Mustang Daily, October 10, 1997

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/6192/thumbnail.jp

Suffolk Journal, Vol. 62, No. 3, 11/13/2002

https://dc.suffolk.edu/journal/1315/thumbnail.jp

Demonic fictions: cybernetics and postmodernism

Whilst demons are no longer viewed as literal beings, as a metaphor the demon continues to trail ideas about doubt and truth, simulation and reality, into post- Enlightenment culture. This metaphor has been revitalised in a contemporary period that has seen the dominance of the cybernetic paradigm. Cybernetics has produced technologies of simulation, whilst the posthuman (a hybrid construction of the self emerging from cultural theory and technology) perceives the world as part of a circuit of other informational systems. In this thesis, illustrative films and literary fictions posit a connection between cybernetic epistemologies and metaphors of demonic possession, and contextualise these against postmodern thought and its narrative modes. Demons mark a return to pre-Enlightenment models of knowledge, so that demonic (dis)simulation can be seen to describe our encounters with artificial others and virtual worlds that reflect an uncertainly constituted and unstable self. By juxtaposing Renaissance notions of the demon with Donna Haraway's posthuman "cyborg," psychoanalytic demons with the robots of the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), and Descartes' "deceiving demon" with Alan Turing's artificial intelligence test, I propose that the demon proves a fluid, multivalent trope that crosses historical and disciplinary boundaries. The demon raises epistemological questions about the relationship between reality, human psychology, and the representation of both in other modes, particularly narrative fictions. When this framework is applied to seminal science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? [both 1968]), conventional readings of cyborgs as monstrous Others have to be revised. These fictions are engaged with cybernetic technologies with an epistemological rather than ontological concern, and consequently lend themselves to the kind of sceptical doubt about reality that characterises postmodern thought. Contrary to Descartes, who sees foundational truth through the deceptions of his "deceiving demon," later films like Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999) use the motif of cybernetic technologies to highlight the inescapability of the postmodern condition of the hyperreal. Finally, however, literary fictions like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and A.S. Byatťs A Whistling Woman (2002) and Possession (1990) draw attention to their narrative mechanisms through metafiction, and set the creation of literary meaning against computer-generated texts. Consequently, they defy both the determinism of cybernetic sciences, and the postmodern pretence that the "real" is irrecoverably evasive

VTAC: Virtual terrain assisted impact assessment for cyber attacks

Recently, there has been substantial research in the area of network security. Correlation of intrusion detection sensor alerts, vulnerability analysis, and threat projection are all being studied in hopes to relieve the workload that analysts have in monitoring their networks. Having an automated algorithm that can estimate the impact of cyber attacks on a network is another facet network analysts could use in defending their networks and gaining better overall situational awareness. Impact assessment involves determining the effect of a cyber attack on a network. Impact algorithms may consider items such as machine importance, connectivity, user accounts, known attacker capability, and similar machine configurations. Due to the increasing number of attacks, constantly changing vulnerabilities, and unknown attacker behavior, automating impact assessment is a non-trivial task. This work develops a virtual terrain that contains network and machine characteristics relevant to impact assessment. Once populated, this virtual terrain is used to perform impact assessment algorithms. The goal of this work is to investigate and propose an impact assessment system to assist network analysts in prioritizing attacks and analyzing overall network status. VTAC is tested with several scenarios over a network with a variety of configurations. Insights into the results of the scenarios, including how the network topologies and network asset configurations affect the impact analysis are discussed

Distributed Provers and Verifiable Secret Sharing Based on the Discrete Logarithm Problem

Secret sharing allows a secret key to be distributed among n persons, such that k(1 <= k <= n) of these must be present in order to recover it at a later time. This report first shows how this can be done such that every person can verify (by himself) that his part of the secret is correct even though fewer than k persons get no Shannon information about the secret. However, this high level of security is not needed in public key schemes, where the secret key is uniquely determined by a corresponding public key. It is therefore shown how such a secret key (which can be used to sign messages or decipher cipher texts) can be distributed. This scheme has the property, that even though everybody can verify his own part, sets of fewer than k persons cannot sign/decipher unless they could have done so given just the public key. This scheme has the additional property that more than k persons can use the key without compromising their parts of it. Hence, the key can be reused. This technique is further developed to be applied to undeniable signatures. These signatures differ from traditional signatures as they can only be verified with the signer's assistance. The report shows how the signer can authorize agents who can help verifying signatures, but they cannot sign (unless the signer permits it)

Affordances and limitations of algorithmic criticism

Humanities scholars currently have access to unprecedented quantities of machine-readable texts, and, at the same time, the tools and the methods with which we can analyse and visualise these texts are becoming more and more sophisticated. As has been shown in numerous studies, many of the new technical possibilities that emerge from fields such as text mining and natural language processing can have useful applications within literary research. Computational methods can help literary scholars to discover interesting trends and correlations within massive text collections, and they can enable a thoroughly systematic examination of the stylistic properties of literary works. While such computer-assisted forms of reading have proven invaluable for research in the field of literary history, relatively few studies have applied these technologies to expand or to transform the ways in which we can interpret literary texts. Based on a comparative analysis of digital scholarship and traditional scholarship, this thesis critically examines the possibilities and the limitations of a computer-based literary criticism. It argues that quantitative analyses of data about literary techniques can often reveal surprising qualities of works of literature, which can, in turn, lead to new interpretative readings