37,540 research outputs found
Dining Cryptographers are Practical
The dining cryptographers protocol provides information-theoretically secure
sender and recipient untraceability. However, the protocol is considered to be
impractical because a malicious participant may disrupt the communication. We
propose an implementation which provides information-theoretical security for
senders and recipients, and in which a disruptor with limited computational
capabilities can easily be detected.Comment: 12 page
Police overestimation of criminal career homogeneity
Police presumptions about criminal career trajectories have been little studied. The exploratory
study reported here involved 42 police staff of varying rank and experience. Participants were
asked to complete a questionnaire which asked them to predict the type of offence that an
individual with specified prior record was most likely to commit next. Participating police
personnel substantially overstated the homogeneity of criminal careers, i.e. the nature of prior
offences determined their prediction of their next offence more than available official data would
deem reasonable. An incidental finding was that officers who rated the probability of further
offending highest were also those who thought criminal careers most specialised. Theimplications
for operational police decision making are discussed and held to be profound
Unusual Events in GitHub Repositories
In large and active software projects, it becomes impractical for a developer
to stay aware of all project activity. While it might not be necessary to know
about each commit or issue, it is arguably important to know about the ones
that are unusual. To investigate this hypothesis, we identified unusual events
in 200 GitHub projects using a comprehensive list of ways in which an artifact
can be unusual and asked 140 developers responsible for or affected by these
events to comment on the usefulness of the corresponding information. Based on
2,096 answers, we identify the subset of unusual events that developers
consider particularly useful, including large code modifications and unusual
amounts of reviewing activity, along with qualitative evidence on the reasons
behind these answers. Our findings provide a means for reducing the amount of
information that developers need to parse in order to stay up to date with
development activity in their projects.Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Softwar
Do the Fix Ingredients Already Exist? An Empirical Inquiry into the Redundancy Assumptions of Program Repair Approaches
Much initial research on automatic program repair has focused on experimental
results to probe their potential to find patches and reduce development effort.
Relatively less effort has been put into understanding the hows and whys of
such approaches. For example, a critical assumption of the GenProg technique is
that certain bugs can be fixed by copying and re-arranging existing code. In
other words, GenProg assumes that the fix ingredients already exist elsewhere
in the code. In this paper, we formalize these assumptions around the concept
of ''temporal redundancy''. A temporally redundant commit is only composed of
what has already existed in previous commits. Our experiments show that a large
proportion of commits that add existing code are temporally redundant. This
validates the fundamental redundancy assumption of GenProg.Comment: ICSE - 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
(2014
- …