/releases/download/${VERSION}/peertube-${VERSION}.zip"
	sudo -u peertube unzip peertube-${VERSION}.zip && sudo -u peertube rm peertube-${VERSION}.zip
	cd ../ && sudo -u peertube ln -s versions/peertube-${VERSION} ./peertube-latest
	cd ./peertube-latest && sudo -H -u peertube yarn install --production --pure-lockfile
}

configurePeertube() {
	cd /var/www/peertube && sudo -u peertube cp peertube-latest/config/production.yaml.example config/production.yaml
	sudo -u peertube sed -i -e "s/\@Chocobozzz/$TWITTER/" config/production.yaml
	sudo -u peertube sed -i -e "s/admin\@example.com/$EMAIL/" config/production.yaml
	sudo -u peertube sed -i -e "s/example.com/$DOMAIN/" config/production.yaml
	sudo -u peertube sed -i -e "s/password: 'peertube'/password: '$PASSWORD'/" config/production.yaml	
	
	cp /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/support/nginx/peertube /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
	sed -i -e "s/peertube.example.com/$DOMAIN/" /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube
	ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/peertube
	
	# configure let's encrypt
	systemctl stop nginx
	sed -i -e "s/ssl_certificate/#ssl_certificate/" /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube # Comment ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key lines
	certbot --authenticator standalone --installer nginx --post-hook "systemctl start nginx" -n --agree-tos -m "$EMAIL" --domains "$DOMAIN"
	sed -i -e "s/#ssl_certificate/ssl_certificate/" /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube # Uncomment ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key lines
	systemctl reload nginx
}

tuneTCPIP() {
	cp /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/support/sysctl.d/30-peertube-tcp.conf /etc/sysctl.d/
	sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.d/30-peertube-tcp.conf
}

setupSystemd(){
	cp /var/www/peertube/peertube-latest/support/systemd/peertube.service /etc/systemd/system/
	systemctl daemon-reload
	systemctl enable peertube
	systemctl start peertube
	journalctl -feu peertube
}

# check domain resolution (or Let's Encrypt will complain)
getent hosts $DOMAIN  > /dev/null || dnsError

# Install dependencies
debinst unzip curl

dpkg -l certbot|grep ii > /dev/null || installCertbot
dpkg -l nodejs|grep ii > /dev/null || installNodeJS
dpkg -l yarn|grep ii > /dev/null || installYarn

debinst nginx ffmpeg postgresql postgresql-contrib openssl g++ make redis-server git python-dev

systemctl start redis postgresql

# Install Peertube
export PT_INITIAL_ROOT_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD
createPeertubeUser
test -d /var/www/peertube/versions || installPeertube
test -f /etc/nginx/sites-available/peertube || configurePeertube

# TCP/IP tuning
test -f /etc/sysctl.d/30-peertube-tcp.conf || tuneTCPIP

# Systemd setup
test -f /etc/systemd/system/peertube.service || setupSystemd

What is Informatics?

2019-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

What is Informatics? Why some call it “Computer Science”?
Why programmers can’t get it right as civil engineers do with bridges?

Given the pervasive presence of computers around us, people usually think about Informatics as a pretty advanced field of technology, something that push the edges of human knowledge. They think of programming as a specialized skill, something you need to learn if you want to follow a certain kind of career.

It’s all wrong.

A bit of History

In 1957, Karl Steinbuch coined the term «Informatik» for his essay Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung, “Informatics: automatic information processing”.

On March 1962, Philippe Dreyfus used for the first time the term «Informatique» to name his own company Société d’informatique appliquée.

On the same month Walter Bauer started the american company «Informatics Inc.», registered its trademark and sued universities using such word to describe the new field, forcing them to resort to the locution “Computer Science”, despite the fact that the matter was not restricted to computers and the scientific method was not really applied by practitioners.

ACM even tried to gain permission to use the term from Informatics, Inc, but the company refused.

It’s worth noticing that according to Donald Knuth the choice of “Computer Science” by American Universities was not due to trademark issues, but to semantic reasons: computers do not deal with information, but data.

But as pragmatic as this might look, it’s very short-sighted: it loosely describes the “how” without considering the “why” of Informatics.

Indeed, if it’s true that data is what computers handle, we turn them on to treat information anyway.

Some definitions

As a field apparently built on top of binary values, Informatics is full of interesting dichotomies. The most fundamental but often overlooked one is that between Information and Data:

Information, from Latin informo, “I build inside (of myself)”: An idea, a construct of a human mind that can be shared with other humans.

Datum, pl. Data, from Latin datum, “given”: One of the possibile representations of a piece of information that can be transferred and interpreted as information by humans.

Information only exists in a human mind.

Not every construct of a human mind is information, but only those that can be precisely communicated to other humans. For example, no mystic experience can be really shared.

However Information is the fundamental building block of human knowledge. Indeed whatever belongs to the field of Mathematics is Information, so much that no conjecture can be considered as a valid statement until other humans can agree on it just by reading the description of the proof that was formed in the author’s mind.

Data instead are mere representations.

Any representation of Information is actually a set of data.

The words you are reading, be them printed on paper or drawn on a raster screen, just represent a message I’m trying to convey, an insight built over years of practice in the field.

But I could have recorded a video lesson, for example.
Or recorded a phonograph.

All of these would have been representation of the same intended information.
But they would not be equivalent.

A complex relationship

Information and data have a very complex relation.

By writing these words I’m turning the information in my mind to data.
By reading them, you are turning the data back to information again.

Both of above sentences are properly expressed in present tense, but they occur at different points in time and space.

Moreover data always convey much more information than the intended message. For example the information about this text itself, its language, its length and so on, are what is often improperly called “metadata”. But even a lot of personal information is embedded in these data, as the style of my writings might reveal.

If instead of a text the message was carried through a video a whole lot of additional information would be spread together with the intended message. My race, my gender, my census, even some deseases could be leaked through a video. And my voice, and much much more.

So we can see that information can be turned to data and data can be turned back to information by the human mind, but no mathematical function could describe this relationship: there is both loss of information and addition of it at every passage.

And people can misunderstand data creating completely unintended information from them.

Yet, humans are so good at turning information to data and data back to information, that we are not even conscious of the process. And this lead to tons of unfortunate and lethal misunderstanding in Informatics.

So what is Informatics?

Informatics, from French informatique, “information automatique”: The field of human knowledge that study how information can be transferred, stored, represented, interpreted and transformed and the set of techniques that apply such knowledge.

Informatics is all about Information.

It’s about humans not machines.
Computers are mere mirrors for our own minds.

As it often happens, this European perspective is diametrically opposed to the American one attributed to Knuth.

Yet in a well known essay, Knuth defines Computer Science as “the study of Algorithms” while they are so unrelated to computers that he can also use a game of “musical chairs” to describe the inner working of hash tables in that same paper.

The problem of naming is not “just” a philosophical one: after thousands years of history, we know that the words we use forge our understanding of reality. By focusing on computers and what we can do through them, we blind ourselves on the wider application of Informatics.

Algorithms are Information in the mind of people knowing them.

If Informatics was all about Algorithms, programmers’ lives would be much more easy… and boring. Unfortunately, programs are not Informations, but Data. Programs do not exist in the human mind but on a physical support that can be played by a computer, much like a gramophone can play a vinyl.

Bugs belong to the real world

As data, programs can be wrong even when they try to represent a correct algorithm just because humans are inherently fallible.

Each program is just one of the many possible representations of an algorithm and, together with the algorithm itself, it also conveys a whole lot of other informations.

Moreover, if the programmer does not know the full algorithm he is trying to implement beforehand, bugs become just another example of the more general principle known as “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.

Bugs are so inherently tied to the real world of Informatics that programmers developed a wide set of tools and techniques to hunt and kill them… without much success.

But what is a total failure from an engineering perspective could actually become a rock to build Democracy upon.

Way more than computers

Since Mathematics belongs to the human mind and is communicable (or is not Math yet) any concept that belongs to it is an Information. As such it belongs to Informatics too.

The converse is not true: bugs are first class citizens of Informatics, but won’t annoy much Mathematicians.

As a consequence, Mathematics is a subset of Informatics.

One might argue that the opposite is true or that they are more like siblings much like Physics and Math. But to a closer look we can see how to push such relationship we need to restrict Informatics, artificially excluding Cryptography, Statistics, UX design and so on.

And while this statement might look heretic at first, it shouldn’t surprise us much as we can see that Informatics is changing every single field of human endeavour, from Medicine to Agriculture, from Reproduction to Finance, from Engineering to Cooking, from Democracy to War.

And while no program needs Medicine, most Doctors use programs.
And while no program needs to kill, most Wars need software.
And so on.

This weird phenomenon has a simple explanation: Informatics changes everything humans do because it changes how humans collectively think. Indeed, if Information belongs to a human mind, when shared among the members of community, it builds the Culture of such community. And such Culture goes back into new members’ minds as Information in a never ending feedback loop.

Informatics is today what Mathematics was at the time of Pythagoras.
It’s Philosophy on disguise. Applied Philosophy, if you will.

A Political field

Many practitioners would refuse this qualification of Informatics as a modern form of Philosophy. It’s not just because of ignorance about Philosophy itself (that is where Logic, was born). It’s because of a bad feeling about it. After all, if you look at the history, from Confucius to Plato, from Kant to Nietzsche, philosophers have always had this weird habit of messing with Politics one way or another.

This is annoying. Software Engineers pretends to be Engineers so that they can focus their minds on technical stuffs alone. They feel responsible to create the best possible artifact that can serve a purpose, but don’t want to be held accountable for the choice of the purpose itself.

Being a philosopher is a call to make clear statements, to take position. Being an engineer instead just mean to build stuff, so that you can pretend you don’t align with the values of your customers while you serve their endeavours.

Engineers can pretend to be “neutral”, Philosophers cannot.

Technology is a prosecution of Politics by other means

If you look at History, you can see how technology is the most powerful political force at work all over the world.

From fire to wheels, to sails, to archs, to mills: every new technology created new ways of living that in turn enabled the rise of more complex human organizations.

One might wonder: how something that works with Information can impact so deeply the physical world we live in? Informations are just insight we can communicate, after all!

While many argue that “software is eating the world”, few ask how this happens.

It turns out that the explaination is a marvel of electronics: the general purpose programmable computer. General purpose computers are not designed to solve a particular problem but to execute certain sequences of instructions fed by a programmer in a binary format.

This way, while computers play the software, what is ultimately a pure act of imagination expressed in a certain language is summoned as a sort of daemon that acts on the physical world.

As before, each progress in technology provides a strategic advantage to those who get it. We don’t need to go back at the stone age to see evidence of this. Not even knowing about Enigma is required. A Cyber World War is ongoing right now. A war for the total domination of humans through technology.

Programming trains Rationality

In itself, a general purpose computer is useless. But programs can specialize it to make it useful for a wide variety of specific problems.

Such specialization contraints what the computer can do. It reduces its potential. This might look counter-intuitive to somebody who cannot program (and unfortunately to some programmers too), but in fact, all we do with programming languages, is to reduce what computer can do by deciding what they will do.

But is it just about computers?

If all we had was Assembly it would be so. Programming would be a very time consuming task not much different from circuit design.

However we have built high level programming languages to speed up software development and, by doing so, we highly reduced the coupling between the hardware and the software.

High level programming languages reduce the cognitive load on programmers. We don’t need to know the quirks of a specific processor or device. Most of times at least. But once freed from the limits of machines, programmers faced a new enemy: the limits of their own minds.

There are many ways to express a program. Most of them are wrong.

So the practice of programming evolved towards more complex tools that, by constraining how programmers can express the insights they have in mind, help them to write code that their mind can manage.

However, since the underlying hardware follows strictly logical and mathematical rules, any programming language has to enforce those rules too, sooner or later.

This means that to program you need to learn rational thinking.
And to explain it.

In other words, programming force people to learn how to describe complex dynamic and ever evolving systems to somebody as dumb as a computer is. Some techniques are so similar to Philosophy that practitioners talk way more than they code.

The programming language you use also influence your way of thinking in a way that is way deeper than what you eperience when learning a human language. The patterns you learn while programming becomes useful in every aspect of your own life. Exactly like with Math, but on steroids.

And yet, the real key to understand the political potential of Informatics is debugging. While debugging you look for an error in the collective cultural elaboration of thousands of people from all over the world.

Debugging trains Critical Thinking

There is nothing on Earth that can train Critical Thinking as a decade or two of Software Debugging.

