Technology and the Promise of Decentralization: Origins, Development, Patterns of Arguments

Digitalization has long been associated with the promise of a technology-enabled decentralization of social conditions. Although such expectations have regularly fallen short, their underlying generic vision has proven to be astonishingly stable. This paper strives to trace the origin of the notion of decentralizing socio-economic forms of coordination through technological means—from the do-it-yourself scene of the late 1960s, the computer counterculture of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the debates on cyberspace and Web 2.0 in the 1990s and 2000s to present day ideas of decentralized and distributed forms of production and economic systems. An elaboration of the basic patterns of arguments behind technology-based promises of decentralization and their communicative functions then follows

Controlling passively-quenched single photon detectors by bright light

Single photon detectors based on passively-quenched avalanche photodiodes can be temporarily blinded by relatively bright light, of intensity less than a nanowatt. I describe a bright-light regime suitable for attacking a quantum key distribution system containing such detectors. In this regime, all single photon detectors in the receiver Bob are uniformly blinded by continuous illumination coming from the eavesdropper Eve. When Eve needs a certain detector in Bob to produce a click, she modifies polarization (or other parameter used to encode quantum states) of the light she sends to Bob such that the target detector stops receiving light while the other detector(s) continue to be illuminated. The target detector regains single photon sensitivity and, when Eve modifies the polarization again, produces a single click. Thus, Eve has full control of Bob and can do a successful intercept-resend attack. To check the feasibility of the attack, 3 different models of passively-quenched detectors have been tested. In the experiment, I have simulated the intensity diagrams the detectors would receive in a real quantum key distribution system under attack. Control parameters and side effects are considered. It appears that the attack could be practically possible.Comment: Experimental results from a third detector model added. Minor corrections and edits made. 11 pages, 10 figure

Concepts in quantum state tomography and classical implementation with intense light: a tutorial

A tomographic measurement is a ubiquitous tool for estimating the properties of quantum states, and its application is known as quantum state tomography (QST). The process involves manipulating single photons in a sequence of projective measurements, often to construct a density matrix from which other information can be inferred, and is as laborious as it is complex. Here we unravel the steps of a QST and outline how it may be demonstrated in a fast and simple manner with intense (classical) light. We use scalar beams in a time reversal approach to simulate the outcome of a QST and exploit non-separability in classical vector beams as a means to treat the latter as a “classically entangled” state for illustrating QSTs directly. We provide a complete do-it-yourself resource for the practical implementation of this approach, complete with tutorial video, which we hope will facilitate the introduction of this core quantum tool into teaching and research laboratories alike. Our work highlights the value of using intense classical light as a means to study quantum systems and in the process provides a tutorial on the fundamentals of QSTs

Controlling passively-quenched single photon detectors by bright light

Single photon detectors based on passively-quenched avalanche photodiodes can be temporarily blinded by relatively bright light, of intensity less than a nanowatt. I describe a bright-light regime suitable for attacking a quantum key distribution system containing such detectors. In this regime, all single photon detectors in the receiver Bob are uniformly blinded by continuous illumination coming from the eavesdropper Eve. When Eve needs a certain detector in Bob to produce a click, she modifies polarization (or other parameter used to encode quantum states) of the light she sends to Bob such that the target detector stops receiving light while the other detector(s) continue to be illuminated. The target detector regains single photon sensitivity and, when Eve modifies the polarization again, produces a single click. Thus, Eve has full control of Bob and can do a successful intercept-resend attack. To check the feasibility of the attack, 3 different models of passively-quenched detectors have been tested. In the experiment, I have simulated the intensity diagrams the detectors would receive in a real quantum key distribution system under attack. Control parameters and side effects are considered. It appears that the attack could be practically possible.Comment: Experimental results from a third detector model added. Minor corrections and edits made. 11 pages, 10 figure

