Developing an International Framework for Addressing Non-State Actors in Cyberspace

On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline shut down its operations following a ransomware attack by the criminal group DarkSide (Bordoff, 2021). It took five days to resume normal operations, but this short period led to panic buying, rising prices, and significant gas shortages. The attack underscores an emerging threat in the landscape of cybersecurity: critical infrastructure attacks carried out by non-state actors

Mediazione e responsabilità, nel suono

Agostino Di Scipio, questioning the relationship between music, technology and society, points to the need of abandoning a strictly sociological point of view in favor of an approach that considers the actions and decisions mediated through technology – together with the responsibility the composer assumes on these processes of mediation – in their capacity to trace elements capable to be audible within the conditions of existence of sound and music. Through a series of steps – which go from a hermeneutic of technology to the identification of paradigms of mediation, from the definition of the conditions for responsibility, to the assessment of the nature of the plurality of tracks left in the sound from the constructive gesture – the author points out the terms of a perspective informed to the creative practice, the conditions and the techniques of those who act in a creative sense. In a world structured as a network of interconnected technical systems, the reflection must be brought from the aesthetic plane to the more decisive one of ‘responsibility of the media’, where “the skills and awareness that a musician has of the technologies of his work are not secondary to the meaning and significance of the final products of his work”

I quanta acustici di Gabor nelle tecnologie del suono e della musica

Through a series of brillant paper publications dating from the late 1940s, Dennis Gabor developed a new conceptual and operational framework for the analysis of sound signals, based on a quantum-oriented view of acoustical phenomena. In the present essay, I try to illustrate the shaping up of Gabor’s quantum analysis of sound, especially as delineated in two papers from 1946 (Theory of communication) and 1947 (Acoustical quanta and the theory of hearing), and to overview its legacy in scientific research as well as in audio and musical applications. After some introductory remarks, I follow a hybrid path, between history of science and history of audio technology, sketching a “genealogy” of Gabor’s quantum view of sound (i.e. as connected to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, to Mach’s analysis of sensation, etc.), and relating it to an empiricist tradition of modern science. I eventually situate his research in the context of contemporary research preoccupations shared by other, at the time, and I finally discuss some of the earliest audio devices that seem to tie back to Gabor’s own practical experiments (beside his theoretical framework) and that revealed of primary interest to pioneers in analog and digital music technologies and related creative practices