Digital Thought

I’m diddling since a couple of weeks with the new Samsung Galaxy Pad 10.1v, equipped with Android 3.0 Honeycomb.

The whole thing is crappy.

There is no support for OS X, no information on how to factory reset the machine when hangs on boot (the only option, as I sadly discovered, is to send the tablet back to Samsung even for a trivial hard-reset), no native file-manager, no native (working) multimedia player, no native task killer. The internal disk is painfully slow and Android crashes more often that it should be supposed to do. Working MP4-econded videos streamed from a DLNA server don’t play when copied locally.

If I were Apple, I wouldn’t care about Samsung Galaxy tablets. They’re far, far, far away from becoming a viable Ipad alternative

The Italian center-left wing has proposed a bill (currently passed in Senate, and now to be examined in the other chamber) that allows the law enforcement to obtain the use of computer seized during computer-crime related investigation, early before the final judgement comes to an end.

The “idea” backing the proposal (that will likely become a full-force law in a few time) is that there is no harm for the defendant if the police uses his computer waiting for the trial. At the end of the day, if the defendant will be acquitted – says the accompaining text to the draft law – he will get his computer back, and will start using it as if nothing happened. The reason for this law – this is clearly stated – is to give the brand new computers used for criminal purposes to the law enforcement agencies that still use old and crappy technology at no cost.

This is the very same approach adopted for houses and vehicles used by drug dealers and mafia mobs so in principle there shouldn’t be a particular concern for this new law.

Personally I disagree from this statement, since a computer is something different than a car or some other premises. It stores information often unrelated to the investigated crime, and/or information related to innocent third parties.

Why should these people be exposed to a mass infringement of their personal life?

As every country with “something to hide”, Italy (better, the Italian government) is concerned of what might be soon disclosed on Wikileaks.

As a preemptive strike against possible Wikileaks’ fallback yesterday an official press-release said – without explicitly mentioning Assanges’ website – that “the forthcoming pubblication of confidential reports about the USA politics, with possible negative side effects on Italy tooo – imposes a though determination to defend the Italian reputation as well the protection of economic and political interests of the country” (the translation is mine, I apologize for any mistake.)

I bet my ten cents that when the Italian File will be disclosed the first reaction will be to call for a new law to control the flow of information that endanger “national security” or whatever they name it.

Another interesting issue to remark is the (non)role of the Italian journalists in the whole story. It is, at least, odd that a remote-located website news service, with no apparent connection with the country, is able to get sensitive information about the Italian government, while the local journalists – and especially those who write about politics – don’t.

This is a bad blow to the role of the press as powers’ watchdog.

The “discovery” that Italy is going to enforce the EU directive 2008/63/CE by imposing that only a State-approved professional can connect a router to a socket has generated some sort of  hype among those who’re not familiar with the Italian legal system. Since 1992, in fact,  the decree of the Ministry of communication n.314 already establish such burden (and sanction those who don’t comply.)

The true news is that – should the government actually revise the old regulation – things can only get worse…

I’m an old Amazon.com customer and I’m very happy that the Company finally landed in Italy.
It is odd, nevertheless, that Amazon.it’s data protection policy (informativa sul trattamento dei dati personali) is not fully compliance with the Italian Data Protection Code, since mandatory information are missed:
- the identity of the data controller (responsabile del trattamento)
- how long will Amazon handle the personal data
- what will happen when the data handling is no more necessary
- the rights belonging to the data subject (diritti dell’interessato) under sect. 7-13 of the Italian Data Protection Code
Further more Amazon.it’s privacy procedure fails to collect the explicit consent of the data subject for the data processing and didn’t collect the specific consent to handle the sensitive data (those related to customers who purchase political, philosophical, and/or healt-related books.)
This situation, then, poses an interesting question: is Amazon.it actually infringing its customer personal privacy rights?
Strictly speaking, the answer is yes because the law has been breached. Nevertheless I’ll keep purchasing books through Amazon services since I feel more protected by Amazon ethical commitment than by a bunch of legal lingo.
Fact is that bureaucracy asks for its lamb to be sacrificed.

The more I think about, the more I’m convinced that if we continue to think of privacy as a concept unrelated to other ideas we face the old problem: if an unbreakable wall is a wall that cannot be broken and an unstoppable projectile is a projectile that cannot bestopped, what happens when an unstoppable projectile hits an unbreakable wall? This is not to justify a softer approach in defending privacy, rather to ask whether “trust” plays a role in defining (and not only supporting) privacy.

In other words: if each of us lived in a separate island then privacy would be at its best, but could we still think of privacy if nobody else is around?

If this is correct, than the privacy in itself should include the idea of (breaching the) trust. As soon as we enter into a relationship with somebody else, we need to surrend a part of our privacy. This means that privacy is co-defined by our counterpart’s ethical commitment to recognize it as a “value”.

Odds, although intriguing.

In Italy the Codice delle comunicazioni elettroniche legally bind ISPs to guarantee the functionality and security of the network (both from a physical and logical perspective). This means that if traffic shaping is needed to handle traffic overload this can be done with no specific provision.
Every proposal of nailing down traffic shaping options is a trojan horse because – for instance – copyright lobbies might whistleblow that P2P is creating an international emergency thus forcing ISPs to violate the net neutrality “for security sake”.

If passed, a bill heavily supported by right wing Italian prime minister and media mogul , Silvio Berlusconi, will force the public prosecutors to wiretap suspect’s communication for a limited time and will punish harshly those who shares information related to a criminal investigation before the trial (that usually, in Italy, starts year after the alleged crime has been detected.)
This draft law is a ruthless attempt to shut down the check and balance system in Italy (thus, it is not a case that the bill is aimed at preventing prosecutors to investigate AND both traditional media and independent citizens to report information.)
That said, the reactions against the proposal were (and still are) short-sighted. Mainstream media talk about dangers for “bloggers” as if running a site with Drupal or WordPress actually gave a particular status to the information released. Technically speaking, whoever publish fake or offensive information is liable of his action. If those who commit the fact are journalists, then there is an additional liability for the editor-in-chief (in Italian: direttore responsabile.) Period.
I really don’t understand why a lot of “bloggers” complain for the (possible) introduction of a mandatory amendment of mistaken information. A law shouldn’t even be necessary, since it is matter of common sense to verify sources first and then, in case of error, fix it as fast as is possible.
Unfortunately, then, the criticisms against this law hit the wrong target, easing the work of the “Evil Forces”.

Right wing minister of Home Affair (Maroni – Lega Nord) and undersecretary of economic development (Paolo Romani – Forza Italia) are pushing aggressively ISPs and Telcos to adopt a self-regulation on illegal content basically meaning: the gov wants ISPs to shut down “illegal” content upon “simple” notice, to protect “human dignity” and “privacy”.
What’s wrong with that?
First: although the label is “self-regulation” it isn’t actually so. Self regulation is (or should be) a set of rules that a specific sector freely choose to adopt. On the contrary, the gov arranged a “definitive draft” (so they called it) with no actual room for discussion.
Second: in Italy all the crimes involving human dignity and political freedom can be prosecuted without the need of a specific claim. If a public prosecutor believes that a such a crime has been committed, he can start the investigation on his own. Thus, if a content is illegal, it is a prosecutor business, while if the content is strong although not illegal, like it or not is just free speech.
Thus, there is no (legal and technical) need for the ISPs to become a “private court” telling the right from wrong. But this is exactly what this alleged “self regulation” wants to achieve: just shut down those “annoying bugs”.
So, if there is no need for such “self regulation” why does the gov try to enforce it?
The main reason is that they wants people to believe that industry itself chosen this solution, because the gov hasn’t the courage to pass such third world legislation.
So, with the excuse of protecting privacy and human dignity, what the Italian goverment is actually doing is pushing ahead the quest for censorship.

Finally the Court of Milan made public the opinion that backed the indictment of a couple of Google’s executives charged of Italian Data Protection Act infringement by not removing a violent video from the company’s video sharing platform, video.google.com. The opinion of the Court tells basically what I “guessed” in a previous post, (easy guess, BTW) while analyzing the charges against the managers.

Thus, to put it short, Google’s people have been indicted because they failed to verify, under the Italian Data Protection Act, whether all of the people depicted in the video positively consented to its upload. No matter that the service agreement bind the user to publish legally obtained content only.

As I’ve written and told in serveral places, this is a wrong decision.

Wrong in a legal perspective, for it set on ISP’s side an hidden duty of pre-emptive control over users’ activity.

Wrong in a social perspective, for it breaks the tie between a crime and its “author” and reinforces the idea of “faida” (the collateral vendetta of the ancient barbarians.)