Wild Dog Management: Best Practice Manual

Wild dogs (all wild-living dogs including pure-bred dingoes, hybrids, and domestic dogs running wild) are one of the major pest species impacting on grazing industries across mainland Australia. In this Manual, the text refers to dingoes where the information is derived from studies of essentially pure dingoes. Elsewhere the text usually refers to the more generic term, wild dogs. The information in this Manual is based on scientific studies, including detailed evaluations of techniques and strategies, as well as considerable practical experience from doggers, Department of Agriculture and Food staff and land managers. Much of this Manual focuses on sheep enterprises which, with goat enterprises, are at the highest risk of wild dog predation. Although the effects of wild dogs on cattle can also be significant and widespread, wild dogs are easier to control in cattle areas.https://researchlibrary.agric.wa.gov.au/bulletins/1211/thumbnail.jp

Generation, Verification, and Attacks on Elliptic Curves and their Applications in Signal Protocol

Elliptic curves (EC) are widely studied due to their mathematical and cryptographic properties. Cryptographers have used the properties of EC to construct elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). ECC are based on the assumption of hardness of special instances of the discrete logarithm problem in EC. One of the strong merits of ECC is providing the same cryptographic strength with smaller key size compared to other public key cryptosystems. A 256 bit ECC can provide similar cryptographic strength as a 3072 bit RSA cryptosystem. Due to smaller key sizes, elliptic curves are an attractive option in devices with limited storage capacity. It is therefore essential to understand how to generate these curves, verify their correctness and assure that they are resistant against attacks. The security of an EC cryptosystem is determined by the choice of the curve that is used in that cryptosystem. Over the years, a number of elliptic curves were introduced for cryptographic use. Elliptic curves such as FRP256V1, NIST P-256, Secp256k1 or SM2 curve are widely used in many applications like cryptocurrencies, transport layer protocol and Internet messaging applications. Another type of popular curves are Curve25519 introduced by Dan Bernstein and Curve448 introduced by Mike Hamburg, which are used in an end to end encryption protocol called Signal. This protocol is used in popular messaging applications like WhatsApp, Signal Messenger and Facebook Messenger. Recently, there has been a growing distrust among security researchers against the previously standardized curves. We have seen backdoors in the elliptic curve cryptosystems like the DUAL_EC_DRBG function that was standardized by NIST, and suspicious random seeds that were used in NIST P-curves. We can say that many of the previously standardized curves lack transparency in their generation and verification. We focus on transparent generation and verification of elliptic curves. We generate curves based on NIST standards and propose new standards to generate special types of elliptic curves. We test their resistance against the known attacks that target the ECC. Finally, we demonstrate ECDLP attacks on small curves with weak structure

Retrieving an archive: Brook Andrew and William Blandowski's Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen

Much of the critical response to Brook Andrew’s reinterpretation of images from a colonial archive in his 2008 series The Island situated the work in a tradition of post-colonial critique of documentary images. But is this an adequate account of either Andrew’s work or the archive in question, William Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen (1862)? This essay looks at practices involving copying and their impact on understandings of authenticity, the role of art in science, the nature of the observer and visual communication in relation to the broad scope of Blandowski’s archive, but particularly with regard to Andrew’s intervention in it. By examining the way that the past is brought into the present in the Island series, this essay seeks to facilitate a more richly nuanced understanding of these works that is cognizant of the historical issues involved

Combinatorial and Stochastic Approach to Parallelization of the Kangaroo Method of Solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem

The kangaroo method for the Pollard\u27s rho algorithm provides a powerful way to solve discrete log problems. There exist parameters for it that allow it to be optimized in such a way as to prevent what are known as useless collisions in exchange for the limitation that the number of parallel resources used must be both finite and known ahead of time. This thesis puts forward an analysis of the situation and examines the potential acceleration that can be gained through the use of parallel resources beyond those initially utilized by an algorithm so configured. In brief, the goal in doing this is to reconcile the rapid rate of increase in parallel processing capabilities present in consumer level hardware with the still largely sequential nature of a large portion of the algorithms used in the software that is run on that hardware. The core concept, then, would be to allow spare parallel resources to be utilized in an advanced sort of guess-and-check to potentially produce occasional speedups whenever, for lack of a better way to put it, those guesses are correct. The methods presented in this thesis are done so with an eye towards expanding and reapplying them to this broadly expressed problem, however herein the discrete log problem has been chosen to be utilized as a suitable example of how such an application can proceed. This is primarily due to the observation that Pollard\u27s parameters for the avoidance of so-called useless collisions generated from the kangaroo method of solving said problem are restrictive in the number of kangaroos used at any given time. The more relevant of these restrictions to this point is the fact that they require the total number of kangaroos to be odd. Most consumer-level hardware which provides more than a single computational core provides an even number of such cores, so as a result it is likely the utilization of such hardware for this purpose will leave one or more cores idle. While these idle compute cores could also potentially be utilized for other tasks given that we are expressly operating in the context of consumer-level hardware, such considerations are largely outside the scope of this thesis. Besides, with the rate of change consumer computational hardware and software environments have historically changed it seems to be more useful to address the topic on a more purely algorithmic level; at the very least, it is more efficient as less effort needs to be expended future-proofing this thesis against future changes to its context than might have otherwise been necessary

Genocide in Tasmania and Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party

The aim of this paper is to elucidate how the process of the colonisation of Tasmania in the nineteenth century led to a gradual disintegration of its native inhabitants, the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and ended up with an alleged extinction of an entire race. The paper describes conditions on the Tasmanian frontier, and moments of fierce violence that eventually led to such an outcome, and places it in the context of the violence committed by the settlers in the whole of Australia, showing that there existed a pattern. What is elaborated further is how the violence in Tasmania came to be represented in historiography, from the discourses that saw Tasmania as the site of the extinction of a weaker race to the notion of Tasmania as a site of genocide committed by the British Empire. Fierce debates, especially in the last 40 years, point to the issues in defining Tasmania as a site of genocide, and whether such a definition can be applied in this case. It explains why Tasmania can be seen as a site of genocide, even though it does not conform entirely to the definition of genocide provided by the UN Convention on Genocide. The paper further provides an analysis of Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party, novel that deals with a particularly violent moment from Tasmania’s history. The analysis of the novel shows how the events described in the novel can be seen as a part of a bigger process – of the ongoing process of genocide

Computing Discrete Logarithms in an Interval

The discrete logarithm problem in an interval of size $N$ in a group $G$ is: Given $g, h \in G$ and an integer $N$ to find an integer $0 \le n \le N$, if it exists, such that $h = g^n$. Previously the best low-storage algorithm to solve this problem was the van Oorschot and Wiener version of the Pollard kangaroo method. The heuristic average case running time of this method is $(2 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. We present two new low-storage algorithms for the discrete logarithm problem in an interval of size $N$. The first algorithm is based on the Pollard kangaroo method, but uses 4 kangaroos instead of the usual two. We explain why this algorithm has heuristic average case expected running time of $(1.715 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. The second algorithm is based on the Gaudry-Schost algorithm and the ideas of our first algorithm. We explain why this algorithm has heuristic average case expected running time of $(1.661 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. We give experimental results that show that the methods do work close to that predicted by the theoretical analysis. This is a revised version since the published paper that contains a corrected proof of Theorem 6 (the statement of Theorem 6 is unchanged). We thank Ravi Montenegro for pointing out the errors