628 research outputs found
Mapping the Focal Points of WordPress: A Software and Critical Code Analysis
Programming languages or code can be examined through numerous analytical lenses. This project is a critical analysis of WordPress, a prevalent web content management system, applying four modes of inquiry. The project draws on theoretical perspectives and areas of study in media, software, platforms, code, language, and power structures. The applied research is based on Critical Code Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that holds the potential as a theoretical lens and methodological toolkit to understand computational code beyond its function. The project begins with a critical code analysis of WordPress, examining its origins and source code and mapping selected vulnerabilities. An examination of the influence of digital and computational thinking follows this. The work also explores the intersection of code patching and vulnerability management and how code shapes our sense of control, trust, and empathy, ultimately arguing that a rhetorical-cultural lens can be used to better understand code\u27s controlling influence. Recurring themes throughout these analyses and observations are the connections to power and vulnerability in WordPress\u27 code and how cultural, processual, rhetorical, and ethical implications can be expressed through its code, creating a particular worldview. Code\u27s emergent properties help illustrate how human values and practices (e.g., empathy, aesthetics, language, and trust) become encoded in software design and how people perceive the software through its worldview. These connected analyses reveal cultural, processual, and vulnerability focal points and the influence these entanglements have concerning WordPress as code, software, and platform. WordPress is a complex sociotechnical platform worthy of further study, as is the interdisciplinary merging of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to critically examine code. Ultimately, this project helps further enrich the field by introducing focal points in code, examining sociocultural phenomena within the code, and offering techniques to apply critical code methods
The Public Performance Of Sanctions In Insolvency Cases: The Dark, Humiliating, And Ridiculous Side Of The Law Of Debt In The Italian Experience. A Historical Overview Of Shaming Practices
This study provides a diachronic comparative overview of how the law of debt has been applied by certain institutions in Italy. Specifically, it offers historical and comparative insights into the public performance of sanctions for insolvency through shaming and customary practices in Roman Imperial Law, in the Middle Ages, and in later periods.
The first part of the essay focuses on the Roman bonorum cessio culo nudo super lapidem and on the medieval customary institution called pietra della vergogna (stone of shame), which originates from the Roman model.
The second part of the essay analyzes the social function of the zecca and the pittima Veneziana during the Republic of Venice, and of the practice of lu soldate a castighe (no translation is possible).
The author uses a functionalist approach to apply some arguments and concepts from the current context to this historical analysis of ancient institutions that we would now consider ridiculous.
The article shows that the customary norms that play a crucial regulatory role in online interactions today can also be applied to the public square in the past. One of these tools is shaming. As is the case in contemporary online settings, in the public square in historic periods, shaming practices were used to enforce the rules of civility in a given community. Such practices can be seen as virtuous when they are intended for use as a tool to pursue positive change in forces entrenched in the culture, and thus to address social wrongs considered outside the reach of the law, or to address human rights abuses
Towards trustworthy computing on untrustworthy hardware
Historically, hardware was thought to be inherently secure and trusted due to its
obscurity and the isolated nature of its design and manufacturing. In the last two
decades, however, hardware trust and security have emerged as pressing issues.
Modern day hardware is surrounded by threats manifested mainly in undesired
modifications by untrusted parties in its supply chain, unauthorized and pirated
selling, injected faults, and system and microarchitectural level attacks. These threats,
if realized, are expected to push hardware to abnormal and unexpected behaviour
causing real-life damage and significantly undermining our trust in the electronic and
computing systems we use in our daily lives and in safety critical applications. A
large number of detective and preventive countermeasures have been proposed in
literature. It is a fact, however, that our knowledge of potential consequences to
real-life threats to hardware trust is lacking given the limited number of real-life
reports and the plethora of ways in which hardware trust could be undermined. With
this in mind, run-time monitoring of hardware combined with active mitigation of
attacks, referred to as trustworthy computing on untrustworthy hardware, is proposed
as the last line of defence. This last line of defence allows us to face the issue of live
hardware mistrust rather than turning a blind eye to it or being helpless once it occurs.
This thesis proposes three different frameworks towards trustworthy computing
on untrustworthy hardware. The presented frameworks are adaptable to different
applications, independent of the design of the monitored elements, based on
autonomous security elements, and are computationally lightweight. The first
framework is concerned with explicit violations and breaches of trust at run-time,
with an untrustworthy on-chip communication interconnect presented as a potential
offender. The framework is based on the guiding principles of component guarding,
data tagging, and event verification. The second framework targets hardware elements
with inherently variable and unpredictable operational latency and proposes a
machine-learning based characterization of these latencies to infer undesired latency
extensions or denial of service attacks. The framework is implemented on a DDR3
DRAM after showing its vulnerability to obscured latency extension attacks. The
third framework studies the possibility of the deployment of untrustworthy hardware
elements in the analog front end, and the consequent integrity issues that might arise
at the analog-digital boundary of system on chips. The framework uses machine
learning methods and the unique temporal and arithmetic features of signals at this
boundary to monitor their integrity and assess their trust level
Dionysus against the Crucified: Nietzsche, Sovereignty, and the Power of Nihilism
Is international law nihilistic? Being produced from nihilism and driven by it? And are even we nihilistic â we Critical scholars who stand beyond the end of history? Not a break from the past but a continuation?
