The Domination of the English Language in the Global Village: Efforts to Further Develop the Internet By Populating It With Non-Latin-Based Languages

At the top of the homepage of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a choice of nine different languages in which to read information about the organization; four of them are languages written in non-Latin script (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian). Clicking upon any of the language options brings the reader to a new website in that language and, presuming the reader has a computer and screen that can handle non-Latin script, the webpage reads legibly and clearly. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL), however, still reads in Latin script despite the webpage’s content being in a foreign script. This article will examine the current state of affairs in policy-oriented Internet realms and suggest that the cohesive development of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), which are domain names in character sets other than American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), is a critical step to take in order to more fully utilize the potential the Internet offers for international communication

Best practices for publishing linked data

Este documento establece una serie de buenas prácticas destinadas a facilitar el desarrollo y la entrega de los datos de gobierno abierto como Linked Open Data. Linked Open Data convierte a la World Wide Web en una base de datos global, a veces denominada como "Web de datos". Utilizando los principios de Linked Data, los desarrolladores pueden consultar datos enlazados provenientes de múltiples fuentes a la vez y combinarlos sin la necesidad de un único esquema común que todos los datos comparten. Anteriormente a las normas internacionales para el intercambio de datos para datos en la Web, construir aplicaciones utilizando técnicas tradicionales de gestión de datos era lento y difícil. Dado que se publican en la web cada vez más los datos de gobierno abierto, las buenas prácticas están evolucionando también. El objetivo de este documento es compilar las prácticas de gestión de los datos más relevantes para la publicación y uso de datos de alta calidad publicados por los gobiernos de todo el mundo como Linked Open Data.W3

A Practical Study of E-mail Communication through SMTP

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an application layer protocol for e-mail communication. It has been adopted as a standard by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). SMTP has set conversational and grammatical rules for exchanging messages between connected computers. It has evolved through several revisions and extensions since its formation by Jon Postel in 1981. In SMTP, the sender establishes a full-duplex transmission channel with a receiver. The receiver may be either the ultimate destination or an intermediate forwarding agent. SMTP commands are issued by the sender and are sent to the receiver, which responds to these commands through codes. Each SMTP session between the sender and the receiver consists of three phases namely: connection establishment, mail transactions and connection termination. This paper describes and illustrates the process of e-mail communication through SMTP by issuing the individual SMTP commands directly to transmit e-mail messages. It also describes individual SMTP commands and extensions with practical implementation using a Telnet client

Social media as a data gathering tool for international business qualitative research: opportunities and challenges

Lusophone African (LA) multinational enterprises (MNEs) are becoming a significant pan-African and global economic force regarding their international presence and influence. However, given the extreme poverty and lack of development in their home markets, many LA enterprises seeking to internationalize lack resources and legitimacy in international markets. Compared to higher income emerging markets, Lusophone enterprises in Africa face more significant challenges in their internationalization efforts. Concomitantly, conducting significant international business (IB) research in these markets to understand these MNEs internationalization strategies can be a very daunting task. The fast-growing rise of social media on the Internet, however, provides an opportunity for IB researchers to examine new phenomena in these markets in innovative ways. Unfortunately, for various reasons, qualitative researchers in IB have not fully embraced this opportunity. This article studies the use of social media in qualitative research in the field of IB. It offers an illustrative case based on qualitative research on internationalization modes of LAMNEs conducted by the authors in Angola and Mozambique using social media to identify and qualify the population sample, as well as interact with subjects and collect data. It discusses some of the challenges of using social media in those regions of Africa and suggests how scholars can design their studies to capitalize on social media and corresponding data as a tool for qualitative research. This article underscores the potential opportunities and challenges inherent in the use of social media in IB-oriented qualitative research, providing recommendations on how qualitative IB researchers can design their studies to capitalize on data generated by social media.https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406https://doi.org/10.1080/15475778.2019.1634406Accepted manuscriptPublished versio

Successful Marketing Strategies for Promoting Event Destinations

Travel and tourism has been recognized as being an important driver of jobs, growth and economic recovery in the United States. Meetings, events and incentive travel contribute $98.7 billion of the direct spending,$15.0 billion in taxes and 859,000 jobs. As a result, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) in the United States are taking advantage of this impact for growth in their destinations. As a destination marketing organization\u27s main job responsibility is to promote their destination to attract visitors, which requires superior marketing strategies to achieve these goals. This research investigates the marketing strategies of DMOs in the United States. The specific purposes of the paper are: (1) to explore the incentives and marketing strategies used by DMOs to attract clients to a destination (2) to explore the importance of the strategic marketing features on a destination\u27s desirability and (3) to provide the most effective destination marketing strategies for promoting a destination. The data for this study were obtained by way of a survey and documentation. The target population for this study was DMOs in the United States of America and the unit of analysis was each individual DMO. The sample limitation for this study was destinations with populations less than 300,000. The sample selection acquired from the DMAI membership list for this study was a convenience sample consisting of 142 DMOs. Out of 142 surveys, 19 were collected and 13 were usable. Therefore, the data from 13 respondents were analyzed in this study. Descriptive statistics (Mean, Percentage, and Frequencies) were used to analyze the data collected for this study. The results of the research reveal the importance of when DMOs are developing the marketing strategies for promoting their destination, there are some key elements that should be involved in their planning for success in attracting groups, (1) incorporating valued incentives, (2) using the most effective marketing strategies such as word-of-mouth and (3) enhancing and promoting the features of their destination, such as accessibility, cost of living, attractions, facilities and services, and image, brand and perception

Internationalizing the Japanese classroom with computer-mediated instruction

The goal of this project is to design an effective way for Japanese high school students to improve their English communication skills through internationalized, computer-mediated instruction

Disentangling international research collaboration in the Spanish academic context: Is there a desirable researcher human capital profile?

A number of studies has focused on examining those academic researchers attributes-demographics or not- that condition international research collaboration (IRC) and its results. However, it is not possible to speak about an ‘ideal’ type of researcher so far. Should we assume that just only those ‘star researchers’ collaborate internationally?. The literature is not clear enough on this topic, offering interesting but insufficient support to know the set of individual characteristics that ensures fruitful IRC. To deepen the analysis of academic researchers attributes, in particular, the human capital characteristics, this study proposes in-depth research on exploring different combinations on human capital dimensions and testing potential differences in IRC levels. To do so, from an exploratory perspective, a cluster analysis was conducted in a sample of 937 Spanish academics, obtaining three researcher profiles: (1) consolidated international research collaborators, (2) effective international research collaborators, and (3) skilled international research collaborators. Far from the recurrent analysis of single or disconnected researchers' attributes, this paper contributes to the extant literature with a new typology based on the variables of academic human capital, providing an useful starting point to better understand who really can develop international networks to collaborate and, therefore, how to foster IRC in Universitie

U.S. apparel retailers' international expansion: an application of the Uppsala model.

The purpose of this study is to elucidate U.S. apparel retailers' internationalization by proposing a theoretical framework that incorporates the antecedents of U.S. apparel retail firms' international market involvement and investigating the effects of international activities on firm performance. Data were collected via a self-administered questionnaire completed by U.S. apparel retailers nationwide. A total of 81 usable questionnaires were collected based on Dillman, Smyth, and Christian (2009)'s Mixed-mode Survey technique. The respondents were predominantly small firms (n = 76, 93.8%) that had fewer than 500 employees. Of these 81 firms, 30 firms currently sell their products or services outside the U.S. market. The first international market for half of the firms was Canada and more than half the firms had attained their first international sales via online (n = 16, 53.3%). Measures were assessed using a 7-point Likert-type scale, a dichotomous variable, and continuous variables. A series of regression models were performed to test all hypotheses. The results indicated that apparel retailers who have more foreign networking are likely to have market knowledge about foreign markets. Firm age and market knowledge (i.e., firm-specific factors) were found as significant factors in categorizing companies as being either involved or not involved in the international market of the apparel retail environment. The results further revealed that market knowledge mediates the relationship between foreign networking and international market involvement. The findings also indicated that although the effect is weak, apparel retailers that expanded internationally at younger ages are likely to demonstrate better firm performance in foreign markets compared to their counterparts. Firms who have had longer experience in foreign markets reveal better firm performance than firms who have had shorter experience in foreign markets. This study contributes to the growing knowledge base about retailers' international expansion in the apparel industry and fills a gap in the literature about the U.S. apparel retailers' international expansion. The findings can provide information related to the specific status of U.S. apparel firms' current internationalization process and serve as useful references to U.S. apparel companies that consider their growth opportunities to include internationalization. The findings and limitations of this study suggest some interesting directions for future research

Understanding Flaws in the Deployment and Implementation of Web Encryption

In recent years, the web has switched from using the unencrypted HTTP protocol to using encrypted communications. Primarily, this resulted in increasing deployment of TLS to mitigate information leakage over the network. This development has led many web service operators to mistakenly think that migrating from HTTP to HTTPS will magically protect them from information leakage without any additional effort on their end to guar- antee the desired security properties. In reality, despite the fact that there exists enough infrastructure in place and the protocols have been “tested” (by virtue of being in wide, but not ubiquitous, use for many years), deploying HTTPS is a highly challenging task due to the technical complexity of its underlying protocols (i.e., HTTP, TLS) as well as the complexity of the TLS certificate ecosystem and this of popular client applications such as web browsers. For example, we found that many websites still avoid ubiquitous encryption and force only critical functionality and sensitive data access over encrypted connections while allowing more innocuous functionality to be accessed over HTTP. In practice, this approach is prone to flaws that can expose sensitive information or functionality to third parties. Thus, it is crucial for developers to verify the correctness of their deployments and implementations. In this dissertation, in an effort to improve users’ privacy, we highlight semantic flaws in the implementations of both web servers and clients, caused by the improper deployment of web encryption protocols. First, we conduct an in-depth assessment of major websites and explore what functionality and information is exposed to attackers that have hijacked a user’s HTTP cookies. We identify a recurring pattern across websites with partially de- ployed HTTPS, namely, that service personalization inadvertently results in the exposure of private information. The separation of functionality across multiple cookies with different scopes and inter-dependencies further complicates matters, as imprecise access control renders restricted account functionality accessible to non-secure cookies. Our cookie hijacking study reveals a number of severe flaws; for example, attackers can obtain the user’s saved address and visited websites from e.g., Google, Bing, and Yahoo allow attackers to extract the contact list and send emails from the user’s account. To estimate the extent of the threat, we run measurements on a university public wireless network for a period of 30 days and detect over 282K accounts exposing the cookies required for our hijacking attacks. Next, we explore and study security mechanisms purposed to eliminate this problem by enforcing encryption such as HSTS and HTTPS Everywhere. We evaluate each mechanism in terms of its adoption and effectiveness. We find that all mechanisms suffer from implementation flaws or deployment issues and argue that, as long as servers continue to not support ubiquitous encryption across their entire domain, no mechanism can effectively protect users from cookie hijacking and information leakage. Finally, as the security guarantees of TLS (in turn HTTPS), are critically dependent on the correct validation of X.509 server certificates, we study hostname verification, a critical component in the certificate validation process. We develop HVLearn, a novel testing framework to verify the correctness of hostname verification implementations and use HVLearn to analyze a number of popular TLS libraries and applications. To this end, we found 8 unique violations of the RFC specifications. Several of these violations are critical and can render the affected implementations vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks