Author: Andrea Monti

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Brexit, Donald Trump and the Dark Side of the Internet

The Brexit’s outcome, Donald Trump to become POTUS (President of the United States) and, before that rise of “populist” political wings, are all a consequence? (I hate to say it) of the Internet. Of course, the Internet is not the only factor, but facts show that it contributed largely to a shift of the people’s role in the political arena.

Before the Internet, haters, poorly educated and fanatics lived their life in
(a relative) isolation. They were just individual drops? or – at the very worst – a number of little, unconnected rivulets. Thank to the Internet, they all of a sudden discovered that they weren’t alone in their way to look at life and found a way to turn the rivulets into an enormous tide.

So, what present reality teaches us, is that the Internet empowered the most gullible and “weak” part of the society with an actual capability to create social, political and economic damages.

I do not intend to offend (and I’m not talking about) those who voted to leave the EU or supported the current POTUS and so on,? that did it on a rational, informed basis. That’s the core of the democracy: a dissenting opinion is not – per se – wrong. What scares me, as the late events have demonstrated, is that our destiny can be shaped by a large, irrational, anonymous digital crowd.

It would be easy, at this point, to start thinking that Russia and China aren’t that wrong
when they prevent the people from accessing the Internet. And that a serious tool should be handled with the proper care and training by untroubled people.

But, apart the unacceptable racist basis of the statement – this? would means that only a few should have had access to this resource and then that nobody would have thrown the necessary money to develop the network. So, to close the circle, we now enjoy the Internet as it is, because less culturally-structured people made it possible.

Having a tool that makes people dumber, a modern version of Nero’s panem et circenses, is great for the powers-that-be. Do spend your time in streaming, social-networking, and texting and let us do our job: we know what’s good for you.

And the paradox lies in that: to have power you need to make people weak in thinking. But such kind of people do irrational things, hence Brexit, Trump and so on, so the power you’re eagerly looking for, is lost.

Funny, isn’t it?

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The Italian Supreme Court: name and surname only aren’t subjected to the Data Protection Act

The Corte di cassazione (Italian Supreme Court) decision n. 20615/16 narrows the definition of “personal data” under the Italian data-protection act that enforces the data-protection directive.

The merit of the decision is a legal action against a municipality accused of having published on its website the name and surname of an individual who sued the municipality.

While, the Court said, when mandatory by law the releasing of personal data is always allowed (and this was the case, since there is a law the bind a municipality to disclose its decisions, including those related to legal actions), the simple publication of a name and surname is not enough to make and individual actually identifiable.

Verbatim, the Court says:

the identification of the individuals… would have been possible only by way of further investigations, including third-parties database, with a disproportionate effort in terms of energy and money that is not justified by the interest to identify people involved in a trivial car accident.

This decision set forth a very important point because points out the fact that the “identifiability” notion of the directive is a relative one.

In other words, and enforcing the legal principle to the telco world, an IP number in itself is not necessary a personal data, unless “the identification of the individuals… would have been possible only by way of further investigations, including third-parties database, with a disproportionate effort in terms of energy and money that is not justified by the interest to identify people”.

Needless to sat, the Italian Data Protection Authority has always challenged this interpretation, trying to affirm an “absolute” notion of personal data, thus creating bureaucratic burdens end financial costs for the compliance.

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Phoney and the forensics value of Iphone chat

Phoneys is a software that allows a user to change the content of an Iphone chat thus altering the meaning of the conversation.While this is just an entertainment software, it might have some disturbing impacts on a possible criminal investigation.

Indeed, SMS, chat transcripts and messages are routinely used as a source of evidence by lawyers and prosecutors on the basis that if something is on a phone it can be hardly be faked. Of course, this is not always true, of course evidences must be corroborated by independent checks, of course the legal community is not that dumb to give face value to a text on a phone screen. But…

Phoneys allows a malicious person to create a prima facie deceiving fact, by exploiting the fact that a message has actually been sent, thus leading the investigator into thinking that a conversation took place with the intended correspondent. In an emergency context, the necessity of taking immediate action might push him to under evaluate what has been shown as “evidence”, thus jeopardizing the final result.

Maybe this is a either a minor or non-existent issue. But judicial reality has proven to be more surprising then legal-thriller. So, next time you’re confronted with a message as an evidence, why not double check?

Just in case…

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Smartwhatever, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence. When Marketing Tricks Lead To Dangerous Effects

If we give marketing buzzwords its proper meaning, a lot of hype disappear and things can be looked at in a less fancy while easier and pragmatic way.

So, for instance, SmartWhatever is just an electric/electronic tool with expanded (although limited) programming capability. “The Cloud” is just either an FTP or a grid/parallel computing service with dynamic resources allocation and, last but no least, Artificial Intelligence is just the attempt of enhancing the computer’s capability of performing its task in autonomy (and is not related to the creation of an actual “intelligence” since neurologist and other scientists still ignore how the brain works.)

Sure, neither calling a cloud service “enhanced FTP” nor labeling an “intelligent phone”? just “voice driven mobile” power the sales of the gimmick of the moment. Nevertheless, since words do have meaning, the recklessness of the marketing coupled with the ignorance of lawmakers and courts lead to dangerous consequences.

The legal “rhetoric” about these buzzwords is unbelievable: the legal community tries to look for “new” problems to solve (and I suspect, for new clients), and somebody, around, keeps talking about artificial intelligence “rights”.

To put it short: once again, by fault of ignorance and unscrupulousity we are exposed to? non-existent legal issues that, despite being just nothing, shall cause actual trouble.