Integrable e-lements for Statistics Education

Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at the beginning of his or her studies? Which technology can be presented during class and which computational elements can re-occur (at increasing level of complexity) during the different courses? In this paper we address these questions and discuss where e-techniques have their limits in statistics education.electronic books, hypertext, e-supported teaching, statistical software

Maryland Personal Jurisdiction Law in the Cyberspace Content

A century ago, personal jurisdiction largely hinged on a simple litmus test: the defendant’s presence in the forum state. The issue of personal jurisdiction gained prevalence as the nation evolved from its earlier days of detached, semi-sovereign entities, whose citizens rarely interacted, to a nation where interstate commerce had increased, with interstate litigation growing correspondingly. In Pennoyer v. Neff, the Supreme Court of the United States effectively limited a state’s jurisdiction to persons physically present within its territorial borders. However, in today’s increasingly interconnected world, physical presence appears to represent an anachronism set in the post-Civil War, horse-and-buggy America of Pennoyer. Since then, long-arm jurisdiction has devolved into a confused “state of flux, if not chaos . . . a ‘mess of state long-arm legislation and vacillating Supreme Court jurisprudence.’” Personal jurisdiction jurisprudence has become a latter-day rule against perpetuities, befuddling litigators and courts alike. This befuddlement is compounded by the rapid evolution of technology. Technological progress generates jurisdictional wrinkles at a pace that consistently outstrips the ability of the legal profession to deal with them. In recent years, the complexity of those issues has increased exponentially by the development of cyberspace; actors a world away can exert influence in Maryland with the touch of a keystroke. Of course, at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), actors in Maryland can return those intrusions with interest. However, for counsel representing clients other than the NSA, the issue of what level of “cyber” or “virtual” activity suffices to allow Maryland to assert jurisdiction over an actor is one with immediate repercussions

Maryland Personal Jurisdiction Law in the Cyberspace Content

A century ago, personal jurisdiction largely hinged on a simple litmus test: the defendant’s presence in the forum state. The issue of personal jurisdiction gained prevalence as the nation evolved from its earlier days of detached, semi-sovereign entities, whose citizens rarely interacted, to a nation where interstate commerce had increased, with interstate litigation growing correspondingly. In Pennoyer v. Neff, the Supreme Court of the United States effectively limited a state’s jurisdiction to persons physically present within its territorial borders. However, in today’s increasingly interconnected world, physical presence appears to represent an anachronism set in the post-Civil War, horse-and-buggy America of Pennoyer. Since then, long-arm jurisdiction has devolved into a confused “state of flux, if not chaos . . . a ‘mess of state long-arm legislation and vacillating Supreme Court jurisprudence.’” Personal jurisdiction jurisprudence has become a latter-day rule against perpetuities, befuddling litigators and courts alike. This befuddlement is compounded by the rapid evolution of technology. Technological progress generates jurisdictional wrinkles at a pace that consistently outstrips the ability of the legal profession to deal with them. In recent years, the complexity of those issues has increased exponentially by the development of cyberspace; actors a world away can exert influence in Maryland with the touch of a keystroke. Of course, at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), actors in Maryland can return those intrusions with interest. However, for counsel representing clients other than the NSA, the issue of what level of “cyber” or “virtual” activity suffices to allow Maryland to assert jurisdiction over an actor is one with immediate repercussions

CamFlow: Managed Data-sharing for Cloud Services

A model of cloud services is emerging whereby a few trusted providers manage the underlying hardware and communications whereas many companies build on this infrastructure to offer higher level, cloud-hosted PaaS services and/or SaaS applications. From the start, strong isolation between cloud tenants was seen to be of paramount importance, provided first by virtual machines (VM) and later by containers, which share the operating system (OS) kernel. Increasingly it is the case that applications also require facilities to effect isolation and protection of data managed by those applications. They also require flexible data sharing with other applications, often across the traditional cloud-isolation boundaries; for example, when government provides many related services for its citizens on a common platform. Similar considerations apply to the end-users of applications. But in particular, the incorporation of cloud services within `Internet of Things' architectures is driving the requirements for both protection and cross-application data sharing. These concerns relate to the management of data. Traditional access control is application and principal/role specific, applied at policy enforcement points, after which there is no subsequent control over where data flows; a crucial issue once data has left its owner's control by cloud-hosted applications and within cloud-services. Information Flow Control (IFC), in addition, offers system-wide, end-to-end, flow control based on the properties of the data. We discuss the potential of cloud-deployed IFC for enforcing owners' dataflow policy with regard to protection and sharing, as well as safeguarding against malicious or buggy software. In addition, the audit log associated with IFC provides transparency, giving configurable system-wide visibility over data flows. [...]Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

PRIVACY-AVARE: An approach to manage and distribute privacy settings

Privacy enhancing technologies become increasingly necessary as more and more personal data is collected. Especially, as nowadays everybody is permanently online using different applications and devices, users are often lacking the means to effectively control the access to their private data. Existing approaches provide only isolated solutions for one device and are limited in functionality to control data access. Moreover, existing solutions may not be legally compliant and lack usability, especially for non-experts. Therefore, we present an interdisciplinary approach to manage and distribute privacy settings: PRIVACY-AVARE is intended to enable users to centrally determine their data protection preferences and to apply them globally on different devices (mobiles, tablets, smart homes, cars, ...). In this paper, we present PRIVACY-AVARE by first introducing and discussing main functional and non-functional requirements with a special focus on compliance and usability requirements. Based on this discussion, we then develop a conceptual solution. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our approach and give an outlook

Dependable Public Ledger for Policy Compliance, a Blockchain Based Approach

The ever increasing amount of personal data accumulated by companies offering innovative services through the cloud, Internet of Things devices and, more recently, social robots has started to alert consumers and legislative authorities. In the advent of the first modern laws trying to protect user privacy, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, it is still unclear what are the tools and techniques that the industry should employ to comply with regulations in a transparent and cost effective manner. We propose an architecture for a public blockchain based ledger that can provide strong evidence of policy compliance. To address scalability concerns, we define a new type of off-chain channel that is based on general state channels and offers verification for information external to the blockchain. We also create a model of the business relationships in a smart home setup that includes a social robot and suggest a sticky policy mechanism to monitor cross-boundary policy compliance