A forensics software toolkit for DNA steganalysis.

Recent advances in genetic engineering have allowed the insertion of artificial DNA strands into the living cells of organisms. Several methods have been developed to insert information into a DNA sequence for the purpose of data storage, watermarking, or communication of secret messages. The ability to detect, extract, and decode messages from DNA is important for forensic data collection and for data security. We have developed a software toolkit that is able to detect the presence of a hidden message within a DNA sequence, extract that message, and then decode it. The toolkit is able to detect, extract, and decode messages that have been encoded with a variety of different coding schemes. The goal of this project is to enable our software toolkit to determine with which coding scheme a message has been encoded in DNA and then to decode it. The software package is able to decode messages that have been encoded with every variation of most of the coding schemes described in this document. The software toolkit has two different options for decoding that can be selected by the user. The first is a frequency analysis approach that is very commonly used in cryptanalysis. This approach is very fast, but is unable to decode messages shorter than 200 words accurately. The second option is using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) in combination with a Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) technique. This approach is very time consuming, but can decode shorter messages with much higher accuracy

Social Turing Tests: Crowdsourcing Sybil Detection

As popular tools for spreading spam and malware, Sybils (or fake accounts) pose a serious threat to online communities such as Online Social Networks (OSNs). Today, sophisticated attackers are creating realistic Sybils that effectively befriend legitimate users, rendering most automated Sybil detection techniques ineffective. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a crowdsourced Sybil detection system for OSNs. We conduct a large user study on the ability of humans to detect today's Sybil accounts, using a large corpus of ground-truth Sybil accounts from the Facebook and Renren networks. We analyze detection accuracy by both "experts" and "turkers" under a variety of conditions, and find that while turkers vary significantly in their effectiveness, experts consistently produce near-optimal results. We use these results to drive the design of a multi-tier crowdsourcing Sybil detection system. Using our user study data, we show that this system is scalable, and can be highly effective either as a standalone system or as a complementary technique to current tools

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Providing detection strategies to improve human detection of deepfakes: An experimental study

Deepfake videos are becoming more pervasive. In this preregistered online experiment, participants (N = 454, Mage = 37.19, SDage = 13.25, males = 57.5%) categorize a series of 20 videos as either real or deepfake. All participants saw 10 real and 10 deepfake videos. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a list of strategies for detecting deepfakes based on visual cues (e.g., looking for common artifacts such as skin smoothness) or to act as a control group. Participants were also asked how confident they were that they categorized each video correctly (per video confidence) and to estimate how many videos they correctly categorized out of 20 (overall confidence). The sample performed above chance on the detection activity, correctly categorizing 60.70% of videos on average (SD = 13.00). The detection strategies intervention did not impact detection accuracy or detection confidence, with the intervention and control groups performing similarly on the detection activity and showing similar levels of confidence. Inconsistent with previous research, the study did not find that participants had a bias toward categorizing videos as real. Participants overestimated their ability to detect deepfakes at the individual video level. However, they tended to underestimate their abilities on the overall confidence question

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Sin city Kentucky : Newport, Kentucky\u27s vice heritage and its legal extinction, 1920-1991.

This thesis is an examination and analysis of the role of law enforcement in the transformation of a city\u27s downtown from one dominated by sleazy strip bars and prostitutes to one of family entertainment. The focus is on the police and prosecutors; however, a substantial portion of the thesis discusses the role of Newport, Kentucky\u27s, City Commission. The thesis chronicles Newport\u27s vice history from early Prohibition through the early 1990s and the impact of city government upon anti-vice efforts becomes evident, but law enforcement that paved the way. The approach is chronological. Newport\u27s transformation was an evolutionary process. Elected officials influenced the city\u27s vice problems, but state legislative changes and United States Supreme Court cases also had a part in the course of anti-vice efforts. Changes in the law and court cases often gave city officials and law enforcement direction in the regulation and prosecution of illegal vices

Community-Based Internet Usage Policy Development

The Internet is a tool for learning and obtaining a vast amount of information, but it is a tool which also has associated problems. The number of risks associated with the internet has been increasing both in number and in danger. As a result, protection measures must be developed to minimize the risks. One of the most important groups of such measures are Internet Usage Policies. An Internet Usage Policy addresses the problem by providing a set of guideline to be followed which minimize the risks. This dissertation investigates the development of Internet Usage Policy with the assistance of the groups that will be affected directly by the Policy. Survey techniques will be used to gather domain requirements and help shape development of policy