October 2006 - Report on Cocoa and Forced Child Labor

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.ILRF_ReportOnCocoaAndForcedChildLabor_2006.pdf: 257 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

An optimistic fair e-commerce protocol for large e-goods

Suppose two entities that do not trust each other want to exchange some arbitrary data over a public channel. A fair exchange protocol ensures that both parties get what they want or neither gets anything. In this paper, a fair e-commerce protocol for large e-goods is proposed and implemented. The proposed protocol provides a method for the fair exchange of e-money for e-products, and a method for verifying the contents of the exchanged items. The protocol is optimistic and efficient such that when none of the parties tries to cheat, only three messages are sufficient. In case of disputes, three more messages are needed. Furthermore, the customer remains anonymous after the transaction; thus, no information about the customers' shopping habits can be gathered through the protocol. The implementation results show that the protocol is efficient and secure and that only a small number of cryptographic operations is sufficient

The Cocoa Protocol: Success or Failure?

The use of child labor in the cocoa industry in West Africa is widespread. This report by the ILRF reviews the outcome of a significant policy instrumented drafted in 2001, the “Protocol for the Growing and Processing of Cocoa Beans and their Derivative Products,” and concludes with lessons learned and recommendations for companies, governments, multilateral agencies, and consumers

Still Time to Raise the Bar: The Real Corporate Social Responsibility Report for the Hershey Company

ILRF_HersheyReport2011_0.pdf: 3278 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Broken Hearts: A Review of Industry Efforts to Eliminate Child Labor in the Cocoa Industry

Report by the International Labor Rights Forum analyzing the chocolate industry’s initiatives to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in West Africa’s cocoa sector. Shows how chocolate companies have continued to control these initiatives and, as a result, have allowed child labor to continue

Chocolate Company Scorecard 2009: The Sweet and the Bitter

Major chocolate companies have all made lofty promises, but how many have delivered? Here is an update from the International Labor Rights Forum on who has delivered, and who has not. Companies are rated bitter, semi-sweet, and, sweet according to their commitments to sustainability and improving the livelihoods of cocoa farmers globally

Detection loophole attacks on semi-device-independent quantum and classical protocols

Semi-device-independent quantum protocols realize information tasks - e.g. secure key distribution, random access coding, and randomness generation - in a scenario where no assumption on the internal working of the devices used in the protocol is made, except their dimension. These protocols offer two main advantages: first, their implementation is often less demanding than fully-device-independent protocols. Second, they are more secure than their device-dependent counterparts. Their classical analogous is represented by random access codes, which provide a general framework for describing one-sided classical communication tasks. We discuss conditions under which detection inefficiencies can be exploited by a malicious provider to fake the performance of semi-device-independent quantum and classical protocols - and how to prevent it.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, published versio

Continuous Call for Action to Lift Restraining Order Imposed by Fibres and Fabrics International

The article provides background regarding the alleged labor rights violations at Fibres and Fabrics International (FFI) and the resulting restraining order that has purportedly silenced all of those seeking to improve the situation

2005 Cocoa Protocol Update

This brief report provides an update on child labor on cocoa farms in West Africa and on the status of the chocolate industry’s voluntary initiative to eliminate the worst forms of child labor by July 1, 2005

Certified Universal Gathering in R2R^2 for Oblivious Mobile Robots

We present a unified formal framework for expressing mobile robots models, protocols, and proofs, and devise a protocol design/proof methodology dedicated to mobile robots that takes advantage of this formal framework. As a case study, we present the first formally certified protocol for oblivious mobile robots evolving in a two-dimensional Euclidean space. In more details, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of universal gathering mobile oblivious robots (that is, starting from any initial configuration that is not bivalent, using any number of robots, the robots reach in a finite number of steps the same position, not known beforehand) without relying on a common orientation nor chirality. We give very strong guaranties on the correctness of our algorithm by proving formally that it is correct, using the COQ proof assistant. This result demonstrates both the effectiveness of the approach to obtain new algorithms that use as few assumptions as necessary, and its manageability since the amount of developed code remains human readable.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1506.0160