FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability

This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of misbehavior. FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second, limited by the hardware I/O subsystem. Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

Impossible protest: noborders in Calais

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee reception centre in Sangatte, undocumented migrants in Calais hoping to cross the border to Britain have been forced to take refuge in a number of squatted migrant camps, locally known by all as ‘the jungles.’ Unauthorised shanty-like residences built by the migrants themselves, living conditions in the camps are very poor. In June 2009, European ‘noborder’ activists set up a week-long protest camp in the area with the intention of confronting the authorities over their treatment of undocumented migrants. In this article, we analyse the June 2009 noborder camp as an instance of ‘immigrant protest.’ Drawing on ethnographic materials and Jacques Rancière's work on politics and aesthetics, we construct a typology of forms of border control through which to analyse the different ways in which the politics of the noborder camp were staged, performed and policed. Developing a critique of policing practices which threatened to make immigrant protest ‘impossible’, we highlight moments of protest which, through the affirmation of an ‘axiomatic’ equality, disrupted and disarticulated the borders between citizens and non-citizens, the political and non-political

Militant training camp and the aesthetics of civil disobedience

This paper examines the current interest in ‘art activism’ (Grindon 2010), and the relationship between artistic expression and civil disobedience. Boris Groys has argued that the lack of political dissidence within contemporary art is not down to the ineffectiveness of the aesthetic, but the far more effective intrusion of the aesthetic by the political (Groys 2008). As such, the political question of civil disobedience is necessarily an aesthetic one. At the same time, this raises problems for how politically effective artistic dissidence can be. As Grindon argues, if art activism often only mimics ‘real’ social activism, it remains within the boundaries of the gallery system with no real consequences (2010: 11). Most art activism fails to be effective civil disobedience, in this sense, as it already operates within the confines of pre-established curatorial spaces. As such, the use of art for the purposes of civil disobedience cannot be, then, mere aestheticism, but rather must act as ‘an insight into the transformed mechanisms of conquest’ (Groys, in Abdullah & Benzer 2011: 86): a conflict over the topology of disobedience which exposes the interrelation of aesthetics and politics through medium, space and archive. This paper critically assesses attempts in contemporary art to re-appropriate the symbolic dimension of dissidence as an aesthetic; in particular the use of militancy, asceticism and dissidence as an attempt to move beyond mere counter-political protest and towards a reclaiming of aesthetics from the intrusions of politics. It uses as a specific case example Militant Training Camp, a social experimental performance camp held at Arcadia Missa Gallery in London, March 2012. This weeklong performance piece was designed to explore the activity and mind-set of militant groups and the idea of non-pacifist activity within wider social movements. Engaging with not only the tradition of anarchist activism, but also more recent artistic engagements with civil disobedience (such as the Yes Men; Avaaz.org; Bike Bloc), the camp involved a residential ascetic ‘training programme’ followed by a series of violent performances open to the public, often disturbing other sites of protest such as Anarchist theatres and Occupy sites in the process. The paper uses first-hand documentary evidence and critical reflection on the event in order to argue that, as both an act of civil disobedience, and an exploration of the limits of its aesthetic treatment, the event raises two specific issues surrounding the notion of disobedience and its conceptual possibilities. The first issue is the representation of rage within the context of art activism. Here, the performance is discussed with particular reference to Sloterdijk’s arguments that argues that militancy and revolt operate under a ‘thymotic economy’ (2010: 58). However, Sloterdijk’s re-appropriation of the thymotic – a conceptualising of ‘rage’ which is not absorbed within the sublimination of psychology or Habermasian symbolism – is not as simple as offering an alternative, ‘non-symbolic’ rage. Given that modern militancy is always subject to containment (the ‘civility’ of civil disobedience), the second issue raised is the formative role of ‘curating’ acts of disobedience. Using the work of Groys on aesthetics and power, the paper assesses how ‘events’ of civil disobedience such as Militant Training Camp are located, represented, circulated and even stored, and the ways in which they might resist their reduction to or supplementing of a further economy (be it symbolic, banal or simply pious) which conceals the formative ‘rage’ of disobedience

The Impact of Protest Responses in Choice Experiments

Not much attention has been given to protest responses in choice experiments (CE). Using follow-up statements, we are able to identify protest responses and compute welfare estimates with and without the inclusion of such protest responses. We conclude that protest responses are fairly common in CE, and their analysis affects the statistical performance of the empirical models. In particular, when the sample is corrected by protests, our results come from utility consistent models. Thus, future choice experiments should consider the role of protest responses as contingent valuation studies have done.Protest Responses, Choice Experiments

Analyzing the determinants of willingness-to-pay values for testing the validity of the contingent valuation method. Application to home care compared to hospital care

The contingent valuation (CV) method is an attractive approach for comparing home care to hospital care in which the only difference is patients' well-being during the treatment process and not health outcomes. We considered the empirical situation of blood transfusion (BT) in cancer patients and collected willingness to pay (WTP) values among BT users. Our main objective was to test the validity of the CV method, namely its ability to elicit true preferences. Firstly, possible determinants of WTP values and their expected influences were identified, from both economic and non economic literature and from the findings of a pilot study. Secondly, they were compared to predicted influences resulting from appropriate econometric analysis of WTP values elicited by a bidding process. From the health economics literature it appeared that the double-hurdle model is the most appropriate approach to account for zero values and protest responses. However, because the number of protest responses was too small, we used a truncated regression model. None of the 7 hypothesized influences was invalidated by econometric results. The anchoring bias hypothesis was confirmed. The WTP for home BT compared to hospital BT increased with household income, with previous experience of home care, with living far from the hospital and with low quality of life. Conversely, it was lower for advanced-stage (palliative or terminal) than for early-stage (curative) patients. We conclude that the CV approach is acceptable to severely ill patients. Moreover, WTP values demonstrate good validity given that influences predicted by our model are consistent with expected determinants.contingent valuation ; validity ; protest responses ; censored data ; home care

The Regional Development of Democratization and Civil Society: Transition, Consolidation, Hybridization, Globalization - Taiwan and Hungary

Different starting points, similar processes and different outcomes can be identified when comparing East Central Europe and East and South Asia. The two regions face similar global challenges, follow regional patterns of democratization and face crises. In communist times, East Central Europe was economically marginalized in the world economy, while some parts of Asia integrated well in the global economy under authoritarian rule. Europeanization and a favorable external environment encouraged the former communist countries to opt for the Western-style rule of law and democracy. Different external factors helped the Third Wave democracies in Asia, especially South Korea and Taiwan, which benefited from the support of the United States and other global economic, military and cultural partnerships to develop their human rights culture and democracy while facing their totalitarian counterparts, namely the People’s Republic of China and North Korea. The very different positions Taiwan and Hungary have in their respective regions follow from the different capacities of their transformation management since 1988-1989. Taiwan preserved its leading role and stable democracy despite the threat to its sovereignty from the People’s Republic of China. Hungary never had such an influential and problematic neighbor and was ensured security and welfare partnership by the European Union, which Taiwan lacked. While Taiwan was less secure, economic and social conditions were more favorable for democratization than those in Hungary. Hungary, in turn, held a leading position in democratization processes in the period of post-communist transition which was lost during the crisis and conflicts of the last decade (after 2006 and especially since 2010). Despite the fact that liberalization prepared the way for peaceful transition in both countries and resulted in similar processes of democratic consolidation in the 1990s, Hungary joined the ‘loser’ group in its region, whereas Taiwan is among the top ‘winning’ countries in its region. Taiwan at the moment is starting comprehensive reform processes toward enhanced democracy, civil rights and the rule of law, and Hungarian development is criticized by many external and internal analysts as straying from the path of European-style consolidated democracies towards illiberal trends and hybridization. Western global concepts of democratization may help to identify similarities and differences, and compare stronger and weaker factors in the democratic transitions in Asia and Europe within the Third Wave democracies