Facebook on College Campuses: Usage and Opinions of the Social Networking Site among College Students

Social Networking sites have emerged as college students’ number one source of communication. Facebook, ranked the number one SNS among college students, has gone from a student-only environment to the general public. In addition to exploring how college students are using the sire, I explore if students sex and year in school play a significant role in opinions about the site and how it is being used. Through a sample of 149 undergraduate college students, findings suggest that students seem to be using Facebook in the same ways and for the same reasons with little variation. Furthermore, my research proves that certain opinions of Facebook vary with students’ sex and year in school by older students have strong opinions of who is using the site and negative implications with females being more cautious of their privacy

How Teenagers Deal with their Privacy on Social Network Sites? Results from a National Survey in France

This paper proposes to examine the case of privacy concerns and privacy management for teenagers on Social Network Sites, according to a national survey being carried out in France since January 2008 by two University research teams in management sciences, sociology and computing, for the French National Postal Service.

KASR: A Reliable and Practical Approach to Attack Surface Reduction of Commodity OS Kernels

Commodity OS kernels have broad attack surfaces due to the large code base and the numerous features such as device drivers. For a real-world use case (e.g., an Apache Server), many kernel services are unused and only a small amount of kernel code is used. Within the used code, a certain part is invoked only at runtime while the rest are executed at startup and/or shutdown phases in the kernel's lifetime run. In this paper, we propose a reliable and practical system, named KASR, which transparently reduces attack surfaces of commodity OS kernels at runtime without requiring their source code. The KASR system, residing in a trusted hypervisor, achieves the attack surface reduction through a two-step approach: (1) reliably depriving unused code of executable permissions, and (2) transparently segmenting used code and selectively activating them. We implement a prototype of KASR on Xen-4.8.2 hypervisor and evaluate its security effectiveness on Linux kernel-4.4.0-87-generic. Our evaluation shows that KASR reduces the kernel attack surface by 64% and trims off 40% of CVE vulnerabilities. Besides, KASR successfully detects and blocks all 6 real-world kernel rootkits. We measure its performance overhead with three benchmark tools (i.e., SPECINT, httperf and bonnie++). The experimental results indicate that KASR imposes less than 1% performance overhead (compared to an unmodified Xen hypervisor) on all the benchmarks.Comment: The work has been accepted at the 21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses 201

Development and Maintenance of Self-Disclosure on Facebook: The Role of Personality Traits

This study explored the relationships between Facebook self-disclosure and personality traits in a sample of Italian users. The aim was to analyze the predictive role of Big Five personality traits on different parameters of breadth and depth of selfdisclosed behaviors online. Facebook users, aged between 18 and 64 years of age (Mage = 25.3 years, SD = 6.8; N = 958), of which 51% were female, voluntarily completed an online survey assessing personality traits and Facebook self-disclosure. Results at a series of hierarchical regression analyses significantly corroborated the hypotheses that high extroverted and openness people tend to disclose on Facebook a significant amount of personal information, whereas high consciousness and agreeableness users are less inclined to do it. Furthermore, more extroverts and agreeableness people develop less intimacy on Facebook, differently from those with high levels of openness. Results also corroborated the hypothesis of a full mediation of time usage in the relationship between personality factors such as extroversion and conscientiousness with breadth of Facebook self-disclosure. Overall, according to the findings of the current study, personality traits and Facebook self-disclosure become central both as predictive variables for depicting the different profiles of potential addicted and as variables to help educators, teachers, and clinicians to develop training or therapeutic programs aimed at preventing the risk of Internet addiction. Limitations of the study are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested

Elite Tweets: Analysing the Twitter Communication Patterns of Labour Party Peers in the House of Lords

The micro-blogging platform Twitter has gained notoriety for its status as both a communication channel between private individuals, and as a public forum monitored by journalists, the public, and the state. Its potential application for political communication has not gone unnoticed; politicians have used Twitter to attract voters, interact with constituencies and advance issue-based campaigns. This article reports on the preliminary results of the research team’s work with 21 peers sitting on the Labour frontbench. It is based on the monitoring and archival of the peers’ activity on Twitter for a period of 100 days from 16th May to 28th September 2012. Using a sample of more than 4,363 tweets and a mixed methodology combining semantic analysis, social network analysis and quantitative analysis, this paper explores the peers’ patterns of usage and communication on Twitter. Key findings are that as a tweeting community their behavior is consistent with others, however there is evidence that a coherent strategy is lacking. Labour peers tend to work in ego networks of self-interest as opposed to working together to promote party polic

The phone as a tool for combining online and offline social activity – teenagers’ phone access to an online community

