Feminist Futures of Work:Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy

The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork" —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful

Quantitative economics of security: software vulnerabilities and data breaches

Includes bibliographical references.2016 Summer.Security vulnerabilities can represent enormous risks to society and business organizations. A large percentage of vulnerabilities in software are discovered by individuals external to the developing organization. These vulnerabilities are often exchanged for monetary rewards or a negotiated selling price, giving rise to vulnerability markets. Some of these markets are regulated, while some are unregulated. Many buyers in the unregulated markets include individuals, groups, or government organizations who intend to use the vulnerabilities for potential attacks. Vulnerabilities traded through such markets can cause great economic, organizational, and national security risks. Vulnerability markets can reduce risks if the vulnerabilities are acquitted and remedied by the software developers. Studying vulnerability markets and their related issues will provide an insight into their underlying mechanisms, which can be used to assess the risks and develop approaches for reducing and mitigating the potential risks to enhance the security against the data breaches. Some of the aspects of vulnerability—discovery, dissemination, and disclosure—have received some recent attention. However, the role of interaction among the vulnerability discoverers and vulnerability acquirers has not yet been adequately addressed. This dissertation suggests that a major fraction of discoverers, a majority in some cases, are unaffiliated with the software developers and thus are free to disseminate the vulnerabilities they discover in any way they like. As a result, multiple vulnerability markets have emerged. In recent vulnerability discovery literature, the vulnerability discoverers have remained anonymous. Although there has been an attempt to model the level of their efforts, information regarding their identities, modes of operation, and what they are doing with the discovered vulnerabilities has not been explored. Reports of buying and selling the vulnerabilities are now appearing in the press; however, the nature of the actual vulnerability markets needs to be analyzed. We have attempted to collect detailed information. We have identified the most prolific vulnerability discoverers throughout the past decade and examined their motivation and methods. A large percentage of these discoverers are located outside of the US. We have contacted several of the most prolific discoverers in order to collect firsthand information regarding their techniques, motivations, and involvement in the vulnerability markets. We examine why many of the discoverers appear to retire after a highly successful vulnerability-finding career. We found that the discoverers had enough experience and good reputation to work officially with a good salary in some well- known software development companies. Many security breaches have been reported in the past few years, impacting both large and small organizations. Such breaches may occur through the exploitation of system vulnerabilities. There has been considerable disagreement about the overall cost and probability of such breaches. No significant formal studies have yet addressed this issue of risk assessment, though some proprietary approaches for evaluating partial data breach costs and probabilities have been implemented. These approaches have not been formally evaluated or compared and have not been systematically optimized. This study proposes a consolidated approach for identifying key factors contributing to the breach cost by minimizing redundancy among the factors. Existing approaches have been evaluated using the data from some of the well-documented breaches. It is noted that the existing models yield widely different estimates. The reasons for this variation are examined and the need for better models is identified. A complete computational model for estimating the costs and probabilities of data breaches for a given organization has been developed. We consider both the fixed and variable costs and the economy of scale. Assessing the impact of data breaches will allow organizations to assess the risks due to potential breaches and to determine the optimal level of resources and effort needed for achieving target levels of security

Information technology, contract and knowledge in the networked economy: a biography of packaged software for contract management

In this research I investigate the intersection of information and communication technology (ICT), contract and knowledge in the networked economy as illuminated by the “life” of contract management software (CMS). The failure of CMS to fulfill market expectations provides the motivating question for this study. Based on interview, survey and archival data, I construct a “biography” of CMS from a market perspective informed by the theory of commoditization as well as studies of markets from economic sociology. From the latter, I draw upon the theory of performativity in markets to identify in the failure of CMS a series of breakdowns in performative assumptions and operations normally at work in the making of a packaged software market, ranging from a failure in classification performativity to a detachment of marketized criteria, in the form of analyst ratings, from the underlying software product and vendors. This catalog of breakdown indicates that packaged software production implicates multiple levels of commoditization, including financialized meta-commodities and marketized criteria, in a dynamic I theorize as substitution of performance. I explore the implications of my findings for packaged software and for process commodities more generally, suggesting, inter alia, that process commoditization may revolve around contract and information exchange rather than product definition. I go on to propose an open theorization of contract as a technology of connectedness, in a relationship of potential convergence, complementarity and substitution with ICT, interpenetrating and performative. My contributions are to information systems and organizations research on the topics of packaged software and the relationship of ICT, contract and organizational knowledge; and to economic sociology on the topics of performativity in markets and product qualification in process commoditization