Luca Saiu — Translations

Here are a few non-peer-reviewed articles by others along with translations into the language of the country where I was born. Two of these translations are by me; one is by Dora Scilipoti, with minor contributions from me.

I did this work with pleasure when asked, hoping to help spread important information more widely; nonetheless I have no illusions. My experience has taught me to put very little trust in people who claim to be interested in technical articles and yet cannot or will not read English. It wouldn't be insincere for me to say that these translations are an exercise of intellectual vanity — a way to add a contribution of mine, however negligible, to what the original authors did, so that ten years from now I will be able to say I was there.

I have always dealt with other topics in Computer Science and I am not a security expert. However some of the original authors such as Christian Grothoff, Mathias Wachs and Julian Kirsch definitely are. Their credentials are easy to check.

How to issue a central bank digital currency

[2022 comment: This article dealt with an anonymous CBDC, but the mainstream spin on public media discussions has since moved to reject the anonymity feature. Any non-anonymous Central Bank Digital Currency must be rejected, strongly and completely, at all costs. Non-anonymous CBDCs serve to implement Chinese-style social-credit systems with pervasive surveillance and the inevidable death of any form of personal freedom. No state must have such power, ever.]

David Chaum, Christian Grothoff, Thomas Moser, March 2021.

You can find the original in English here and its translations into multiple languages on the Taler web site.

In early 2022 I helped Dora Scilipoti with her translation Come emettere una moneta digitale di banca centrale (PDF, 700KB) by replying to some questions, but she did almost all the work by herself.

NSA's MORECOWBELL: Knell for DNS

Christian Grothoff, Matthias Wachs, Monika Ermert, Jacob Appelbaum, January 2015.

Here (PDF, 1MB) is my translation.

You can find the original in English here along with the French translation by Ludovic Courtès and the Spanish translation by Hellekin O. Wolf. Ludovic did a particularly good job advertising the article, which was covered at length by Le Monde.

My translation was published by Punto Informatico.

The HACIENDA Program

Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Monika Ermert, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras, Henrik Moltke, Semptember 2014.

Here (PDF, 5MB) is my translation.

The day before GHM 2014 started, in Munich, Christian asked me to translate the article. It was officially presented at the beginning of the event on August 15 2014. If you don't know what this is all about, you really should. You can find the original English version here, along with other translated versions.

Paolo Attivissimo was kind enough to point out a few typos in my translation.

Luca Saiu
Last modified: 2022-12-04