You see a computer executing billions of lines of code and you have to guess where somebody did the error that is currently causing a misbehaviour. It’s such an expensive and complex task, that people and corporations try to avoid it as much as possible, usually working around the bug. But if you have to fix it, it’s a very educative experience.

First because, most of times, it’s your own fault.

But sometimes it’s really the compiler. Sometimes it’s really the operating system. Sometimes it’s really the browser’s garbage collector. Sometimes you see the butterfly effect happening before you: you have to find (and kill) the right butterfly hundreds of miles away, just to stop the tornado you are in.

Compared to this, debunking a Fake News is a kids game.

Compared to this, debunking lobbists’ claims is a kids game!

That’s because you are trained to get an insight about what thousands of other people have thought before you, to grasp their assumptions, to spot not only what they knew or what they misunderstood but also what they didn’t knew at all.

The Unknown is a first class citizen of Informatics.

Good programmers know that they know nothing. By experience.
And hackers know that nobody knows anything. That’s why we are so curious!

A Universal Human Right

In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, three unsuspectable articles talk about Informatics:

Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy,
family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.
Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference
or attacks.

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive
and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of
    the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement
    and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material
    interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic
    production of which he is the author.

Even without looking at the large multinational corporations that constitute the core of Surveillance Capitalism, we can see that these articles are systematically violated from most computer device that we “own”.

People who cannot configure their own mail server, cannot have 12 granted. People who cannot program themselves, cannot “impart information and ideas through any media” and thus cannot have 19 granted. People who cannot debug a cryptographic library, cannot have 19 granted Since programs are culture (and theorems, by Curry–Howard correspondence), people who cannot program cannot have 27.1 granted.

So knowing Informatics is a Human right.

A Fundamental right

Would you like a to live in a world where you need a scribe to read and write your mails?

Yeah, let’s assume that they are all well trained professionals.
Let’s assume that they have a Code of Conduct, an Oath and all.

Let’s assume it’s a Free Service. Just like Gmail, Facebook or WeChat. All the readers and all the writers have well payed jobs.

What can go wrong?

Freedom like in… Free Software

We live in a dystopia that we are trained to ignore.

We would never accept that a stranger should read or write all of our mails for us. Not even for free.

Yet we let software written by strangers without much oversight to control our own devices. To act for us. They could read what we write. They could listen what we say. They could see what we do. They decide what we should know and what not.

In early eighty of the last century. somehow Richard Stallman foresaw this was coming and started the Free Software political movement to fight it. He conceived the Four Freedoms of Free Software: to use, study, share and improve the software you get.

Later, the Open Source Initiative rebranded these freedoms, turning Free Software values to marketing tools.

Emptied of their strong ethical values, the four freedoms became a tool to gain market share and maximize shareholders’ value.

Google was probably the first to realize that you can easily distribute software that formally grant the four freedoms while preserving the full control of its development. The trick is to raise the technical complexity so much that nobody can really hope to challenge your take on the project.

So you dress yourself of hackers’ values while at the same time marginalizing them. Though those fake values you gain users that trust you. Users that use your software free of charge, but in exchange for their own freedom and safety.

And now even Microsoft distributes GNU/Linux.

Did Stallman win?

Beyond the Freedom of the few

Can we call “Freedom” a right that few can practice? Shouldn’t we call it “Privilege” instead?

Since most people can’t program and debug, they cannot really read and modify Free Software. They can’t practice two of the four Freedoms. They must trust somebody else. And they have no way to know if the people they trust are actually trustworthy.

The availability of sources make it theoretically safer than proprietary software, but complexity can counter this to a great grade. A malicious piece of code can stay hidden for months despite the Open Source rhetorics about the number of eyeballs.

But users must trust the system. They have no choice. No freedom.

So we need to go beyond Free Software. We need to turn its freedoms to universal rights.

Information Technology must progress

To turn Informatics from a tool of Power to a tool of Freedom, we need to drastically improve it.

Just like scribes did with hieroglyphs in Ancient Egypt, programmers gain their Power by using primitive tools that take years to be mastered.

And just like scribes they are so unaware of their own Power that they keep serving the Pharaoh that oppresses most of them.

By understanding that Informatics is about Informations and Informations are inside their own head, programmers will realize that they are a unicum in the history of Economy.

Programmers are the first workers that control the means of production.
They are solidly attached on their neck and it cannot be removed without destroying the Capital.

If you are a programmer, think about it.
It’s not your IDE that writes program. It’s not your desk. It’s not your manager. They are just tools that “facilitate” what you do. They are useful, but secondary.
And yet, who decides what you do?

Now consider what you could do for this world instead of maximizing shareholders’ value.

Avoid Moralism

Since years there is a lot of fuss about ~~Moralism~~ Ethics in Information Technology.

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, after several deaths caused by self driving cars unable to solve a trolley problem that shouldn’t be there in the first place, researchers are trying to teach ethics to machines.

It’s a very smart move, if you think about it.
On a practical perspective, it’s just like teaching sex to condoms. You should start from people, instead.
But from a political point of view, it’s a subtle attempt to reduce the corporate accountability for the damage produced by their “autonomous” products.

This is not Ethics, but Moralism: a perversion of Morality to serve one’s interests.

We should reject this hypocrisy as the smokescreen it actually is.

Be Human

Programmers often looks at users from the limited perspective of the application they build.

A programmer decide with a great degree of precision what the users can do and what they can not. In this way, programmers decide what users need to understand and what not. What they will probably think and what not.

This goes beyond the issues of Surveillance and is the 101 of Human-Machine Interaction, the basics of User Interface and User Experience design and it is… unavoidable.

But instead of thinking to the user from the limited perspective of your application’s scope, you should consider them as humans, as people.

If you think about the software as a letter to another person instead of as a tool to gain money, you start to consider several trade offs in a different way.

What if the persons on the other end are tired?
What if they need to address unexpected issues with your program?
Do they really understand what they are doing with your software?
Do they really understand the security risk it poses?
Do they feel scared by the software?
Can they really customize it to their need?

Calling people “users” is a way to use them without remorse.
Don’t do that.

Be Political

Since Technology is a prosecution of Politics by means that are under our own control, we should really consider what sort of responsibility come with them.

As liberated programmers we should state for each program we code the Political goals we want to achieve.

From now on, all of my Free Software projects will contain a new file alongside with LICENSE.txt and README.txt: POLITICS.txt

POLITICS.txt should be a short but unambiguous statement about the political effects that the authors want to achieve with a software.