That is the gambit of this thesis: to explore the nihilistic inner life of international law, through the root and stem of its creation and development, right up until the contemporary movement towards Critical approaches to the discipline. Through the embracing scope of nihilism, I argue that each of these turns and evolutions can be tracked back to a single logic.
The first Volume of this thesis is dedicated to the theorisation of nihilism and how it could be existentially connected to international law. Using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, I link nihilism to what I term the âcivilising psychosisâ: a process (or sickness) by which the production of the human and the state is co-constitutive. Through this bond, it becomes possible to argue that the structures of nihilism, and the civilising psychosis, frame and condition the development of legal concepts.
In Volume II, I take the civilising psychosis and apply it to the creation of the European global order of sovereign states. Here I suggest that transformations within sovereignty doctrine have been devices of managing and rearticulating the civilising psychosis. Applying literary techniques, this Volume takes the form of a âA play in three actsâ. Within it, I follow the civilising psychosis, first, in the domestic generation of sovereignty, through to the use of sovereignty in 19th century imperialism, before bringing the civilising excesses of this latter period into confrontation with Critical scholarship. Through the violence of this encounter, I intend to begat recognition and disorientation. Rather than marking a departure from the civilising psychosis, such scholarships could be its most visceral manifestation
Security Technologies and Methods for Advanced Cyber Threat Intelligence, Detection and Mitigation
The rapid growth of the Internet interconnectivity and complexity of communication systems has led us to a significant growth of cyberattacks globally often with severe and disastrous consequences. The swift development of more innovative and effective (cyber)security solutions and approaches are vital which can detect, mitigate and prevent from these serious consequences. Cybersecurity is gaining momentum and is scaling up in very many areas. This book builds on the experience of the Cyber-Trust EU projectâs methods, use cases, technology development, testing and validation and extends into a broader science, lead IT industry market and applied research with practical cases. It offers new perspectives on advanced (cyber) security innovation (eco) systems covering key different perspectives. The book provides insights on new security technologies and methods for advanced cyber threat intelligence, detection and mitigation. We cover topics such as cyber-security and AI, cyber-threat intelligence, digital forensics, moving target defense, intrusion detection systems, post-quantum security, privacy and data protection, security visualization, smart contracts security, software security, blockchain, security architectures, system and data integrity, trust management systems, distributed systems security, dynamic risk management, privacy and ethics
The Forgetting of Fire: An Archaeology of Technics
This dissertation applies the methods of Bachelard and Foucault to key moments in the development of science. By analyzing the attitudes of four figures from four different centuries, it shows how epistemic attitudes have shifted from a participation in non-human, natural realities to a construction of human-centred technologies. The idea of an epistemic attitude is situated in reference to Foucaultâs concept of the episteme and his method of archaeology; an attitude is the institutionally-situated and personally-enacted comportment of an epistemic agent toward an object of knowledge. This line of thought is pursued under the theme of elemental fire, which begins as a substance for early alchemical knowledge and ends up as a quantifiable branch of functions in technics. We call the attitude of Paracelsus, an alchemist of the sixteenth century, âparticipation,â which sheds light on the intimate goal of his alchemical practice. In the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle inaugurates the evolution of technics with the attitude of instrumentalization. Building off this, Lavoisier participates in the development of technics through his effort to construct the countable, using measuring instruments and chemical techniques. This attitude of accounting, and neither his theory of oxygen nor his basic observations in the laboratory, determines his decisive role in the development of chemistry. Finally, we discuss the attitude of employment as we find it in Sadi Carnot and the engineers of the steam engine, watching as fire for these epistemic agents becomes nothing but an employed instant of combustion
Manifestation: masculinity on the female body in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
At the end of Michael Shapiroâs highly influential Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (1996) was an appendix comprising a âChronological list of Plays with Heroines in Male Disguiseâ from 1570-1642 (221). This thesis focuses on the plays written in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in order to establish the development of a subgenre of female to male crossdressing and examines the expectations for female crossdressing characters and gender expression. Organized by authorial groupings and then an overview of outlying plays, the thesis seeks to contextualize heroine crossdressing as a trope contributed to by a substantial cohort of playwrights. Although Shakespearean drama is discussed first, this is not to prioritize his work but rather seeks to demonstrate how conservative his use of such tropes is in comparison with later playwrights. His plays provide evidence of an Elizabethan adherence to structure and limitations for female crossdressers that are later developed. Thomas Heywoodâs plays exemplify the growing attention and interest in heroine crossdressing. He features a character who is minor and rudimentary; another who is derivative but reflects newly popularized archetypes; while his most detailed is an epic character who serves as the main protagonist of her narrative. Plays by Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and John Webster are at the heart of the new genre and testify to an established public desire for female crossdressing characters onstage, while their characters begin to evolve the trope and introduce diverse new traits, relationship arcs, and resolutions. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, in collaboration with Phillip Massinger, abandon the restrictions of Elizabethan standards in exchange for increasingly transgressive innovations. Over the course of eight plays, they become masters in creating crossdressing heroines. Finally, an evaluation of individual dramas written by several authors establishes how the creation, growth, and scope of such heroine crossdressers reveals evolving expectations for gendered performances in early modern England
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