We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more private compared to the computer, but teens do share the use when they want to. The cell phone bridges the online and offline social communities and allows teens to participate in both at the same time. The online community is not only a place for social activity online, it is also a social activity offline that is carried out face-to-face with friends. The cell phone thus was a tool for the teens to combine their participation in the online and the offline world

Bitcoin: the wrong implementation of the right idea at the right time

This paper is a study into some of the regulatory implications of cryptocurrencies using the CAMPO research framework (Context, Actors, Methods, Methods, Practice, Outcomes). We explain in CAMPO format why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. We are hopeful that the full paper will produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, block chains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of current ‘media darling’ currency Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain generator Ethereum. While virtual currencies can play a role in creating better trading conditions in virtual communities, despite the risks of non-sovereign issuance and therefore only regulation by code (Brown/Marsden 2013), the methodology used poses significant challenges to researching this ‘community’, if BitCoin can even be said to have created a single community, as opposed to enabling an alternate method of exchange for potentially all virtual community transactions. First, BitCoin users have transparency of ownership but anonymity in many transactions, necessary for libertarians or outright criminals in such illicit markets as #SilkRoad. Studying community dynamics is therefore made much more difficult than even such pseudonymous or avatar based communities as Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft or SecondLife. The ethical implications of studying such communities raise similar problems as those of Tor, Anonymous, Lulzsec and other anonymous hacker communities. Second, the journalistic accounts of BitCoin markets are subject to sensationalism, hype and inaccuracy, even more so than in the earlier hype cycle for SecondLife, exacerbated by the first issue of anonymity. Third, the virtual currency area is subject to slowly emerging regulation by financial authorities and police forces, which appears to be driving much of the early adopter community ‘underground’. Thus, the community in 2016 may not bear much resemblance to that in 2012. Fourth, there has been relatively little academic empirical study of the community, or indeed of virtual currencies in general, until relatively recently. Fifth, the dynamism of the virtual currency environment in the face of the deepening mistrust of the financial system after the 2008 crisis is such that any research conclusions must by their nature be provisional and transient. All these challenges, particularly the final three, also raise the motivation for research – an alternative financial system which is separated from the real-world sovereign and which can use code regulation with limited enforcement from offline policing, both returns the study to the libertarian self-regulated environment of early 1990s MUDs, and offers a tantalising prospect of a tool to evade the perils of ‘private profit, socialized risk’ which existing large financial institutions created in the 2008-12 disaster. The need for further research into virtual currencies based on blockchain mining, and for their usage by virtual communities, is thus pressing and should motivate researchers to solve the many problems in methodology for exploring such an environment

MEPs online: Understanding communication strategies for remote representatives

This article explores the use of the Internet by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), assessing the adoption of online communication as well as its strategic uses. In particular we analysed the websites, weblogs and social networking site profiles of all MEPs who linked to an online presence from the European parliament homepage, a total of 440 MEPs representing all 27 member nations. Through a thorough analysis of the content using a scheme designed to record the presence and functionality of 103 specific features and tools and recency of updates, we assess how MEPs use the Internet to connect with a range of audiences; from journalists to loyal supporters. We find MEPs embracing a range of features which would be appealing to a wide range of different visitors. There is a minor generational divide among MEPs based both on their age and the length of time their country has been a member of the European Union. However overall we suggest there is an ebb and flow of innovation within the online political communication of these parliamentarians

CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research

This whitepaper describes the major IT challenges in scientific research at CERN and several other European and international research laboratories and projects. Each challenge is exemplified through a set of concrete use cases drawn from the requirements of large-scale scientific programs. The paper is based on contributions from many researchers and IT experts of the participating laboratories and also input from the existing CERN openlab industrial sponsors. The views expressed in this document are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their organisations and/or affiliates

A Social-Centred Gamification Approach to Improve Household Water Use Efficiency

The research community is showing a growing interest in gamification and there are works showing the usefulness of gamification in different problem domains. Recently, a special interest has been given to the gamification design on systems addressing natural resource consumption issues such as to encourage efficient household water consumption. Despite the potential benefits, the gamification design method for such system is not conclusive. In this paper, we proposed a social-centred gamification approach to improve household water use efficiency. The approach firstly identified the water use related social network activities based upon existing popular social network activities. The approach then gamified each identified activity in terms of traditional instruments for improving water use efficiency and gamification rewards. The approach also used a set of indicators to explicitly detect and monitor both online social network activities and offline water use activities. With this approach the gamification effectiveness can be better traced and evaluated.ISS-EWATUS, Integrated Support System for Efficient Water Usage and Resources Management, FP7 project (grant no. 619228), funded by the European Communit