Such description should not include a list of nice ethical principles that the authors want to try to follow in their own heart. Just to avoid the risk of hypocrisy.

It should be a list of specific social effects that the authors want to produce in the society with that specific software. And it should also list the social effects that they want to avoid or minimize.

They might be high level ones or very narrow, but people should be able to say if the software is a political success or a failure by just reading these goals and comparing them with the actual effects the software produced.

A Political success might be a technological failure and vice versa.
And the POLITICS.txt might evolve with the project.
And projects will be forked for disagreements over it.

And it’s all fine.

But having a POLITICS.txt means that you accept to be held accountable for the daemons you summon.

Be Educational

The hackers’ ethics that underlie Free Software is built on top of Curiosity. It’s all about the desire to learn new things, the desire to explore new solution, and to challenge generally accepted assumptions.

But our time is limited. So are our minds.

Thus a very effective strategy to gain new knowledge is to maximize the number of people who search for it.

Writing good code is not as effective as writing simple code.

Reading source code should not require a degree or years of experience in the field.

We need to reorient research in programming language toward simplicity. The lessons of Professor Niklaus Wirth are still waiting for a new life.

We need simple tools that compose well, instead of complex tools that can do everything.

It will not be easy, as Informatics is still very primitive. Just like Ancient Egyptian lacked the zero for hundreds years, we lack many fundamental concepts. But we need to discover them. We need to create an alphabet of Informatics.

And with this alphabet we need to free the next generation of slaves.

Humanity needs to evolve

It’s not just about developers.

No doctor can cure a sick that refuses the treatment.

If we want to preserve Democracy we need to evolve. It’s not Democracy that should be automated, but people that should be educated.

People need to realize that they are puppets in the hands of power groups that decide what they should know and think.

Some will refuse to gain awareness, as the oppressed often internalize the oppression in their own identity. But if we give them a chance, they might leave their children learn their path towards freedom.
Other will see the reality for what it is, and will fight back… by studying.

Whatever we do, Informatics is going to be a revolution anyway.

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage… born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

Informatics is the Red pill.

About European Draft for AI Ethics Guidelines

2019-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

What follows are the comments I’ve sent to the High-Level Expert Group working to define AI Ethics Guidelines for the European Commission.

To understand them, you need a decent understanding of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and to read the DRAFT ETHICS GUIDELINES FOR TRUSTWORTHY AI

Introduction: Rationale and Foresight of the Guidelines

The first lines of the introduction highlight a serious flaw of the draft: the pillars that underpin the Commission’s vision show a fundamental bias:

increasing public and private investments in AI to boost its uptake,
preparing for socio-economic changes, and
ensuring an appropriate ethical and legal framework to strengthen European values

Being eager to adopt a largely misunderstood technology obviously inhibits the ability to reason about its limits and risks.

Before trying to boost its uptake, the Commission should try to understand to what extent and in which fields of endeavour the set of techniques that goes under the AI umbrella should be experimented.

As Shoshana Zuboff recently wrote, technology is NOT an unstoppable force of nature, but a human artifact serving interests and needs of specific humans. In other words, Technology is a prosecution of Politics by other means: each advancement can be designed to serve the public interest or private and elitarian ones. And just like with Politics, a renounce to participate to its course just means to being subject to others’ will.

Before talking about “Trustworthy AI”, we should have a population able to understand the topic enough for their trust to be meaningful.

As for today, without a serious investments in schools to foster History and Informatics as preconditions of our citizenship, such trust can not be meaningful but just deceptive and ill founded.

It’s not a trust on the technology, but in the corporations and the “experts” that can exploit such trust and the widespread ignorance of the topic to weaken regulations and streghten their handle on society.

Having said that, the high level description outlined for the Ethical framework is basically sound: it’s reasonable to think that when the whole population will be able to understand how a neural network’s calibration differs from a k-mean clustering, a similar framework will emerge.

However the glossary that preceed the Introduction already shows that we are not ready for such framework: despite being written by an high level expert group on AI, the definitions still use an antropomorphic language to describe what is just software. In particular describing software bugs (either intentional or unintentional) as “bias” shows a deep misunderstanding about the software in question and about the statistical processes that define its behaviour. Later on, similar concerns emerge when the draft cites “non-determinism” while talking about software that is executed by deterministic machines (aka computers).

Such language is worrying because it shows a tendency from the HLEG to rationalize the risks as inevitable instead of understanding them deeply and taking them into account.

Chapter I: Respecting Fundamental Rights, Principles and Values - Ethical Purpose

Despite an interesting and convidisible introduction, the principles that the chapter proposes lack a fundamental hierarchical structure.

It should be quite evident by looking at such principles:

The Principle of Beneficence: “Do Good”
The Principle of Non maleficence: “Do no Harm”
The Principle of Autonomy: “Preserve Human Agency”
The Principle of Justice: “Be Fair”
The Principle of Explicability: “Operate transparently”

Even if we hadn’t more than two thousands years from the Hippocratic Oath and generations of physicians grown with the “Primum non nocere” maxim, we can see how the last three principles are just specializations of the more general “Do no Harm”. In particular the Principle of Autonomy tries to address risks to individuals, the Principle of Justice tries to address the risks to weak groups and the Principle of Explicability tries to address socio-political risks.

Since the Principle of Non Maleficience is so preponderant to require three specializations, we should put it first, before the principle of Beneficience, and underlining its relation with the others:

The Principle of Non maleficence: “Do no Harm”
- The Principle of Autonomy: “Preserve Human Agency”
- The Principle of Justice: “Be Fair”
- The Principle of Explicability: “Operate transparently”
The Principle of Beneficence: “Do Good”

The road to hell is paved with good intentions: just like with medicine, whenever simpler and safer solutions exist they should be preferred to more complex and risky ones.

But there is an even more important omission in the list: the Principle of Ultimate Human Accountability.

This is a fundamental principle that underlie all European ethical and legal system: at least a human must always be accountable for the problems caused by a human artifact.

In other terms: what is forbidden to a human can not be allowed through an artificial proxy, no matter how “autonomous” (aka expensive to debug) such proxy is.

Talking about ethics is void if we are not ready to enforce this simple but fundamental principle of human responsibility.

The section on “Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems” is in direct contrast to all the principles stated above.

The only way an Ethical Framework can be credible while proposing principles like “Do no Harm”, “Preserve Human Agency”, “Be Fair”, “Operate transparently” and “Do Good” is to clearly state that Autonomous Weapon Systems (lethal or not) must be forbidden on the European territory.

The section on the “Potential longer-term concerns” shows the usual sci-fi based fears that are the flip side of the current hype.

Instead of being concerned about Artificial Consciousness that would be way easier to fake than to implement we should be afraid of semi-autonomous weapons in the hands of a small group of people holding most of the planet’s wealth. And in the count of such weapons we should obviously include every tool that can be used to direct human attention, to manipulate feelings or perceptions and to forge mass opinions.

Chapter II: Realising Trustworthy AI

Even this chapter present several issues:

The short paragraph about “Accountability” suggest to design mechanisms that can range from monetary compensation to apology, but it forgets to include prison: to gain trust it is important to explicitly state that an autonomous proxy cannot become a “Get Out of Jail Free” ticket.
The section on “Safety” looks like it was designed to be ineffective: it’s pointless to assess potential risks associated with the use of AI-based products and services without defining serious punishments when things goes wrong anyway.
The section on “Trasparency” is too vague and forgiving: a simpler approach is to say that no opacity must be allowed in applications that consume human data. Such rules would instantly skyrocket private and public investments in AI research, looking for new machine learning techniques that can be fully explained and debugged.
The section on “Robustness” looks well designed but open to a wide de-responsibilization when it improperly talks about “non-determinism” (false, if we are talking about deterministic, non-quantum, computers) and it cites “complexity”, “opacity”, and “sensitivity to training/model building conditions” as a sort of justifications for unreproducible results. Simply, whenever such conditions exists, the AI program is not robust and should not be applied to problems that require such robustness.
The section about “Human Autonomy” is very scary: in no way people should be nudged by machines. If AI will be successful in enhancing human wealth as it’s promise to be, a lot of friendly people with a lot of free time will be able to nudge us on our request, but it’s too dangerous to let flawed machines manipulate humans whatever the goal: every software has bugs vulnerabilities and many have intentional backdoors: AI won’t be different.

Later, in “Architectures for Trustworthy AI”, while considering the technical means to ensure an ethical behaviour the HLEG suggest to integrate an ethical signal in the “sense” phase of the stochastic system.

This is both naive and weird:

WHICH ethics we should use?
If we widely deploy autonomous machines following a certain ethical model, people will adapt to it (because machines cannot really adapt to us): this could turn to be most effective brain washing project ever conceived. Humans naturally adapt to the sorrounding intelligences: put a consumist agent in every room, and you will build a population of consumists.
HOW MUCH ethics?
Who will decide the weight of that signal? And what when a bug will inhibit it? Or what if other inputs overwhelm such signal? The only use of an ethical signal in an autonomous system is to shield corporations from taking full responsibility of errors: it’s dumb to pretend to teach ethics to trolleys, we should build infrastructures that simply prevent lethal incidents to occur.

Moreover in the section about Regulation we lack any reference to penal justice: just like before, it should be clearly stated that when an autonomous artifact kill or harm, one or more humans will be held fully accountable for it.

Chapter III: Assessing Trustworthy AI

I really appreciated the flexible approach to the assessment process: talking about ethics, a checklist would be too easy to exploit.

For sure, each technique requires different kind of assessments: for example the dataset used to calibrate a k-mean could be enough to reproduce the calibration process and to exclude any racial discriminations, but it would be totally inadequate for assess any property of a classifier based on an artificial neural network.

The risk however is that, without a widespread understanding of the AI techniques, the Commission will ask to the wolfs how to rule the sheeps: we cannot rely on experts that consults large corporations to define any assessment of “trust” into something that can manipulate people.

Moreover, being able to assess the Ethics of a “Trustworthy AI” cannot replace clear regulation establishing the characteristics that an algorithm must have before being fed with human data.

In particular we need to extend the right to “meaningful information about the logic involved” by each AI processing beyond the individuals protected by the article 13 of the GDPR: even groups, such as families, neightbors, customers and so on should have the right to know and understand the exact logic applied to their collective data, when and to which aim the processing occurs.

General Comments

Despite all the issues described above, I appreciated the effort and care that has been evidently put by the HLEG in the writing of this draft.

It’s important for Europe to fill our technological gap with U.S.A. and China and it’s conforting to see serious people working on the ethical issues that will emerge from the AI adoption.

However is even more important to avoid short-cuts. Good will and honesty are fundamental, but not enough to balance lobbying and hype.

To address our technological issues (including AI adoption) we need to raise the general population understanding of Informatics. We need a new mass education plan, with serious investments on teachers and professors from the primary school on. We need to raise a generation of people able to modify the software that they use and they feed with their own data.

Since Technology is Politics, being able to self-host and customize the applications we use is the only way to preserve democracy: it will prevent data capitalization and people manipulation.

Programming is today what Writing was during Ancient Egypt: a tool which is totally primitive, but effective to collect and retain Power among humans exactly because it is primitive.

We need better systems, better programming languages and people able to use software without being manipulated through it.

Until then, widespread adoption of AI can be useful, but it’s irresponsible to apply it to human data. We need prudent regulations that err on the side of caution, not because computer-aided statistics is dangerous in itself but because it’s too easy to abuse it and manipulate or hurt people and societies in a context when most people can’t understand their working.

Hacking License

2018-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

The terms and conditions of this license give you the rights and norms you need to become a hacker, to learn what we ignore and to challenge our assumptions by teaching us what you’ll learn.

Now… HACK!.

Interview to Richard Stallman: TALKING TO THE MAILMAN

2018-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

An interview to RMS with an intersting historical perspective and his take on several Software related and Political topics.

Math, Science and Technology

2018-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I’ve found myself defining math, science and technology a bit too often. I share my insights here to type less in the future.

Mathematics: from Greek Μαθημα-τικὴ, "the art of learning"
Mathematics studies the structure of the constructs of human mind (concepts, patterns, perceptions...) that can be precisely communicated through language.
Science: from Latin scire, "to know"
Science is the process of forcing the human's perceptions of reality into the structure described by Mathematics, so that it can be shared among humans.
Technology: from Greek τέχνη-λογία, "learning how to build things"
Technology is the process of forcing the human's will onto reality, through the creative use of the knowledge acquired by Science.

Mathematics is a byproduct of human evolution.

But while in this dark age it is used to compete, for thousands years Math has been a collaboration tool.

So what?

From such simple definitions, we can infer that

Math is not about reality, just about our mind.
It’s not Math if it cannot be learned through language: Math move knowledge out of a person mind, turning personal insight into the Culture of Humanity.
It’s not Science if it cannot be described by Math.
Science is not about reality, but about our perceptions of it.
Technology is Politics: from wheel to sail, from writing to computers up to the Internet and beyond, technology is and will always be the greatest political force out there.

These definitions are human-centric because these are human tools.

Other species, with different brains and languages, would use a totally different mathematics.

And obviously, as our brains evolve, Math will evolve (or devolve) with them.

Math fun…

Math can study itself. To me, this recursion is fantastic! :-D

We do not need a definition for Mathematics: its name says it all!

Our perceptions are projections of reality into our minds.
Projections. Like shadows. And like with shadows, a single real object can project several perceptions: we are forced to say that light behaves like particles AND like waves because neither particles nor waves really exist.

This dramatically reduce the glory of Science.
It slams our hubris because it shows that we will never know anything that, for any reason, cannot fit our minds, our brains.

However it explains why proofs are social constructs and why often we need to invent new languages to share our insights.

This also means that Science cannot beat Mysticism.
Whenever you see people using Science or Math against Religion, you know they do not understand what Math and Science are. Science can beat bigotry, but not Faith.

…for small men

As a programmer, I’m pretty sad about the amount of crap we see in technology.

I think that most of this crap is directly derived from the lack of political awareness among the people who build such technology.

Technology is Politics. You are responsible. Life with it.

Also, understanding what Math is should help debunking dumb slogans like “The end of theory”.
Without models we have no knowledge. It can be fine if all you want is to exploit big data to make money through trade secrets.
But this naive inductionism do not push humanity forward.

We are wasting tons on money dreaming of artificial intelligences, machine learning and similar buzzwords, massively funded with the hope to milk more users and further manipulate them.

Instead, we should use computer-aided statistics to look at the universe… with new glasses.

This is a huge waste of intelligence.

The Intelligent Symbiosis

2018-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

This is a translated (and polished) transcript of my talk (slides here) at the XV Congress of the Association Luca Coscioni about Research Freedom.

Good evening, my name Giacomo, I’m a programmer and I will try to share here a more practical perspective on these matters. I will talk about the symbiosis between humans and machines, trying to envision a path that can move us forward into this direction.

A new specie

Let’s start with a definition of Artificial Intellingence from the University of Stanford

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building artificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that – in suitable contexts – appear to be animals) and, for many, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that – in suitable contexts – appear to be persons).

Now, if we introduce a new specie into an ecosystem, be it artificial or not, we break its dynamic equilibrium with few possible outcomes:

the extinction of the new specie, refused by the ecosystem
an articulation of the food web
the destruction of the ecosystem itself
the establishment of a symbiotic relationship among the new specie and a resident one.

We can surely exclude the first outcome, since we are here talking about Artificial Intelligences that are taking off. But we can also exclude the articulation of the food web by looking at the metabolism of Artificial Intellicences that is based on data:

data collected by specialized infrastructures
provided to AIs in INPUT
transformed by such AI
returned from the AIs in OUTPUT
and then fed to other AIs
or turned into informations by humans

We can thus see at least three phases:

Eating
Defecation
Interpretation (of the excrements :-D)

which is a little magical, it’s always arbitrary, since it’s up to humans.

Data are just representations of information.
Information belong to human minds.

But where do these data come from?

Feeding Artificial Intelligences

To understand this I suggest you to look at this except from a wikipedia page.

In a footnote it has a link to a primary source.
By clicking such link we spread at the very least 10 personal informations.

Some informations are cultural, some are medical, some are geopolitical and some are economical, since if you are browsing from the last iPhone you probably have different wealth then if you browse Wikipedia from a library’s PC.

Note that this is the bare minimum: with the default browser configuration, you spread a lot more infos. And this is just one click: you can’t even imagine how many precious medical infos you spread by playing an online casual game!

However this data are what AI eat, every day, without any interaction with the carbon cycle: they are neither prey nor predator for other species.

Thus we are left with two possible outcomes:

the destruction of the ecosystem
the symbiosis

That is: we can either go to Terminator… or to WALL-E.

Artificial… Politics.

Sadly, this year excluding the Terminator outcome became harder since, on March, an artificial intelligence from Uber killed a 49 years old woman in Arizona.

Nobody went to jail.
Not even the car, that had perceived Elaine Herzberg but it didn’t break anyway.

What does it means?

The Singularity!

We have two possible interpretations of this fact.

The first is that we have reached the Singularity: the machine asserts its superiority by killing a citizen of the greatest military power of the planet.

Please note the political acumen of this intelligence: while AI are said to reproduce human bias, it killed a white woman in the states; but to avoid a popular uprising it killed a homeless, a poor, a woman that was not relevant in the capitalist economy that stay at the core of the values of that Nation.

This way the car was able to establish a precedent, with a clear message: “it’s allowed to sacrify human lifes to progress; it’s fine to kill people to facilitate the evolution of my specie”.

A super intelligence, as you can see.

But there is another explanation.

Hype-Driven Politics

That simulator shouldn’t have been driving a 2 tons car in a road open to public transit. Indeed Uber’s engineers explained that the car was configured to avoid emergency braking maneuvers while the vehicle was under computer control, “to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior”.
The car didn’t break to avoid car sickness to Uber’s customers.

So Elaine wasn’t killed for progress, but for Uber’s profit!

Teaching ethics to machines is like teaching sex to condoms.
I'd focus on humans, first.

And this is relevant to us because Uber was invited to test a technology totally inadequated to the complexity it had to face, by an ignorant Governor.

But a Governor whose ignorance is pretty mainstream.

A misleading language

The language we use to describe reality forges our understanding of it.

Thus when we use words like “intelligence”, “learning”, “training” and even “neural networks”, we evoke human experiences, things that are deep in our consciuosness, but that have NOTHING to do with that happens inside these software.

This language is great for science-fiction, but it sucks at science.

It would be easy to adopt a more descriptive technical language, a less anthropomorphic one, but we prefer to easily get funds out of fantasies than to really understand what we are searching with those funds.
After all, the more it takes to find it, the more funds!

Robot means slave!

However this incident let us exclude the Terminator outcome.

It proves that, even when a machine kills autonomously, it kills after a human choice. A human decided that Elaine life was worth less than Uber profit.

So even when we will be able to build autonomous weapon, they won’t destroy the planet. They won’t destroy the ecosystem. At all!
They will just thin out humanity of the exceding 99 percent!

Symbiosis

So we are left with a single possible outcome: human-machine symbiosis.

But what is symbiosis?

An intimate association, often obliged, between members of different species, that usually lead to a coevolution.

It’s a long process, started by single individuals of the original species that gain an evolutive advantage over the populations they come from.

Thus we should ask ourselves: who shall inherit the Earth? Who will join this coevolution?

The smart phones into your pockets can make you think you are part of these chosen people, but I have to disappoint you. To raise artificial intelligences you need to control data. You do not control the data about you.

Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Uber hold your data.

Now, somebody will say that these company cannot do evil, and that the interdependencies produced by the global market will protect all of us from destructive practices.

The market protection

To reason about this objection I propose you to consider the browsers that serve over 90% of the market: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari.

These browsers are the primary milking tools… I mean… the primary tools to collect users’ data. They are distributed for free, but funded or developed by the companies. But through these software any website you visit can

tunnel into your private network, wherever you work, in an hospital, in a bank, in a military base, in Parliament… wherever!
put illegal contents into your device without you knowing it

and several other attacks that would be too long to describe here.

These attacks are possible by decades but they have been reported a month ago to these companies. Still you do not know about them because they closed the security report saying that they cannot fix them.

This is false: in that same bug report, I suggested few simple expedients, pretty easy to implement, that would largerly reduce the attack surface. The problem is that one of these expedients is to make JavaScript execution opt-in (as Flash was) and JavaScript is fundamental to the business model of tons of companies in the Silicon Valley.

This shows that the invisible hand do not protect us from ignorance.
These companies did not inform their users, they did not inform you.

We have to understand that the market do not work whenever we have information asymmetry!

Indeed, understanding the geopolitical hazard, China decided to compete on the same ground, creating several big companies in robotics, face recognition and artificial intelligence in general that are slowly taking huge market shares.

What about Europe?

Obviously, Europe could start competing on the market too: Macron already proposed France for this race and others will follow.

But I think there are other terrains where Europe, with its complex history, have a real advantage, such as

the Principles and the Laws that stem from such principles, such as:
- Reponsibility that must always be held by identifiable humans, particularly when the machines fail
- Algorithmic transparency that should always be total and absolute when AI are applied to humans
the Research that such Principles could inspire
(and such Laws incentivate)
- new AI algorithms that can grant the total transparency (without just pretending to)
- new language, that would not fool people
the Culture, through the study of History and Informatics

Symbiosis is a Coevolution

If Symbiosis is a coevolution process, we have to evolve too, we need our collective intelligence to evolve. To this goal we usually use Education.

Today Informatics is what Writing was 5000 years ago: a tool which is totally primitive (nothing we have built in the last 100 years will last!), but an effective tool to collect and retain Power among humans exactly because it is primitive.

But who own such power?

This is Audrey Jones. She is 11 years old and she hacked the electronic election system of the United States of America. In 10 minutes. How is this possible?

Randall Munroe explain part of the problem with this wonderful strip

Our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.

(and NO, the blockchain is not the solution, it’s another symptom)

But there is another aspect of this story that is even more important.

Audrey Jones can

write
count
program

which are all preconditions of a true citizenship in the world we live in.

And computers are easy! A SQL injection is a trivial attack: the fact that you cannot do it doesn’t mean that it’s difficult, just that you don’t know how to do it! Audrey can do it, and she is eleven!

Audrey Jones has

Curiosity
Fantasy
and the Cultural tools to build the infrastructure of the world she desire!

Europe need to raise a generation of hackers like Audrey!
A generation that will produce Politicians that understand the cybernetic democracy we live in!
We cannot teach to Politicians how computers work: it must be part of their background from the primary school!

Because, to be honest, people like me will always be able to fool you.
But we can’t fool Audrey… she knows best!

Audrey shows us that we can only be either Hackers or (biological) Robots, either Citizens or Slaves, because (let’s be clear on this) if a software can affect the elections of a Nation, it means that you are the robots!
You that believe you are using the software, while you are being used by the software because you don’t know how it works.

We do not have to teach our sons to use computers, we have to teach them how to create with computers. So that they can build the world they want. A world we cannot even imagine but that we should prepare them to live in anyway.

We must put servers in every house, mail servers… web servers…

And we must start to teach History and Informatics at school. Seriously!

It is the only option we have, not to put chips under skin

This is the Symbiosis we need: to know how to create the Future.

This Web site is Simple.

2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

This is the new version of tesio.it

It is designed to be simple.

And safe.

Everything you ever wanted to know about terminals.

2018-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

here’s a short tutorial on ansi escape codes and terminal control, because you philistines won’t stop using ncurses and oh my god WHY ARE WE STILL USING NCURSES IT IS THE TWENTY FIRST FUCKING CENTURY

Software disenchantment.

2018-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and the IT in general.

Continues on tonsky.me.

I have been banned from Lobste.rs, ask me anything.

2018-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

Let me start by saying that Lobste.rs is a great community that I enjoined for more than an year. Several very smart guys hungs there, and I got great conversations with them about operating system design, programming languages, artificial intelligence and machine learning, security, privacy and so on.

Continues on dev.to.

The Meltdown of the Web.

2018-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

As Bruce Perens recently put it, I’m “just a programmer”.

A humble programmer. And a self-taught one.

Continues on dev.to.

The Web is still a DARPA weapon

2018-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

Everybody knows that the Internet was originally a US military project.

Continues on Medium.

UI/UX tricks against GDPR (and users)

2018-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

A sad example of tricky UI/UX against European users’ rights.

Continues on Medium.

Mksh on Jehanne.

2018-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Let start by saying that I’m not really a C programmer. My last public contribution to a POSIX C program was a little improvement to the Snort’s react module back in 2008.

So while I know the C language well enough, I do not know anything about the subtliness of the standard library and I have little experience with POSIX semantics.

This is not a big issue with Plan 9, since the C library and compiler are not standard anyway, but with Jehanne (a Plan 9 derivative of my own) I want to build a simple, loosely coupled, system that can actually run useful free software ported from UNIX.

Continues on MirBSD web site.

Yet another definition of Intelligence.

