Author: Andrea Monti

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Italian Data Protection Act As Censorship Tool

The news of the day is that the lawyers of an indicted Italian politician will ask the Italian Data Protection Authority to block the publication of a video ?covertly-made by a journalist portraying this indicted politician while serving his sentence in and elder-care facility (as a substitution for a 4 month jail term.)

While it is (still) not known whether the request will actually be filed, the news is a confirmation that the Data Protection Act is now seen as an effective tool to remove “unpleasant” information from the public sources in the name of “privacy protection”.

It will be interesting to see if, in this case, the Italian Data Protection Authority will follow the censor attitude showed back in the 2006 in the case of a TV show that exposed several Italian MPs to make use of drugs.

It really doesn’t matter whether, in this case, the Data Protection Authority shall block the video or not. The point is that by confusing “privacy” with “data protection” and giving room to a devious interpretation of the “right to be alone” – such in the Google Spain case – on the long term we are making impossible the work of the future historian and, on the short term, we are favouring the possibility for the powers-that-be to finally get back its dark, quiet obscurity where anything can happens, hidden from the public scrutiny.

In the name of “privacy”.

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Aperture’s EOL And The Consequence Of Livining in a Golden Cage

Apple discretely manage software lifecycles to push users into buying new, its new, expensive hardware.

A recent news is that is going to dump Aperture, its photo management pro app, announcing in the meantime the availability of a “photo” application in the next iteration of OSX. True, Apple shall not drop the support for the new OS versions, but for how long? This uncertainty ? will force people to either stay stuck to older machines or move to Adobe Lightroom, the (currently only) competitor. In either case this will cause financial and time issues for Aperture’s user-base.

Aperture is nothing but the last Apple-made software to meet this ? or a similar fate. Final Cut Pro X latest version, so Pages, Numbers and Keynote, just to name a few, only work with the current OSX version, Maverick.

True, compared to the consequences of Microsoft XP dismissal, the Apple choice looks a trivial issue but on the long term it shouldn’t, since managing the lifecycle of its applications as well as the backward compatibility, Apple is able to force its users into buying new expensive hardware. Furthermore, for those who choose not to upgrade, the software old-versions might not be anymore permanently available through the AppStore and cannot be locally downloaded. So why a professional user should enter into this uncertain – or, on the contrary, safe-but-costly, world?

This is the consequence of living in a Golden Cage: stay comfortable as soon as you can afford it. And when (“when”, not “if”) you don’t anymore, just get lost and give room to the next, wealthy-at-the-moment, occupier of your place in the Golden Cage.

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Why Do We Blog (or Tweet, or Whatever…)?

Secure your presence online, get traffic on your website or social network profile, target potential customers and talk about them so you can be noticed and – hopefully – hired… The Internet is full of (often) contradictory advices on how to exploit the communication tools to increase the business and get new clients.

Of course there is nothing wrong in using marketing techniques like these, especially by complying with the McCann-Ericson motto: “Truth Well Told”. Nevertheless I find unfair to use this “Trojan Horse” approach: pretending to be nice – or talking about some specific issues – ? just because of the chance to be spotted and hired.

When, together with Stefano Chiccarelli, I wrote Spaghetti Hacker I couldn’t even foresee its success: 10.000 copies sold back in the late nineties, when the Internet wasn’t so available and with no support of a PR agent. We got media coverage, conference invitations and – yes – a fair share of business. And the tide, after almost twenty years, is still high since we (Stefano and I) both meet people praising for the book.

Well, we didn’t write the book because we were following a marketing strategy or to enter into somebody else’s radar. We just felt we had something to say about a topic we care, and that was – and still is – largely unknown: the Italian hacker culture. In other words, Spaghetti Hacker was a sincere, straight-to-the point message to whoever was interested in understanding what was going on in the then newborn Italian Internet.

So, where’s the point of this post?

Answer: sincerity and transparency: if you blog/tweet/post for marketing purposes, please do not pretend to be born on July, 4th.

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Stop Apple and Google To Take Over Our Cars

Google just announced its “Android Auto” platform, while Apple already did ? it with Carplay. Both platforms require an Internet connection and, it is just matter of time, will become more and more deeply interconnected with the car control system.

But software do fail. It fails because there’s no such thing as a bug-free software, it fails because people do mistakes, it fails because the software house’s roadmap not necessarily matches the final users’ safety.

And I don’t care about the usual PR stunts such as “as soon as we discovered the bug we did our best to fix it the fastest way” or “since the xyz library is licensed and proprietary we can’t keep responsibility for the way the software behave” or, finally, “if you just read the EULA you will find that it is clearly stated that we don’t take any responsibility for blah, blah, blah…”

This is a price we cannot afford to pay.

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A Homicide Investigation And The (Still Alive) Data Retention Regulation

The young girl homicide investigation I’ve talked about in a previous post reveals other interesting information, this time about the Telcos’s role in supporting the public prosecution service through the traffic data retention.

The media are reporting (italian only, sorry) that more than 120.000 single mobile calls are under scrutiny spanning from a few months before the kill. But since the fact is more than three years’old, these data aren’t even supposed to exist since the Data Retention Directive forbade its preservation once the (maximum) two-years term expired.

So, hopefully for the justice and the family of the poor girl, at the beginning of the investigation the public prosecutor, as required by law, did issue a traffic data “freezing” order or, better, seized it as dictated by the Italian Criminal Rule of Evidence.

As in the case of the DNA-based evidence, the collection of traffic data without complying the Rule of Evidence might allow the defense lawyers to challenge the reliability of these information especially because the original traffic data have (or should have been) destroyed once collected by the public prosecution service, thus preventing the possibility of double-checking during the trial their actual evidence “weight”.