Cybercrimes and the Rule of Law in West-Africa: The Republic of Cote d’Ivoire as a Case-Study.

Since becoming independent nations in the 60s, West-African countries have enacted laws and regulations with the goals of ensuring peace and justice within their respective borders. On the paper, there was no difference between the justice systems of those newly independent nations and the justice systems of their former masters. Unfortunately, the rule of law in West-African nations since gaining independence, has not always been followed for a myriad of social, cultural, political, and economic reasons. Most justice systems in West-Africa including in Cote d’Ivoire are deeply corrupted, thus rendering the goal of a peaceful society through a fair justice system mute. With the emergence of a new type of crimes taking place in cyberspace, there has been a logical need to enact new laws to protect the public using the added information and communication technologies (ICT). Over the past few years, multiple cyber-legislations have sprung-up all over Africa including in Cote d’Ivoire. The fundamental question is to ask whether the enforcement of cybercrimes laws is more successful than the enforcement of traditional laws. The problem of the enforceability of these cybercrime legislations is compounded by the very nature of cyberspace which is “borderless.” Faced with the complexity of those computer crimes taking place in the virtual space, do West-African countries in general and specifically Cote d’Ivoire have the infrastructure, the knowledge, and the workforce to efficiently investigate and prosecute cybercrimes? This research tries to investigate, expose the theoretical inadequation between cybercrimes legislations and the enforcement capabilities of the Ivorian state, based on the deficiencies of enforcement of traditional laws and the need to stem the tide of corruption in general and specifically in the justice system. This research uses the case-study method because case studies are in-depth investigations of a single person, group, event, or community. Our findings have confirmed our assumptions that the enforcement of cybercrime laws is flawed due to the lack of proper equipment, skills of law enforcement personnel, even though the country has put in place many agencies to fight against cybercrimes. The social, cultural, political, and economical determinants that have always inhibited the fair and just enforcement of traditional laws is exerting the same kind of pressure on the capabilities of Law enforcement when it comes to the investigation and prosecution of cybercrimes in Cote d’Ivoire. This research, far from being exhaustive, needs a follow-up research in the future when the country retrieves its past stability and social peace which will allow a more open cooperation between researchers and the different authorities leading the fight against cybercrimes

Panafrican study on telecentres : Mali; Multipurpose Community Telecentre of Timbuktoo

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Etude panafricaine sur les télécentres : Mali; Télécentre communautaire polyvalent de Tomboucto

Methods for revealing and reshaping the African Internet Ecosystem as a case study for developing regions: from isolated networks to a connected continent

