‘The Others’: Gender and Conscientious Objection in the First World War

In a time when ‘if one was born a male, one became a soldier’, what does it mean to be a man who refuses to fight? This article uses Connell’s framework of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to locate conscientious objectors’ male identities as a suppressed, subaltern manliness that deviated from the dominant norm of martial masculinity. It argues that despite rejecting many aspects of this norm, objectors nonetheless articulated their counter-hegemonic struggle in starkly militarised language, presenting themselves as heroes sacrificing their lives for the greater good. It suggests that in order to understand, rather than merely judge, this strategy, it is important to see masculinity not as a completely discrete field of struggle, but as one of many mutually constitutive structuring principles underpinning a social order that is arranged not merely along patriarchal lines, but along lines of nation and class. In turn, these other principles impose limits on the nature of and possibilities for counter-hegemonic struggle

Defending Against Firmware Cyber Attacks on Safety-Critical Systems

In the past, it was not possible to update the underlying software in many industrial control devices. Engineering teams had to ‘rip and replace’ obsolete components. However, the ability to make firmware updates has provided significant benefits to the companies who use Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), switches, gateways and bridges as well as an array of smart sensor/actuators. These updates include security patches when vulnerabilities are identified in existing devices; they can be distributed by physical media but are increasingly downloaded over Internet connections. These mechanisms pose a growing threat to the cyber security of safety-critical applications, which are illustrated by recent attacks on safety-related infrastructures across the Ukraine. Subsequent sections explain how malware can be distributed within firmware updates. Even when attackers cannot reverse engineer the code necessary to disguise their attack, they can undermine a device by forcing it into a constant upload cycle where the firmware installation never terminates. In this paper, we present means of mitigating the risks of firmware attack on safety-critical systems as part of wider initiatives to secure national critical infrastructures. Technical solutions, including firmware hashing, must be augmented by organizational measures to secure the supply chain within individual plants, across companies and throughout safety-related industries

Spartan Daily, November 22, 1937

Volume 26, Issue 42https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2682/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, March 1, 1991

Volume 96, Issue 23https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8091/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, December 7, 1961

Volume 49, Issue 47https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4234/thumbnail.jp

Having Fun in Learning Formal Specifications

There are many benefits in providing formal specifications for our software. However, teaching students to do this is not always easy as courses on formal methods are often experienced as dry by students. This paper presents a game called FormalZ that teachers can use to introduce some variation in their class. Students can have some fun in playing the game and, while doing so, also learn the basics of writing formal specifications in the form of pre- and post-conditions. Unlike existing software engineering themed education games such as Pex and Code Defenders, FormalZ takes the deep gamification approach where playing gets a more central role in order to generate more engagement. This short paper presents our work in progress: the first implementation of FormalZ along with the result of a preliminary users' evaluation. This implementation is functionally complete and tested, but the polishing of its user interface is still future work

Informational Warfare

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that reputation was an important mediator of access to resources in ancestral human environments. Reputations were built and maintained by the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information about the actions and capabilities of group members-that is, by gossiping. Strategic gossiping would have been an excellent strategy for manipulating reputations and thereby competing effectively for resources and for cooperative relationships with group members who could best provide such resources. Coalitions (cliques) may have increased members' abilities to manipulate reputations by gossiping. Because, over evolutionary time, women may have experienced more within-group competition than men, and because female reputations may have been more vulnerable than male reputations to gossip, gossiping may have been a more important strategy for women than men. Consequently, women may have evolved specializations for gossiping alone and in coalitions. We develop and partially test this theory