Corporate Codes of Conduct: Is Common Environmental Content Feasible?

In a developing country context, a policy to promote adoption of common environmental content for corporate codes of conduct (COCs) aspires to meaningful results on two fronts. First, adherence to COC provisions should offer economic benefits that exceed the costs of compliance; i.e., companies must receive a price premium, market expansion, efficiency gains, subsidized technical assistance, or some combination of these benefits in return for meeting the requirements. Second, compliance should produce significant improvements in environmental outcomes; i.e., the code must impose real requirements, and monitoring and enforcement must offer sufficient incentives to prevent evasion. With those goals in mind, we explore options for establishing common environmental content in voluntary COCs. Because the benefits of a COC rest on its ability to signal information, we ground our analysis in a review of experiences with a broad range of voluntary (and involuntary) information-based programs: not only existing corporate COCs, but also the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) family of standards, ecolabels, and information disclosure programs. We find some important tradeoffs between harmonization, applicability, feasibility, and efficacy.corporate social responsibility, codes of conduct, environmental management

A Game of \u3cem\u3eKatso\u3c/em\u3e and Mouse: Current Theories for Getting Forensic Analysis Evidence Past the Confrontation Clause

The Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause ensures that an “accused” in a “criminal prosecution[]” has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him [.]” Although perhaps a simple concept, defining the scope of confrontation rights has proved extremely difficult. The law has had particular difficulty scoping confrontation rights in forensic analysis cases, such as those where the prosecution seeks to utilize a laboratory report of DNA, blood alcohol content, narcotics, or other “CSI” type analysis. In this connection, Justice Gorsuch recently authored an opinion dissenting from denial of certiorari in Stuart v. Alabama, in which he recognized the “decisive role” of forensic evidence in modern criminal trials, but decried the lack of clarity in this area of law. The purpose of this Article is to analyze modern Confrontation Clause and forensic analysis jurisprudence, and to present six theories or gateways through which to argue that forensic analysis evidence is admissible consistent with the Clause. The theories presented in this Article are not intended to be employed individually, but rather combined to diminish the possibility that the Confrontation Clause will necessitate exclusion. To aid in the presentation of these theories, the Article will discuss the recent illustrative cases of U.S. v. Katso and Stuart v. Alabama, and explore how local stakeholders might utilize Katso-like reasoning to support their positions

Oblivion: Mitigating Privacy Leaks by Controlling the Discoverability of Online Information

Search engines are the prevalently used tools to collect information about individuals on the Internet. Search results typically comprise a variety of sources that contain personal information -- either intentionally released by the person herself, or unintentionally leaked or published by third parties, often with detrimental effects on the individual's privacy. To grant individuals the ability to regain control over their disseminated personal information, the European Court of Justice recently ruled that EU citizens have a right to be forgotten in the sense that indexing systems, must offer them technical means to request removal of links from search results that point to sources violating their data protection rights. As of now, these technical means consist of a web form that requires a user to manually identify all relevant links upfront and to insert them into the web form, followed by a manual evaluation by employees of the indexing system to assess if the request is eligible and lawful. We propose a universal framework Oblivion to support the automation of the right to be forgotten in a scalable, provable and privacy-preserving manner. First, Oblivion enables a user to automatically find and tag her disseminated personal information using natural language processing and image recognition techniques and file a request in a privacy-preserving manner. Second, Oblivion provides indexing systems with an automated and provable eligibility mechanism, asserting that the author of a request is indeed affected by an online resource. The automated ligibility proof ensures censorship-resistance so that only legitimately affected individuals can request the removal of corresponding links from search results. We have conducted comprehensive evaluations, showing that Oblivion is capable of handling 278 removal requests per second, and is hence suitable for large-scale deployment

Poor Man's Content Centric Networking (with TCP)

A number of different architectures have been proposed in support of data-oriented or information-centric networking. Besides a similar visions, they share the need for designing a new networking architecture. We present an incrementally deployable approach to content-centric networking based upon TCP. Content-aware senders cooperate with probabilistically operating routers for scalable content delivery (to unmodified clients), effectively supporting opportunistic caching for time-shifted access as well as de-facto synchronous multicast delivery. Our approach is application protocol-independent and provides support beyond HTTP caching or managed CDNs. We present our protocol design along with a Linux-based implementation and some initial feasibility checks

ASPECTS REGARDING THE FINANCING OF HIGHER EDUCATION

This paper sets forth the issue of financing higher education in Romania according tothe fundamental principles adopted by most of the countries of the European Union. Under suchcircumstances, the two components of financing State universities are minutely exhibited, namelybasic financing and complementary financing. At the same time, the extremely important matterrequiring the foundation of an efficient and competitive educational system demanded by the newenvironment also implies the providing of financing resources and the implementation of amanagement that allows a good administration and an efficient use of the funds.basic financing, complementary financing, State higher education, university autonomy.