Publications

For this Factory Update called “Ethical EOF” we invited Sylvain from Prof. Carmela Troncoso’s SPRING lab. He gave us an introduction to “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)”. We learnt how it can be used in privacy-preserving technologies (PET). Sylvain presented a use case to us which is federated learning. As FHE…

Part of the work of the C4DT Factory is the creation of demonstrators (proof of concepts) of technology coming out of the EPFL/IC labs. After two years we archive them and provide you with the means to easily run the demo on your computer instead. That way the demo remains…

This report summarizes the key results of the 2. Workshop on Digital Service Public held with 20 stakeholders from Swiss public administration, politics, industry, interest groups, civil society and academia.

As part of our work on the digital public service in Switzerland, we have written an initial working paper in which we focused in particular on the question of the future of the traditional service public in the context of progressive platformization.

Julia Rebstein, a student from the GymInf program, just finished and presented her project “Trace(r)s on the web – Julia Rebstein“. In it, she explains how different types of cookies work, and looks at a 1-week sample of browsing sessions from 10 persons. Under the supervision of Linus Gasser and…

In this issue brief, C4DT Digital Trust Policy Fellow Leonila Guglya examines international digital product regulations that are of key relevance to the ICT community, such as mandatory disclosure of source code, use of cryptography, cybersecurity standards, and nondiscrimination rules.

In this book lawyer Jamie Susskind addresses the issue of the unaccountable power exerted by Big Tech. Susskind problematizes the fundamental challenges that the engineers who design and control digital technology pose to democratic power and legitimacy.

Development in research is very different from development in an industrial context. Many popular DevOps tools can nonetheless be effectively used in research development as well. Docker, an open-source containerization platform, is one such a tool. This blog post shows how Docker can help you develop the software needed for…

This book provides and excellent analysis of how digital platforms have become so powerful and so pervasive that they have by now permeated every corner of society and social life to the point that they determine, at least in part, the way society operates.

This recent book by Pradip Ninan Thomas approaches the phenomenon of digital platforms, digitalization, and Big Tech from a non-Western, cultural perspective, which makes it a very welcome contribution to the study of digitalization.

Coverage? Testing is one of the most important step of code validation. One would argue that an untested code is akin to a rogue program destroying what it can in its way. But what tests the testing? How do you know that your testing infrastructure is indeed simulating most behaviors…

What is Nix? I recently had the opportunity to play with Nix, which is a package manager and an OS based on this package manager. Nix is special in the sense that it claims to only make reproducible builds that can’t break the system. But how? The package manager is…

  vs. Today we looked at the following article, which compares Rust and Haskell: https://serokell.io/blog/rust-vs-haskell Even though I did some dabbling in Haskell, I never understood how close the two are. Currently I think I’m quite proficient in Rust, so I can follow the article quite well on that side.…

This extremely well documented and researched book introduces the reader to some novel areas of platformization, namely the platformization of actors that manage information, knowledge and intelligence.

Juan Montero and Matthias Finger's book provides a valuable exploration of digital platforms' ascent and impacts, addressing their market disruption and potential regulatory strategies for mitigating adverse effects.