Socially-Aware Distributed Hash Tables for Decentralized Online Social Networks

Many decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have been proposed due to an increase in awareness related to privacy and scalability issues in centralized social networks. Such decentralized networks transfer processing and storage functionalities from the service providers towards the end users. DOSNs require individualistic implementation for services, (i.e., search, information dissemination, storage, and publish/subscribe). However, many of these services mostly perform social queries, where OSN users are interested in accessing information of their friends. In our work, we design a socially-aware distributed hash table (DHTs) for efficient implementation of DOSNs. In particular, we propose a gossip-based algorithm to place users in a DHT, while maximizing the social awareness among them. Through a set of experiments, we show that our approach reduces the lookup latency by almost 30% and improves the reliability of the communication by nearly 10% via trusted contacts.Comment: 10 pages, p2p 2015 conferenc

Globus Online Security Review

This review is provided as best effort for the benefit of the community. It is provided “as-is” with no warranty expressed or implied. All opinions are those of the author and should not be taken to reflect opinions of any other entity.This document represents a cybersecurity risk assessment of the Globus Online File Transfer service and associated Website service. It provides a set of concerns related to cybersecurity risk and a set of recommendations to mitigate those concerns and risk. It also provides an assessment of the cybersecurity-specific documentation provided by the Globus Project for the services

The experience of positioning the university at the educational services market

The relevance of the problem under study is based on the necessity to find the most productive method of positioning a higher educational organization at the educational services market within the conditions of transfer from the centrally planned economy to a market economy and changing of the thinking format of the young generation. The purpose of the article is to develop a set of marketing actions for positioning a higher educational organization at the educational services market and its assessment. The lead method of studying this problem is modeling which provides the possibility to consider the problem as a process of results-oriented and well-informed managing of the process of development of a university as an educational system. The article contains a set of marketing actions aimed at positioning the university at the educational services market using the organization’s own internal resources and consisting of the interconnected components, such as motivational-target, content-processing and resultassessing; their specific features are described and the algorithm of implementing this set is developed. The developed and assessed system is intended for promotion of the university as a brand at the educational services market, for strengthening and reinforcing its competitive positions and increasing the university’s attractiveness for future students. The materials of the article can be useful for education specialists oriented towards marketing of educational services, for teachers who deliver a course of lectures in disciplines related to pedagogical marketing or marketing of educational services. © 2016 Dorozhkin et al

The Single Euro Payments Area

The objective of the pan-European regulatory and self-regulatory work related to the creation of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) is to improve the efficiency of low-value payments (i.e. retail payments) by establishing a common legal framework and the application of standards. Among the elements of the SEPA project, our focus will be on schemes, in particular the SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme (SCT) already essentially implemented in the EU and Hungary, which we will discuss in detail, stressing the fact that SEPA is not a concrete payments system, but rather a set of procedural and legal rules regulating payment methods, in addition to the entire infrastructure supporting the clearing and settlement of transactions. In the longer term, the broad implementation of the schemes can potentially lead to a substantial reduction in costs for banks, which may ultimately be passed on to customers. We will present the practical experience gained in connection with the Credit Transfer Scheme, in light of the information compiled in the course of the central bank’s informative meetings conducted at the affected Hungarian banks. Currently, 12 banks now apply the Credit Transfer Scheme in Hungary. Due to the lack of a domestic euro infrastructure, domestic euro payments are carried out through international channels. Consequently, a much larger portion of euro transfers made by Hungarian banks have already shifted to the new SEPA format than what has been characteristic of retail payments within the euro area thus far. This phenomenon stems from the fact that initially, the SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme offered a competitive alternative most simply from the perspective of cross-border transaction fees.SEPA, SEPA payment schemes, SEPA payment methods, SEPA Credit Transfer Scheme, Payment Services Directive, PSD.

How Kenya has Implemented and Adjusted to the Changes in International Transfer Pricing Regulations: 1920-2016

transfer pricing; cross-border taxation; Kenya; Africa; tax avoidance; base erosion and profit shifting.A large proportion of international trade in goods and services is conducted between what are known technically as related parties. In practice, most of this trade is between different companies forming part of the same transnational corporate grouping. This is typically highly integrated in economic and financial terms, while legally appearing as a set of separate companies incorporated in a wide range of countries. For accounting, customs and general tax purposes, any two related companies engaging in cross-border transactions need to decide the price that they will set for the goods and services they exchange – ideally they will not make a profit off each other, as would be the case with unrelated companies. Inevitably, however, these are not market prices but administered prices. The process of setting these prices is known as transfer pricing (TP). In principle there is a standard mechanism, agreed internationally, to guide transfer pricing – the arm’s length principle. This means that cross-border transactions between related parties should be booked at the prices that would have applied had these been open competitive market transactions between unrelated parties (arm’s length transactions). It can be extremely difficult – and sometimes impossible – for revenue authorities to apply the arm’s length principle in daily operations. This paper analyses Kenya’s experience of trying to deal with transfer pricing, and looks at difficulties facing developing and middle-income countries in the application of transfer pricing rules. It discusses the course Kenya has taken in introducing TP laws, regulations, policies and administrative training in order to audit TP transactions effectively. Section 1 sets out the background to Kenya, its position in the African continent and globally, explaining why it has been selected as a case study. Section 2 sets out the historical experience of Kenya, both in developing its TP laws, regulations and procedures, as well as building capacity of its staff on issues of transfer pricing. Sections 3 and 4 reflect on the Kenyan position as set out in Section 2, and the appropriateness of some of the changes being proposed internationally by Actions 8-10 and 13 of the BEPS project of the G20/OECD. This paper attempts to unpack the issues surrounding TP in a developing country like Kenya, and to reflect on what is really needed in the BEPS process to make it usable in developing countries. The paper concludes by stating that the issues being raised in TP have been only partially resolved through improved capacity, regulations and policy. The OECD BEPS process does not seem to resolve problems faced by countries like Kenya, but instead foists a set of complex and unwieldy rules on Kenya and other developing and middle-income countries.Department for International DevelopmentBill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

