14 research outputs found

    Traffic microstructures and network anomaly detection

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    Much hope has been put in the modelling of network traffic with machine learning methods to detect previously unseen attacks. Many methods rely on features on a microscopic level such as packet sizes or interarrival times to identify reoccurring patterns and detect deviations from them. However, the success of these methods depends both on the quality of corresponding training and evaluation data as well as the understanding of the structures that methods learn. Currently, the academic community is lacking both, with widely used synthetic datasets facing serious problems and the disconnect between methods and data being named the "semantic gap". This thesis provides extensive examinations of the necessary requirements on traffic generation and microscopic traffic structures to enable the effective training and improvement of anomaly detection models. We first present and examine DetGen, a container-based traffic generation paradigm that enables precise control and ground truth information over factors that shape traffic microstructures. The goal of DetGen is to provide researchers with extensive ground truth information and enable the generation of customisable datasets that provide realistic structural diversity. DetGen was designed according to four specific traffic requirements that dataset generation needs to fulfil to enable machine-learning models to learn accurate and generalisable traffic representations. Current network intrusion datasets fail to meet these requirements, which we believe is one of the reasons for the lacking success of anomaly-based detection methods. We demonstrate the significance of these requirements experimentally by examining how model performance decreases when these requirements are not met. We then focus on the control and information over traffic microstructures that DetGen provides, and the corresponding benefits when examining and improving model failures for overall model development. We use three metrics to demonstrate that DetGen is able to provide more control and isolation over the generated traffic. The ground truth information DetGen provides enables us to probe two state-of-the-art traffic classifiers for failures on certain traffic structures, and the corresponding fixes in the model design almost halve the number of misclassifications . Drawing on these results, we propose CBAM, an anomaly detection model that detects network access attacks through deviations from reoccurring flow sequence patterns. CBAM is inspired by the design of self-supervised language models, and improves the AUC of current state-of-the-art by up to 140%. By understanding why several flow sequence structures present difficulties to our model, we make targeted design decisions that improve on these difficulties and ultimately boost the performance of our model. Lastly, we examine how the control and adversarial perturbation of traffic microstructures can be used by an attacker to evade detection. We show that in a stepping-stone attack, an attacker can evade every current detection model by mimicking the patterns observed in streaming services

    Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major U.S. Cities

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    The underground commercial sex economy (UCSE) generates millions of dollars annually, yet investigation and data collection remain under resourced. Our study aimed to unveil the scale of the UCSE in eight major US cities. Across cities, the UCSE's worth was estimated between 39.9and39.9 and 290 million in 2007, but decreased since 2003 in all but two cities. Interviews with pimps, traffickers, sex workers, child pornographers, and law enforcement revealed the dynamics central to the underground commercial sex trade -- and shaped the policy suggestions to combat it

    London Underground : The multicultural routes of London dance cultures

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    Popular music plays a powerful role in people's lives. The centrality that it takes in the individual and collective lives of social actors appears to be in inverse proportion to their social, cultural and political power: relatively powerless groups have historically used music as a way to organise themselves and their understanding of the world, a way to speak in public, and speak about, among other things, the forces they believe conspire to keep them powerless. This thesis is concentrated on the cultures that have emerged around a series of genres collectively described as 'dance music' in London in the past two decades. It takes as its starting point the most promising theoretical models developed to understand cultures around music, the 'subcultural studies' of the 1970s, but it places these alongside theoretical perspectives that pay more attention to the politics of space, in particular new developments in cultural geography, and the work on transational cultures of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Combining a theoretical approach based on Manual Castell's notion of a 'network society', with ethnography interviews and participant observation data gathered over 3 years at the end of the 1990S - and case studies of specific dance music genre-networks - Rare Groove, 'Acid House' and 'Jungle' - the thesis traces the evolution of London dance cultures in relation to immigration, the changing racial and political geography of the city, and the emergence of multicultural space and practice. The thesis traces patterns of continuity and change across different dance genres, to argue that the African diaspora, and particularly the 'discrete cultural unit' defined by Gilroy as the Black Atlantic rather than the Nation, or an idea of English particularity, continue to be the appropriate contextual frame for understanding dance music activity in Britain. Some of the underlying questions to which this thesis provides the answer are: what role have London's migrant and non-white populations played in the cultural and economic life of the city? What are the mechanisms of multiculture, and what role has Afro-diasporic music played in these mechanisms? What is the relationship between the development of musical subcultures and 'the Nation'