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorWhile connecting end-users worldwide, the Internet increasingly promotes local development by making challenges much simpler to overcome, regardless of the field in which it is used: governance, economy, education, health, etc. However, African Network Information Centre (AfriNIC), the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) of Africa, is characterized by the lowest Internet penetration: 28.6% as of March 2017 compared to an average of 49.7% worldwide according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates [139]. Moreover, end-users experience a poor Quality of Service (QoS) provided at high costs. It is thus of interest to enlarge the Internet footprint in such under-connected regions and determine where the situation can be improved. Along these lines, this doctoral thesis thoroughly inspects, using both active and passive data analysis, the critical aspects of the African Internet ecosystem and outlines the milestones of a methodology that could be adopted for achieving similar purposes in other developing regions. The thesis first presents our efforts to help build measurements infrastructures for alleviating the shortage of a diversified range of Vantage Points (VPs) in the region, as we cannot improve what we can not measure. It then unveils our timely and longitudinal inspection of the African interdomain routing using the enhanced RIPE Atlas measurements infrastructure for filling the lack of knowledge of both IPv4 and IPv6 topologies interconnecting local Internet Service Providers (ISPs). It notably proposes reproducible data analysis techniques suitable for the treatment of any set of similar measurements to infer the behavior of ISPs in the region. The results show a large variety of transit habits, which depend on socio-economic factors such as the language, the currency area, or the geographic location of the country in which the ISP operates. They indicate the prevailing dominance of ISPs based outside Africa for the provision of intracontinental paths, but also shed light on the efforts of stakeholders for traffic localization. Next, the thesis investigates the causes and impacts of congestion in the African IXP substrate, as the prevalence of this endemic phenomenon in local Internet markets may hinder their growth. Towards this end, Ark monitors were deployed at six strategically selected local Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) and used for collecting Time-Sequence Latency Probes (TSLP) measurements during a whole year. The analysis of these datasets reveals no evidence of widespread congestion: only 2.2% of the monitored links experienced noticeable indication of congestion, thus promoting peering. The causes of these events were identified during IXP operator interviews, showing how essential collaboration with stakeholders is to understanding the causes of performance degradations. As part of the Internet Society (ISOC) strategy to allow the Internet community to profile the IXPs of a particular region and monitor their evolution, a route-collector data analyzer was then developed and afterward, it was deployed and tested in AfriNIC. This open source web platform titled the “African” Route-collectors Data Analyzer (ARDA) provides metrics, which picture in real-time the status of interconnection at different levels, using public routing information available at local route-collectors with a peering viewpoint of the Internet. The results highlight that a small proportion of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) assigned by AfriNIC (17 %) are peering in the region, a fraction that remained static from April to September 2017 despite the significant growth of IXPs in some countries. They show how ARDA can help detect the impact of a policy on the IXP substrate and help ISPs worldwide identify new interconnection opportunities in Africa, the targeted region. Since broadening the underlying network is not useful without appropriately provisioned services to exploit it, the thesis then delves into the availability and utilization of the web infrastructure serving the continent. Towards this end, a comprehensive measurement methodology is applied to collect data from various sources. A focus on Google reveals that its content infrastructure in Africa is, indeed, expanding; nevertheless, much of its web content is still served from the United States (US) and Europe, although being the most popular content source in many African countries. Further, the same analysis is repeated across top global and regional websites, showing that even top African websites prefer to host their content abroad. Following that, the primary bottlenecks faced by Content Providers (CPs) in the region such as the lack of peering between the networks hosting our probes and poorly configured DNS resolvers are explored to outline proposals for further ISP and CP deployments. Considering the above, an option to enrich connectivity and incentivize CPs to establish a presence in the region is to interconnect ISPs present at isolated IXPs by creating a distributed IXP layout spanning the continent. In this respect, the thesis finally provides a four-step interconnection scheme, which parameterizes socio-economic, geographical, and political factors using public datasets. It demonstrates that this constrained solution doubles the percentage of continental intra-African paths, reduces their length, and drastically decreases the median of their Round Trip Times (RTTs) as well as RTTs to ASes hosting the top 10 global and top 10 regional Alexa websites. We hope that quantitatively demonstrating the benefits of this framework will incentivize ISPs to intensify peering and CPs to increase their presence, for enabling fast, affordable, and available access at the Internet frontier.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: David Fernández Cambronero.- Secretario: Alberto García Martínez.- Vocal: Cristel Pelsse

The Brave New World of Big Data

Note from the editor The Brave New World of Big Data by Akos Rona-Tas Aadhaar: Uniquely Indian Dystopia? by Reetika Khera Biometric IDs and the remaking of the Indian (welfare) state by Ursula Rao Multiple social credit systems in China by Chuncheng Liu Credit Scoring in the United States by Barbara Kiviat Bringing Context back into privacy regulation and beyond. About limitation on purpose as an (old) response to (new) data challenges by Karoline Krenn OpEd by Jenny Andersson Book review

Contested space in the Kasbah of Marrakech: place, modernity and discourse, the Kasbah of Marrakech 1985 to 2004

