The Growing Complexity of Internet Interconnection

End-to-End (E2E) packet delivery in the Internet is achieved through a system of interconnections between heterogeneous entities called Autonomous Systems (ASes). The initial pattern of AS interconnection in the Internet was relatively simple, involving mainly ISPs with a balanced mixture of inbound and outbound traffic. Changing market conditions and industrial organization of the Internet have jointly forced interconnections and associated contracts to become significantly more diverse and complex. The diversity of interconnection contracts is significant because efficient allocation of costs and revenues across the Internet value chain impacts the profitability of the industry. Not surprisingly, the challenges of recovering the fixed and usage-sensitive costs of network transport give rise to more complex settlements mechanisms than the simple bifurcated (transit and peering) model described in many earlier analyses of Internet interconnection (see BESEN et al., 2001; GREENSTEIN, 2005; or LAFFONT et al., 2003). In the following, we provide insight into recent operational developments, explaining why interconnection in the Internet has become more complex, the nature of interconnection bargaining processes, the implications for cost/revenue allocation and hence interconnection incentives, and what this means for public policy. This paper offers an abbreviated version of the original paper (see FARATIN et al., 2007b).internet interconnection, economics, public policy, routing, peering.

Characterizing Key Stakeholders in an Online Black-Hat Marketplace

Over the past few years, many black-hat marketplaces have emerged that facilitate access to reputation manipulation services such as fake Facebook likes, fraudulent search engine optimization (SEO), or bogus Amazon reviews. In order to deploy effective technical and legal countermeasures, it is important to understand how these black-hat marketplaces operate, shedding light on the services they offer, who is selling, who is buying, what are they buying, who is more successful, why are they successful, etc. Toward this goal, in this paper, we present a detailed micro-economic analysis of a popular online black-hat marketplace, namely, SEOClerks.com. As the site provides non-anonymized transaction information, we set to analyze selling and buying behavior of individual users, propose a strategy to identify key users, and study their tactics as compared to other (non-key) users. We find that key users: (1) are mostly located in Asian countries, (2) are focused more on selling black-hat SEO services, (3) tend to list more lower priced services, and (4) sometimes buy services from other sellers and then sell at higher prices. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis with respect to devising effective economic and legal intervention strategies against marketplace operators and key users.Comment: 12th IEEE/APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime 2017

Body language, security and e-commerce

Security is becoming an increasingly more important concern both at the desktop level and at the network level. This article discusses several approaches to authenticating individuals through the use of biometric devices. While libraries might not implement such devices, they may appear in the near future of desktop computing, particularly for access to institutional computers or for access to sensitive information. Other approaches to computer security focus on protecting the contents of electronic transmissions and verification of individual users. After a brief overview of encryption technologies, the article examines public-key cryptography which is getting a lot of attention in the business world in what is called public key infrastructure. It also examines other efforts, such as IBM’s Cryptolope, the Secure Sockets Layer of Web browsers, and Digital Certificates and Signatures. Secure electronic transmissions are an important condition for conducting business on the Net. These business transactions are not limited to purchase orders, invoices, and contracts. This could become an important tool for information vendors and publishers to control access to the electronic resources they license. As license negotiators and contract administrators, librarians need to be aware of what is happening in these new technologies and the impact that will have on their operations

Unobtrusive and pervasive video-based eye-gaze tracking

Eye-gaze tracking has long been considered a desktop technology that finds its use inside the traditional office setting, where the operating conditions may be controlled. Nonetheless, recent advancements in mobile technology and a growing interest in capturing natural human behaviour have motivated an emerging interest in tracking eye movements within unconstrained real-life conditions, referred to as pervasive eye-gaze tracking. This critical review focuses on emerging passive and unobtrusive video-based eye-gaze tracking methods in recent literature, with the aim to identify different research avenues that are being followed in response to the challenges of pervasive eye-gaze tracking. Different eye-gaze tracking approaches are discussed in order to bring out their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify any limitations, within the context of pervasive eye-gaze tracking, that have yet to be considered by the computer vision community.peer-reviewe

FACTORS AFFECTING CONSUMERS’ VALUE CREATION IN ONLINE GROUP BUYING

Drawing upon the social capital theory (SCT), this study integrates social capital factors with the perspectives of consumer hedonic participation and platform capability of online group buying sites to explore how they af ect consumer value creation toward online group buying (OGB). Data from 663 valid responses were obtained using an online large-scale survey. The conceptual framework was validated by using the partial least squares (PLS) technique. The research findings show that 1) the consumers’ value created by engaging in OGB is contributed collectively by social capital factors (i.e., social interaction tie, trust, and shared value), hedonic participation and OGB platform capabilities; 2) the social capital enhances consumers’ value creation by increasing their hedonic participation; 3) The OGB platform capabilities has a positive impact on social capital, hedonic participation and value creation. The proposed research model explains 64.1 % of variance for consumers’ value creation, 52.6 % of variance for their hedonic participation and 46.1% of variance for social capital in OGB. Our findings provide insights into how OGB administrators can govern OGB initiatives to expand OGB members’ social capital and OGB platform capability, thereby leading to ef ective consumer value creation

Identification guide for cephalopod paralarvae from the Mediterranean Sea

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MT-WAVE: Profiling multi-tier web applications

The web is evolving: what was once primarily used for sharing static content has now evolved into a platform for rich client-side applications. These applications do not run exclusively on the client; while the client is responsible for presentation and some processing, there is a significant amount of processing and persistence that happens server-side. This has advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is that the user’s data is accessible from anywhere. It doesn’t matter which device you sign into a web application from, everything you’ve been working on is instantly accessible. The largest disadvantage is that large numbers of servers are required to support a growing user base; unlike traditional client applications, an organization making a web application needs to provision compute and storage resources for each expected user. This infrastructure is designed in tiers that are responsible for different aspects of the application, and these tiers may not even be run by the same organization. As these systems grow in complexity, it becomes progressively more challenging to identify and solve performance problems. While there are many measures of software system performance, web application users only care about response latency. This “fingertip-to-eyeball performance” is the only metric that users directly perceive: when a button is clicked in a web application, how long does it take for the desired action to complete? MT-WAVE is a system for solving fingertip-to-eyeball performance problems in web applications. The system is designed for doing multi-tier tracing: each piece of the application is instrumented, execution traces are collected, and the system merges these traces into a single coherent snapshot of system latency at every tier. To ensure that user-perceived latency is accurately captured, the tracing begins in the web browser. The application developer then uses the MT-WAVE Visualization System to explore the execution traces to first identify which system is causing the largest amount of latency, and then zooms in on the specific function calls in that tier to find optimization candidates. After fixing an identified problem, the system is used to verify that the changes had the intended effect. This optimization methodology and toolset is explained through a series of case studies that identify and solve performance problems in open-source and commercial applications. These case studies demonstrate both the utility of the MT-WAVE system and the unintuitive nature of system optimization

A distributed solution to software reuse

Reuse can be applied to all stages of the software lifecycle to enhance quality and to shorten time of completion for a project. During the phases of design and implementation are some examples of where reuse can be applied, but one frequent obstruction to development is the building of and the identifying of desirable components. This can be costly in the short term but an organisation can gain the profits of applying this scheme if they are seeking long-term goals. Web services are a recent development in distributed computing. This thesis combines the two research areas to produce a distributed solution to software reuse that displays the advantages of distributed computing within a reuse system. This resulted in a web application with access to web services that allowed two different formats of component to be inserted into a reuse repository. These components were searchable by keywords and the results are adjustable by the popularity of a component’s extraction from the system and by user ratings of it; this improved the accuracy of the search. This work displays the accuracy, usability, and speed of this system when tested with five undergraduate and five postgraduate students