SmartMirror: A Glance into the Future

In todays society, information is available to us at a glance through our phones, our laptops, our desktops, and more. But an extra level of interaction is required in order to access the information. As technology grows, technology should grow further and further away from the traditional style of interaction with devices. In the past, information was relayed through paper, then through computers, and in todays day and age, through our phones and multiple other mediums. Technology should become more integrated into our lives - more seamless and more invisible. We hope to push the envelope further, into the future. We propose a new simple way of connecting with your morning newspaper. We present our idea, the SmartMirror, information at a glance. Our system aims to deliver your information quickly and comfortably, with a new modern aesthetic. While modern appliances require input through modules such as keyboards or touch screen, we hope to follow a model that can function purely on voice and gesture. We seek to deliver your information during your morning routine and throughout the day, when taking out your phone is not always possible. This will cater to a larger audience base, as the average consumer nowadays hopes to accomplish tasks with minimal active interaction with their adopted technology. This idea has many future applications, such as integration with new virtual or augmented reality devices, or simplifying consumer personal media sources

Survey on E-commerce and its applications

Electronic Commerce, usually is called e-commerce, conducts business on-line. It is electronic forms of communication that permits the exchange of sale information related to goods and services purchasing between buyers and sellers with digital cash and via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). The application of e-commerce is very important because that is the only way that how buyers and on-line business stores make the deals without seeing and talking each other. The applications should be very friendly (interface with nice layout and easily accepted by the potential buyers), easy to access and use (almost without to learn any computer and network skills), showing all the necessary and related information to all the viewers (no any questions could not be found during purchasing), and trusted by real buyers (secure without the personal information leaking to third party especially social secure number and financial information). The well know on-line solutions are from IBM’s WebSphere Commerce Suite, Microsoft Corp’s Site Server Commerce Edition, Yahoo’s Yahoo Store, and BroadVision’s One-to-One Commerce, and all of them use web secure protocols such as S-HTTP (Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol), SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), or SEPP (Secure Electronic Payment Protocol). E-commerce has a lot of benefits if it compares with long time traditional business - less expense, space saving, spread fast, saving shopping time, easy comparison, almost no sales tax, etc.. With Internet and personal computer growing dramatically in the last decade, we already saw the huge on-line business obviously. In the next few years along with technological development and innovation of computer, Internet, and any other related factors, the potential e-commerce market will grow to billion and billion dollars business worldwide. E-commerce is changing people’s daily life and their shopping habitations

When Random Sampling Preserves Privacy

Abstract. Many organizations such as the U.S. Census publicly release samples of data that they collect about private citizens. These datasets are first anonymized using various techniques and then a small sample is released so as to enable “do-it-yourself ” calculations. This paper investigates the privacy of the second step of this process: sampling. We observe that rare values – values that occur with low frequency in the table – can be problematic from a privacy perspective. To our knowledge, this is the first work that quantitatively examines the relationship between the number of rare values in a table and the privacy in a released random sample. If we require ɛ-privacy (where the larger ɛ is, the worse the privacy guarantee) with probability at least 1 − δ, we say that 1 a value is rare if it occurs in at most Õ ( ) rows of the table (ignoring log ɛ factors). If there are no rare values, then we establish a direct connection between sample size that is safe to release and privacy. Specifically, if we select each row of the table with probability at most ɛ then the sample is O(ɛ)-private with high probability. In the case that there are t rare values, then the sample is Õ(ɛδ/t)-private with probability at least 1 − δ.

Codifying the hacker film : elements of a genre. From The Conversation to Mr. Robot

Introduction to subject area followed by codification system and an iconography

An IoT Concept of the Small Virtual Power Plant Based on Arduino Platform and MQTT Protocol

In this paper, a new IoT concept of the small virtual power plant is proposed. The main principle is the smart control of the high-voltage power lines by the low-cost and low-voltage Arduino platform with Mosquitto open-source message broker that implements the secure TCP connection based on MQTT IoT protocol using specific topics, passwords, and SSL cryptography. The C# Windows form app and Arduino sketch were developed with MQTT publisher and subscriber, respectively. The hardware simulation of the proposed concept is realized using the solar panel (12.5 V, 180 mA), two relays SRD-05VDC-SL-C, buck (DC/DC YEC SD200) and buck/boost (DC/DC Tusotek TS-IPS-VO2) converters, and two small power banks (first one is to supply the consumption\ud part simulated by Arduino Uno with LED, second one is to supply the smart power distribution block). The hardware was tested successfully in three regimes: the charge of battery by the solar panel, the power supply of the Arduino Uno board with LED using the power bank or solar panel. The proposed infrastructure can be directly applied to the power off-grid solutions of the smart houses if gridtie inverter is added as well as generation and storage parts are more powerful