Sunday, March 29, 2020


Something for my Computer Security students to play with in their spare time.
Safely Explore The Dark Web With This FREE Guide
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Tuning up my lectures.
Towards an Insightful Computer Security Seminar
In this paper we describe our experience in designing and evaluating our graduate level computer security seminar course. In particular, our seminar is designed with two goals in mind. First, to instill critical thinking by teaching graduate students how to read, review and present scientific literature. Second, to learn about the state-of-the-art in computer security and privacy research by reviewing proceedings from one of the top four security and privacy conferences including IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland S&P), USENIX Security, Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) and ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). The course entails each student to i) choose a specific technical session from the most recent conference, ii) review and present three papers from the chosen session and iii) analyze the relationship between the chosen papers from the session. To evaluate the course, we designed a set of questions to understand the motivation and decisions behind the students’ choices as well as to evaluate and improve the quality of the course. Our key insights from the evaluation are the following: The three most popular topics of interest were Privacy, Web Security and Authentication, ii) 33% of the students chose the sessions based on the title of papers and iii) when providing an encouraging environment, students enjoy and engage in discussions.




What the pros are thinking.
Data Protection and Privacy Officer Priorities 2020 Report
A survey of 471 data protection and privacy officers provides valuable insights into their challenges and priorities for 2020




Will we follow China’s lead?
The State and Digital Society in China: Big Brother Xi is Watching You!
There is no question that China is ahead of many developed countries in the digitalization of both its society and surveillance systems. It is also clear that the new technologies made possible by this digitalization — the widespread use of smart ID cards, the Great Firewall, the accumulation of Big Data, the social credit system (SCS) and facial recognition — have enhanced the capacity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to rule China, maintain control over society and stay in power indefinitely. While these are not the only systems in place to manage and control Chinese citizens and this is not their sole purpose, these developments have been rightly seen as part of an ambitious Orwellian project to micromanage and microcontrol every aspect of Chinese society. To better comprehend the significance of this new phenomenon, this paper employs Michel Foucault’s “Panopticon” metaphor, the perfect mean of surveillance and discipline as well as an “apparatus of power.” Yet, these new technologies have their own limits. In real life there is no perfect Panopticon as no society, even the most controlled one, is a sealed prison. Censorship on the Web is erratic and the full implementation of the SCS is likely to be postponed beyond 2020 for both technical and political reasons, as more Chinese citizens have raised concerns about unchecked data collection and privacy breaches. As a result, China is probably heading toward a somewhat fragmented digitalized society and surveillance system that is more repressive in some localities and more flexible in others, as is the case with the Chinese bureaucracy in general.


(Related)
China and Huawei propose reinvention of the internet
China has suggested a radical change in the way the Internet works for the UN, in a proposal that claims to allow cutting-edge technologies such as holograms and autonomous cars, but which critics say will also drive authoritarianism in the architecture that underpins the web.
the proposal  has raised concerns among western countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States, who believe the system would divide the global internet and give state-run Internet service providers granular control over the use of the Internet by citizens. It has won the support of Russia, and potentially of Saudi Arabia, according to Western ITU representatives.




Software architecture? If my design specification leads to unintended consequences, is the AI to blame?
Law and software agents: Are they “Agents” by the way?
Using intelligent software agents in the world of e-commerce may give rise to many difficulties especially with regard to the validity of agent-based contracts and the attribution of liability for the actions of such agents. This paper thus critically examines the main approaches that have been advanced to deal with software agents, and proposes the gradual approach as a way of overcoming the difficulties of such agents by adopting different standards of responsibility depending whether the action is done autonomously by an unattended software, or whether it is done automatically by an attended software. Throughout this paper, it is argued that the introduction of “one size” regulation without sufficient consideration of the nature of software agents or the environments in which they communicate might lead to a divorce between the legal theory and technological practice. It is also concluded that it is incorrect to deal with software agents as if they were either legal persons or nothing without in any way accounting for the fact that there are various kinds of such agents endowed with different levels of autonomy, mobility, intelligence, and sophistication. However, this paper is not intended to provide the final answer to all problematic questions posed by the emergence of intelligent software agents, but is designed to provide some kind of temporary relief until such agents reach a more reliable and autonomous level whereby law begins to regard them, rather than their users, as the source of the relevant action.




Anything to get rid of my students.
Essential Tips for a Winning Resume
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