    Agency in and around videogames

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    This thesis conceptualises player agency in avatar-based videogames as an affordance of game design (Gibson 1979). By examining how agency is discussed in different discourses surrounding videogames, such as those of game studies and game design, it puts forward a multidimensional heuristic framework for conceptualising agency in avatar-based games. Game studios with a particular design focus that draw on ‘game design lineages’ (Bateman and Zagal 2018) feature as case studies to demonstrate the analytical power of this framework, examining how agency is designed, and how developers discuss how it is designed. The combined methods of textual and paratextual analysis provides insight not only into how game designers think about agency but also into how design intentions can translate into features of the released game. Such an approach facilitates a way of looking at agency as designed, which is informed by the vocabularies of academic discussions concerning videogames, as well as the language used to refer to these phenomena by industry practitioners, thereby grounding abstract theory in production practices and discourses

    Compact Anthology of World Literature II: Volumes 4, 5, and 6

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    The Compact Anthology of World Literature, Parts 4, 5, and 6 is designed as an e-book to be accessible on a variety of devices: smart phone, tablet, e-reader, laptop, or desktop computer. Students have reported ease of accessibility and readability on all these devices. To access the ePub text on a laptop, desktop, or tablet, you will need to download a program through which you can read the text. We recommend Readium, an application available through Google. If you plan to read the text on an Android device, you will need to download an application called Lithium from the App Store. On an iPhone, the text will open in iBooks. Affordable Learning Georgia has also converted the .epub files to PDF. Because .epub does not easily convert to other formats, the left margin of the .pdf is very narrow. ALG recommends using the .epub version. Although the text is designed to look like an actual book, the Table of Contents is composed of hyperlinks that will take you to each introductory section and then to each text. The three parts of the text are organized into the following units: Part 4—The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Unit I: The Age of Reason Unit II: The Near East and Asia Part 5—The Long Nineteenth Century Unit I Romanticism Unit II Realism Part 6—The Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature Unit I Modernism Unit II Postcolonial Literature Unit III Contemporary Literature Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain--those published or translated before 1923--are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. In those cases, we have provided a link to a stable site that includes the text. Thus, in Part 6, most of the texts are accessible in the form of links to outside sites. In every case, we have attempted to connect to the most stable links available. The following texts have been prepared with the assistance of the University of North Georgia Press in its role as Affordable Learning Georgia\u27s Partner Press. Affordable Learning Georgia partners with the University of North Georgia Press to assist grantees with copyright clearance, peer review, production and design, and other tasks required to produce quality Open Educational Resources (OER). The University Press is a peer-reviewed, academic press. Its mission is to produce scholarly work that contributes to the fields of innovative teaching, textbooks, and Open Educational Resources. Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant funds may be used for services provided by the Press. To determine how the University Press can assist ALG grantees or anyone interested in developing OER with ALG, the University Press will provide advance free consultations. Please contact the Press at 706-864-1556 or [email protected]. “Textbook Transformation Grants” from Affordable Learning Georgia Accessible files with optical character recognition (OCR) and auto-tagging provided by the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation.https://oer.galileo.usg.edu/english-textbooks/1018/thumbnail.jp

    Agency in and around videogames

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    This thesis conceptualises player agency in avatar-based videogames as an affordance of game design (Gibson 1979). By examining how agency is discussed in different discourses surrounding videogames, such as those of game studies and game design, it puts forward a multidimensional heuristic framework for conceptualising agency in avatar-based games. Game studios with a particular design focus that draw on ‘game design lineages’ (Bateman and Zagal 2018) feature as case studies to demonstrate the analytical power of this framework, examining how agency is designed, and how developers discuss how it is designed. The combined methods of textual and paratextual analysis provides insight not only into how game designers think about agency but also into how design intentions can translate into features of the released game. Such an approach facilitates a way of looking at agency as designed, which is informed by the vocabularies of academic discussions concerning videogames, as well as the language used to refer to these phenomena by industry practitioners, thereby grounding abstract theory in production practices and discourses

    Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995)

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    The files on this record represent the various databases that originally composed the CD-ROM issue of "Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding" database, which is now part of the Dudley Knox Library's Abstracts and Selected Full Text Documents on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995) Collection. (See Calhoun record https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/57364 for further information on this collection and the bibliography). Due to issues of technological obsolescence preventing current and future audiences from accessing the bibliography, DKL exported and converted into the three files on this record the various databases contained in the CD-ROM. The contents of these files are: 1) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_xls.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.xls: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format; RDFA_Glossary.xls: Glossary of terms, in Excel 97-2003 Workbookformat; RDFA_Biographies.xls: Biographies of leading figures, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format]; 2) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_csv.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.TXT: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in CSV format; RDFA_Glossary.TXT: Glossary of terms, in CSV format; RDFA_Biographies.TXT: Biographies of leading figures, in CSV format]; 3) RDFA_CompleteBibliography.pdf: A human readable display of the bibliographic data, as a means of double-checking any possible deviations due to conversion

    Bowdoin Orient v.138, no.1-25 (2008-2009)

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    https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1009/thumbnail.jp
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