Privacy-preserving targeted advertising scheme for IPTV using the cloud

In this paper, we present a privacy-preserving scheme for targeted advertising via the Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). The scheme uses a communication model involving a collection of viewers/subscribers, a content provider (IPTV), an advertiser, and a cloud server. To provide high quality directed advertising service, the advertiser can utilize not only demographic information of subscribers, but also their watching habits. The latter includes watching history, preferences for IPTV content and watching rate, which are published on the cloud server periodically (e.g. weekly) along with anonymized demographics. Since the published data may leak sensitive information about subscribers, it is safeguarded using cryptographic techniques in addition to the anonymization of demographics. The techniques used by the advertiser, which can be manifested in its queries to the cloud, are considered (trade) secrets and therefore are protected as well. The cloud is oblivious to the published data, the queries of the advertiser as well as its own responses to these queries. Only a legitimate advertiser, endorsed with a so-called {\em trapdoor} by the IPTV, can query the cloud and utilize the query results. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated with experiments, which show that the scheme is suitable for practical usage

Net Neutrality

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Chris Marsden maneuvers through the hype articulated by Netwrok Neutrality advocates and opponents. He offers a clear-headed analysis of the high stakes in this debate about the Internet's future, and fearlessly refutes the misinformation and misconceptions that about' Professor Rob Freiden, Penn State University Net Neutrality is a very heated and contested policy principle regarding access for content providers to the Internet end-user, and potential discrimination in that access where the end-user's ISP (or another ISP) blocks that access in part or whole. The suggestion has been that the problem can be resolved by either introducing greater competition, or closely policing conditions for vertically integrated service, such as VOIP. However, that is not the whole story, and ISPs as a whole have incentives to discriminate between content for matters such as network management of spam, to secure and maintain customer experience at current levels, and for economic benefit from new Quality of Service standards. This includes offering a ‘priority lane' on the network for premium content types such as video and voice service. The author considers market developments and policy responses in Europe and the United States, draws conclusions and proposes regulatory recommendations

Mapping Digital Media: Singapore

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.The city-state of Singapore, with its five million people, has fully embraced the technology and opportunities presented by digitization. Nearly nine out of ten households have broadband access. Mobile phone penetration is 150 percent (most are smartphones), and there are 340 TV and 46 local and foreign radio channels.However, the government—and the Singaporean people—are still highly sensitive to the belief that the stability of their multi-ethnic population (Chinese, Malays, Indians, and Eurasians) is fragile, stoked by the memory of two bloody race and religious clashes in the 1950s and 1960s. This has long shaped the role of the media as non-adversarial.So individuals, groups, and media professionals operate within a state-sanctioned sphere and observe what are called "OB markers" ("out of bounds" lines used in sports to denote an area beyond which play is not allowed). These are the boundaries of acceptable and permissible political public discussion, which opposition politicians view as a form of self-censorship. The government has recently acknowledged openly that those markers are shifting.Despite the advances that have been made in recent years, there is a need for further steps to encourage diversity in content across all media. In addition, though Singapore has escaped the decline in professional standards that has accompanied media liberalization in many other countries, more needs to be done to retain talent and to raise the standards and skills of the city-state's 70,000 media professionals, particularly as demand increases for new forms of content creation and distribution

Mapping Digital Media: Spain

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.Since 2005, Spain has designed and implemented aggressive digitization policies that secured the switchoff of analog television in 2010, and developed the digital terrestrial television (DTT) market to saturation point. As a result, cable and satellite subscription services have experienced some decline since 2008. The rapid rise of free-to-air (FTA) digital television has not, however, been replicated in radio, where take-up of the assigned digital audio broadcasting (DAB) standard has been marginal, with little promise of imminent significant growth. This is attributed to a policy focus on digital television, the absence of a digital radio publicity campaign and a switch-off deadline, and the cost of upgrading to digital radio faced by consumers and broadcasters alike.The roll-out of broadband infrastructure has been successful, accounting for 99 percent of all fixed-line connections in 2010. But the consumers' cost of connection remains one of the highest in the European Union (EU), and an enduring digital divide is reflected in the fact that fixed-line internet connections reached only 22 percent of households in 2010.The report also calls for the setting up of an independent regulatory authority on audiovisual matters; the effective implementation of self-regulatory codes concerning media and children; a comprehensive policy program involving concerted action by state institutions, universities, and journalism associations/unions to tackle problems of journalists' pay and conditions; the effective implementation of ethical codes and principles to challenge the abusive dominance of opinion and ideological polarization in the media; the setting up by the Government of a radiocommunications agency to handle radio spectrum policy;the delegation of DTT licensing to this radiocommunications agency; improved publicity for public tenders through the approval of a law on transparency and citizens' access to public information; the promotion of media literacy in school curricula; and finally, the protection of RTVE's political and financing independence to ensure the provision of non-partisan and good-quality journalism to Spanish society

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse