Internet Censorship: An Integrative Review of Technologies Employed to Limit Access to the Internet, Monitor User Actions, and their Effects on Culture

The following conducts an integrative review of the current state of Internet Censorship in China, Iran, and Russia, highlights common circumvention technologies (CTs), and analyzes the effects Internet Censorship has on cultures. The author spends a large majority of the paper delineating China’s Internet infrastructure and prevalent Internet Censorship Technologies/Techniques (ICTs), paying particular attention to how the ICTs function at a technical level. The author further analyzes the state of Internet Censorship in both Iran and Russia from a broader perspective to give a better understanding of Internet Censorship around the globe. The author also highlights specific CTs, explaining how they function at a technical level. Findings indicate that among all three nation-states, state control of Internet Service Providers is the backbone of Internet Censorship. Specifically, within China, it is discovered that the infrastructure functions as an Intranet, thereby creating a closed system. Further, BGP Hijacking, DNS Poisoning, and TCP RST attacks are analyzed to understand their use-case within China. It is found that Iran functions much like a weaker version of China in regards to ICTs, with the state seemingly using the ICT of Bandwidth Throttling rather consistently. Russia’s approach to Internet censorship, in stark contrast to Iran and China, is found to rely mostly on the legislative system and fear to implement censorship, though their technical level of ICT implementation grows daily. TOR, VPNs, and Proxy Servers are all analyzed and found to be robust CTs. Drawing primarily from the examples given throughout the paper, the author highlights the various effects of Internet Censorship on culture – noting that at its core, Internet Censorship destroys democracy

Service Composition in a Global Service Discovery System

GloServ is a global service discovery system which aggregates information about different types of services in a globally distributed network. GloServ classifies services in an ontology and maps knowledge obtained by the ontology onto a scalable hybrid hierarchical peer-to-peer network. The network mirrors the semantic relationships of service classes and as a result, reduces the number of message hops across the global network due to the domain-specific way services are distributed. Also, since services are described in greater detail, due to the ontology representation, greater reasoning is applied when querying and registering services. In this paper, we describe an enhancement to the GloServ querying mechanism which allows GloServ servers to process and issue subqueries between servers of different classes. Thus, information about different service classes may be queried for in a single query and issued directly from the front end, creating an extensible platform for service composition. The results are then aggregated and presented to the user such that services which share an attribute are categorized together. We have built and evaluated a location-based web service discovery prototype which demonstrates the flexibility of service composition in GloServ and discuss the design and evaluation of this system. Keywords: service discovery, ontologies, OWL, CAN, peer-to-peer, web service composition

Generic system architecture for context-aware, distributed recommendation

In the existing literature on recommender systems, it is difficult to find an architecture for large-scale implementation. Often, the architectures proposed in papers are specific to an algorithm implementation or a domain. Thus, there is no clear architectural starting point for a new recommender system. This paper presents an architecture blueprint for a context-aware recommender system that provides scalability, availability, and security for its users. The architecture also contributes the dynamic ability to switch between single-device (offline), client-server (online), and fully distributed implementations. From this blueprint, a new recommender system could be built with minimal design and implementation effort regardless of the application.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress