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The Danger of the New Crusaders and the Risk for the Medical Research

Repubblica.it, an Italian online newspaper, accounts for the cancellation of a fund-raising initiative to collect money for the research on rare disease. The cancellation has been motivated by the fear of riots provoked by animalist activists who object living animals to be used in medical research. This form of terrorism is a dangerous growing trend in Italy, and one of the reasons for this growing is that extreme animalism is not perceived as bad as its “political” sibling (thank to the support given by teen-agers oriented TV channels, politicians and artists.) I don’t see how the opinion of (former)models, self-professed experts with no impact-factor or citation-index or bloggers-on-a-mission should prevail over the facts stated by the major Italian research institution.

Anyway the consequence is that police authorities and the government aren’t taking seriously this issue letting activists to continue threatening the medical and biotech research in Italy. Of course I don’t claim that “every animalist is a terrorist” and I don’t want to enter into the semantics of both words. What I do not find fair is the justification for the use of violence in the name of an idea: the field of history is crossed by enormous rivers of blood because somebody bleieved to be absolutely right, thus taking the burden to “convert” those who disagreed.

As often happens in Italy, this is the result of the a confusion between “ethics” (that is a personal matter) and “law” (that is – or is supposed to be – a tool for balancing contradictory interests.) This confusion is likely to badly affects the feasibility of the scientific research in Italy. I still haven’t collected enough information about how big a disincentive this animalist threat is for the health companies who want to invest in Italy, but the very first hints don’t let imagine a bright future.

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Why the UE Cookie Directive doesn’t actually protect the final user

All the fuss generated by the use of cookies by almost every website on the traditional Internet that led the EU to pass the Cookie Directive just produced a pop-up that warns the anonymous user about the presence of these digital candies. Thus, the Ad-dicted can claim to be law-abiding netizens while giving no actual privacy protection for the users. Want a proof? What follows is a cookie left on my computer by a well-known e-commerce giant: A0CJfSiKBUmZik9DPj7fCXA. Firefox tells me about it existence and expiring date, but how am I supposed to know what does this cookie means? And what difference does it make whether I am aware or not of its presence, since I have no way of understanding what’s its function?

Short: the Cookie Directive is useless and, as Cicero used to say, Summum Jus, Summa Injuria.

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Data Protection vs Data Retention

One of the oddities of the Data Protection legal framework is the relationship between Data Retention and Data Protection and the (wrong) notion that when the retention period has expired, the retained data must be deleted.

Let’s start from scratch: as soon as the services work properly, an ISP has no need to preserve the traffic data, but since we don’t live in a perfect world, problems happen so it is necessary to retain some information for troubleshooting and traffic shaping; furthermore, customers’ claims, billing and legal issues strongly support the need to save some more information. Thus, ISPs – though on a voluntary basis – do collect and retain traffic-related information as long as these information are useful to pursue legitimate goals.

Enter the Data Retention. With a questionable motive, ISPs are now forced – forced – to retain for a limited time some traffic data for the sake of the law enforcement community. In other words, what before the Data Rention Era was voluntary, now is mandatory.

But what happens when the mandatory retention period expires? The answer is (supposed to be) easy: the ordinary Data Protection legal regime comes back into force, so the ISPs are – or should be – free to either continue keeping those data (for legitimate purposes) or deleting it.

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On Death and Corporate Culture

Giancarlo Livraghi, who passed awat last Feb. 22, is not only one of the Fathers of the Italian Internet and a civil rights advocate. He is one of the most influential player of the international advertising business.From 1980 to 1993, until he retired to focus himself on the cultural implication of the (then) newborn Internet, he founded and directed the Livraghi, Ogilvy&Mather, now just Ogilvy Italia.

The sad news made a fast round in the advertising community, but neither the Ogilvy corporate site nor the Italian spent a single word to say “good-bye” to one of its top men ever (at least: I thoroughly looked for, and found nothing, even through Google.) This fact reinforced a disturbing belief I’ve developed interacting with the US-based management style: when you’re gone, you’re gone, no matter how good you did for the company. After all, a human being is just a “resource”.

Then compare this approach to the management style of Adriano Olivetti. True, Olivetti ? – the company that, before Richard Stallman, invented the powerful concept of Open System Architecture – is no more than a vague name in the ICT business. But its management style is still an unsurpassed way to make people work together.