AMBIT RESTful web services: an implementation of the OpenTox application programming interface

The AMBIT web services package is one of the several existing independent implementations of the OpenTox Application Programming Interface and is built according to the principles of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. The Open Source Predictive Toxicology Framework, developed by the partners in the EC FP7 OpenTox project, aims at providing a unified access to toxicity data and predictive models, as well as validation procedures. This is achieved by i) an information model, based on a common OWL-DL ontology ii) links to related ontologies; iii) data and algorithms, available through a standardized REST web services interface, where every compound, data set or predictive method has a unique web address, used to retrieve its Resource Description Framework (RDF) representation, or initiate the associated calculations

BioSWR - Semantic Web services Registry for Bioinformatics

Article About the Authors Metrics Comments Related Content Abstract Introduction Functionality Implementation Discussion Acknowledgments Author Contributions References Reader Comments (0) Figures Abstract Despite of the variety of available Web services registries specially aimed at Life Sciences, their scope is usually restricted to a limited set of well-defined types of services. While dedicated registries are generally tied to a particular format, general-purpose ones are more adherent to standards and usually rely on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL). Although WSDL is quite flexible to support common Web services types, its lack of semantic expressiveness led to various initiatives to describe Web services via ontology languages. Nevertheless, WSDL 2.0 descriptions gained a standard representation based on Web Ontology Language (OWL). BioSWR is a novel Web services registry that provides standard Resource Description Framework (RDF) based Web services descriptions along with the traditional WSDL based ones. The registry provides Web-based interface for Web services registration, querying and annotation, and is also accessible programmatically via Representational State Transfer (REST) API or using a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language. BioSWR server is located at http://inb.bsc.es/BioSWR/and its code is available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/bioswr/​under the LGPL license

Transfer Pricing: A Case Study on PT XX Policy in Related Party Transactions

Transfer pricing has becoming a great fear among companies in Indonesia, especially when Indonesian Tax Office launched its significant initiatives back in 2009 / 2010, where it required companies which submitted their annual tax return to be attached with transfer pricing documentation for company’s related party transactions. Though it has be to admitted that related party transactions mostly used by multinational companies to set up the profit level at the maximum by utilizing different tax regimes of the countries where the companies domiciles. Focus of this final project are maintained on major related party transactions, which are: 1) sales, 2) management and technical assistance fee, 3) charge related to shared services performed by related party domiciled in Malaysia. This is in accordance with tax regulation recently issued in 2011, stating that only transactions > IDR10 billion that required transfer pricing analysis / documentation.The first result of the analysis showed that it will be financially advantageous for the Company to increase the sales price which will affect decrease in global tax expense. However, given the complexities of changing the sales contract with the shareholder, tax implication for Japan business unit, it is advised that the Company maintain its sales price at the current level. The second result is to recommend the Company to revise its transfer pricing method for its MTA fee to a cost based / cost plus method as it would give better rationale of the transaction for Indonesia Tax Office. The third result is to deny the proposal of setting up the shared service organization in Malaysia for Indonesia business unit as it is financially inefficient and making further complexity on the tax administration in Indonesia. Keywords: transfer price, related party transactions, transfer pricing, arm’s length transactio

Transfer Pricing: a Case Study on PT XX Policy in Related Party Transactions

Transfer pricing has becoming a great fear among companies in Indonesia, especially when Indonesian Tax Office launched its significant initiatives back in 2009 / 2010, where it required companies which submitted their annual tax return to be attached with transfer pricing documentation for company's related party transactions. Though it has be to admitted that related party transactions mostly used by multinational companies to set up the profit level at the maximum by utilizing different tax regimes of the countries where the companies domiciles. Focus of this final project are maintained on major related party transactions, which are: 1) sales, 2) management and technical assistance fee, 3) charge related to shared services performed by related party domiciled in Malaysia. This is in accordance with tax regulation recently issued in 2011, stating that only transactions > IDR10 billion that required transfer pricing analysis / documentation.The first result of the analysis showed that it will be financially advantageous for the Company to increase the sales price which will affect decrease in global tax expense. However, given the complexities of changing the sales contract with the shareholder, tax implication for Japan business unit, it is advised that the Company maintain its sales price at the current level. The second result is to recommend the Company to revise its transfer pricing method for its MTA fee to a cost based / cost plus method as it would give better rationale of the transaction for Indonesia Tax Office. The third result is to deny the proposal of setting up the shared service organization in Malaysia for Indonesia business unit as it is financially inefficient and making further complexity on the tax administration in Indonesia