The Kasbah, in origin a late twelfth-century citadel, occupies within the walled city of Marrakech a sovereign territory defined by its historical and present administrative boundaries. It is proposed that the Kasbah has in the last two decades fragmented into a contested space in which the shifting dynamics of differing interpretations of cultural ownership have displaced traditional confrontations with modernity. It is argued that the displacements, ambiguities and ambivalence surrounding contesting interpretations of cultural ownership of urban space might be identified as a 'local modernity' (to be differentiated from the modernity closely identified with global economic centres such as New York, London or Tokyo, which may be characterized as world cities). Contested space in the Kasbah—as in any current urban situation—is so complex that this thesis is structured through selective analyses of representations of space, time, culture, authority and authenticity in the competing but overlapping claims of the discourse of cultural heritage, the academic discourse, the Palace discourse and the discourse of tourism. In analysing contested space in the Kasbah, discourse is understood as corresponding to Michel Foucault's interest in what is assumed to be self-evident, 'natural' and therefore outside time. The formation of each discourse is discussed in order to identify its origins and to question what is taken to be timeless or universal. Analysis of the contested ownership—cultural rather than economic—of space focuses on interpretations of key terms and concepts ('space', 'time', 'culture', 'authority' and 'authenticity') that are indicative of competing discursive claims

The Montclarion, December 07, 1995

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Universityhttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/1742/thumbnail.jp

Economically sustainable public security and emergency network exploiting a broadband communications satellite

The research contributes to work in Rapid Deployment of a National Public Security and Emergency Communications Network using Communication Satellite Broadband. Although studies in Public Security Communication networks have examined the use of communications satellite as an integral part of the Communication Infrastructure, there has not been an in-depth design analysis of an optimized regional broadband-based communication satellite in relation to the envisaged service coverage area, with little or no terrestrial last-mile telecommunications infrastructure for delivery of satellite solutions, applications and services. As such, the research provides a case study of a Nigerian Public Safety Security Communications Pilot project deployed in regions of the African continent with inadequate terrestrial last mile infrastructure and thus requiring a robust regional Communications Satellite complemented with variants of terrestrial wireless technologies to bridge the digital hiatus as a short and medium term measure apart from other strategic needs. The research not only addresses the pivotal role of a secured integrated communications Public safety network for security agencies and emergency service organizations with its potential to foster efficient information symmetry amongst their operations including during emergency and crisis management in a timely manner but demonstrates a working model of how analogue spectrum meant for Push-to-Talk (PTT) services can be re-farmed and digitalized as a “dedicated” broadband-based public communications system. The network’s sustainability can be secured by using excess capacity for the strategic commercial telecommunication needs of the state and its citizens. Utilization of scarce spectrum has been deployed for Nigeria’s Cashless policy pilot project for financial and digital inclusion. This effectively drives the universal access goals, without exclusivity, in a continent, which still remains the least wired in the world

Reasoning of Competitive Non-Functional Requirements in Agent-Based Models

During the decision-making process in real-time competitive environments, there is a need to perform concurrent optimisation of multiple competitive objectives to select an optimal design decision for interdependent stakeholders. To handle such issues, this thesis successfully assimilates the goal-oriented requirements-engineering knowledge with analytical decision-making approaches to facilitate reasoning and analysis by encouraging stakeholders’ involvement. This leads to optimal decisions with domain knowledge improvement in the agent-based i*-goal model by balancing multiple conflicting non-functional requirements reciprocally

Untangling the Web: A Guide To Internet Research

[Excerpt] Untangling the Web for 2007 is the twelfth edition of a book that started as a small handout. After more than a decade of researching, reading about, using, and trying to understand the Internet, I have come to accept that it is indeed a Sisyphean task. Sometimes I feel that all I can do is to push the rock up to the top of that virtual hill, then stand back and watch as it rolls down again. The Internet—in all its glory of information and misinformation—is for all practical purposes limitless, which of course means we can never know it all, see it all, understand it all, or even imagine all it is and will be. The more we know about the Internet, the more acute is our awareness of what we do not know. The Internet emphasizes the depth of our ignorance because our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. My hope is that Untangling the Web will add to our knowledge of the Internet and the world while recognizing that the rock will always roll back down the hill at the end of the day