2018-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

After my recent article about the legal implications of artificial neural networks, I’ve got the privilege to share and compare my point of view with a few experts in the field, during my talk at the seminar organized by the “Università degli Studi Milano Bicocca”, in collaboration with “The Innovation Group”.

Of this unexpected and great privilege I’ve to thank in particular Carlo Batini and Roberto Masiero, that let me know and talk to many smart Professors.

Most of my talk was an application of common sense: behind the hype, the marketing and the cultural (and economical) pressure of lobbies, there is just software, deterministic like any other. Full of bugs, like any other.

However the title of the seminar “Myths and reality of Artificial Intelligence — Theoretical issues and practical developments” and the high preparation of the audience were a call for a more technical contribution than my first article on the topic.

Thus I dared to propose yet another definition of intelligence.

Continues on tesio.it.

What I wish I knew before contributing to Open Source.

2018-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

There is no such thing like FLOSS.

Free Software and Open Source Software are completely different things.

Continues on tesio.it.

The delusions of neural networks.

2018-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

Here I try to provide useful insights to both the layman that use AI for fun or profit, and to the AI practitioner that is too deep in the field to see it from a broader, interdisciplinary perspective.

It’s lengthy, to be both clear and technically correct, but should worth a read.

Continues on tesio.it.

Corporate fishes.

2011-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

An enterprise system is a system that supports the day to day operations of an enterprise or organization in real time.
Strong, D.M. & Volkoff, O. (2004) 'A roadmap for enterprise system implementation', Computer, 37 (6), pp. 22-29.

This is the best definition of enterprise system that I’ve ever found.

Keeping this definition in mind is strategic for design and development decisions.
But it is even more important for corporate managers that choose technological patners.

Recent experiences with Microsoft made me realize that no bank, school or medical institute should base their own software infrastructure on such a big company.

No matter how cheap could seem their solutions: the time will come when they put your interests after their own. And then you’ll pay a lot more than you saved before.

Banks are big fishes, in the world’s economy.

But even big fishes should avoid to depend upon bigger ones.

Synthesis vs compromise.

2010-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

My job is all about complexity.

Designing and developing an enterprise application for a big bank, is a huge challenge. It’s all about understanding and solving concrete problems that are complex by nature, since they mix the human habits and needs with the rigidity of a software system. You can’t miss a word, neither when you write the code nor when you talk with customers and users. You have to deeply understand both.

It happens that people requirements collide with developers’ experience and habits.

In these cases, project managers, developers and architects brainstorms. Such brainstorm are really similar to political talk-shows: many people talk, fews listen.

I’m actually both a developer and an architect, so I’m often required in such brainstorms.

During the last years I noticed that there are two different approaches to problems:

serching compromises
serching syntesis

The two always conflict.

Compromises are easier and faster to obtain: you only need to negotiate.

Synthesis are by far harder to achieve: everyone have to listen and understand the reasons of the others and to propose solution that others can endorse.

Compromises don’t solve problems, but seem cheaper in the short term. Synthesis avoid the problems, solving the human errors that lead to them, but are harder to get.

Recently we have a problem that has been approached with compromises: the agreement was taken in an hour by a project manager and an architect.

After 97 man/days of hard work we had to throw it all.

Than we tried to search a syntesis. It took 5 day for 5 people to understand the problem, the errors we did before and so on.

5 people brainstormed for 5 days.

After that 2 developers built the solution we defined. In a week.

It was an emblematic experience.

Most italian politics search compromises.

Compromises are cheaper: all they need is to keep their voter’s consensus.

Moreover with compromises you can focus to ensure a practice of favouritism. They forgot (when they know) our wonderful Constitution that states:

Each Member of Parliament represents the Nation and carries out his duties without a binding mandate. Art.67 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic

They should avoid compromises. They should always search synthesis. They should work for all italians, not only for their voters.

Political compromises clean your garden while your home burns. May be you are looking the garden and vote them again, but you’ll eventually have to go home.

On the other hand synthesis is always possible: we all have legitimate needs and egoistic pretensions. By mortifing such pretensions you don’t win elections but you find compatible needs. But how to find politics that avoid compromises? How to find men that works only for the common good?

A first step: don’t allow anyone to run for parliament twice.

Ode al gabinetto.

2010-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Ti ringrazio Signore, per quel bianco
inesorabile, sfondo perfetto,
tela di ogni più piccolo difetto,
profondità insondata… di cui manco.

Profondità che merita un sonetto,
perché ricorda ad un fedele stanco
l’Umiltà per camminare al Tuo fianco.
Grazie Signore… per il gabinetto.

Rimarrebbe presidio di Uguaglianza
perfino se passasse il lodo Alfano,
rubando ai retti il senso di Giustizia.

Riuscirebbe a diffonder la notizia
se la Carta che fu Patria Speranza
fosse insozzata da un sol deretano?

Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software

2010-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

Domain-Driven Design, by Eric Evans, provides a broad framework for making design decisions and a vocabulary for discussing domain design. It is a synthesis of widely accepted best practices along with the author’s own insights and experiences. Projects facing complex domains can use this framework to approach domain-driven design systematically.

More at dddcommunity.org.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

2009-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Plan 9 began in the late 1980’s as an attempt to have it both ways: to build a system that was centrally administered and cost-effective using cheap modern microcomputers as its computing elements. The idea was to build a time-sharing system out of workstations, but in a novel way. Different computers would handle different tasks: small, cheap machines in people’s offices would serve as terminals providing access to large, central, shared resources such as computing servers and file servers. For the central machines, the coming wave of shared-memory multiprocessors seemed obvious candidates. The philosophy is much like that of the Cambridge Distributed System [NeHe82]. The early catch phrase was to build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes.

The problems with UNIX were too deep to fix, but some of its ideas could be brought along. The best was its use of the file system to coordinate naming of and access to resources, even those, such as devices, not traditionally treated as files. For Plan 9, we adopted this idea by designing a network-level protocol, called 9P, to enable machines to access files on remote systems. Above this, we built a naming system that lets people and their computing agents build customized views of the resources in the network. This is where Plan 9 first began to look different: a Plan 9 user builds a private computing environment and recreates it wherever desired, rather than doing all computing on a private machine. It soon became clear that this model was richer than we had foreseen, and the ideas of per-process name spaces and file-system-like resources were extended throughout the system—to processes, graphics, even the network itself.

Full text at 9p.io.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

2008-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

A classic of object-oriented design.