Measuring third party tracker power across web and mobile

Third-party networks collect vast amounts of data about users via web sites and mobile applications. Consolidations among tracker companies can significantly increase their individual tracking capabilities, prompting scrutiny by competition regulators. Traditional measures of market share, based on revenue or sales, fail to represent the tracking capability of a tracker, especially if it spans both web and mobile. This paper proposes a new approach to measure the concentration of tracking capability, based on the reach of a tracker on popular websites and apps. Our results reveal that tracker prominence and parent-subsidiary relationships have significant impact on accurately measuring concentration

Telecommunication reforms, access regulation, and Internet adoption in Latin America

The authors review the stylized facts on regulatory reform in telecommunications and its effects on telecommunications development and Internet penetration in Latin America. Relying on data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Information for Development Program (InfoDev), and the World Bank for 1990-99, the authors then test econometrically the determinants of the differences in Internet penetration rates across Latin America. The results show that effective implementation of the reform agenda in telecommunications regulation could accelerate adoption of the Internet in Latin America-even though it is only part of the solution (income levels, income distribution, and access to primary infrastructure are the main determinants of growth in Internet connections and use). Regulation will work by cutting costs. Cost cutting will require that regulators in the region take a much closer look at the design of interconnection rules and at the tradeoffs that emerge from the complex issues involved. It will also require a commitment to developing analytical instruments, such as cost models, to sort out many of the problems. Appropriate cost models will generate benchmarks that are much more consistent with the local issues and with the local cost of capital than international benchmarks will ever be for countries in unstable macroeconomic situations. Cost cutting will require an equally strong commitment to imposing regulatory accounting systems that reduce the information asymmetrics that incumbents use to reduce the risks of entry. All these changes will ultimately require a stronger commitment by competition agencies, since in many countries a failure to negotiate interconnection agreements will raise competition issues just as often as it will raise regulatory questions.Rural Communications,Information Technology,Telecommunications Infrastructure,Knowledge Economy,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Knowledge Economy,Information Technology,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Rural Communications,Education for the Knowledge Economy

The Sussex occupation and the privatisation of university education

The outsourcing of campus services is part of a wider process where UK universities are becoming more like businesses. Private companies are moving into the sector, facilitated by government. This is to the detriment of employees, campus community and collective dialogue. Privatisation is spreading to academia, and learning is becoming less about social benefit and the value of education, and more about what’s commercially profitable. This will change the shape and content of the curriculum

Internet economics and policy: An Australian perspective

Publicly available information indicates that the demand and supply of Internet and Internet-related services are continuing to expand at a rapid pace. Since 1997 the number of Internet service providers (facilities-based and resellers) has increased by nearly 40 per cent; the number of points-of-presence per Internet service provider has increased by five times; the number of hosts connected to the Internet has more than quadrupled; and Internet traffic has increased from six to 10 times. The emergence of electronic commerce (e-commerce), driven by this rapid adoption of Internet services and continual technological innovation, is likely to have profound economic and social impacts on Australian society. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the impact of the Internet and e-commerce, ranging from the changes in the market structure of the telecommunications industry, its role in changing the organisation of traditional markets, the emergence of new markets, and the structural shifts to employment, productivity and trade. The paper also analyses contemporary Australian regulatory responses. IIe-commerce; internet economics

Iowa Public Television’s Planning Targets 2011-2014

Agency Performance Plan, Iowa Public Televisio

Food on Wheels: Mobile Vending Goes Mainstream

Mobile food vending generates approximately $650 million in revenue annually. The industry is projected to account for approximately$2.7 billion in food revenue over the next five years, but unfortunately, most cities are legally ill-equipped to harness this expansion. Many city ordinances were written decades ago, with a different type of mobile food supplier in mind, like ice cream trucks, hot dog carts, sidewalk peddlers, and similar operators. Modern mobile vending is a substantial departure from the vending typically assumed in outdated local regulations. Vendors utilize large vehicles packed with high-tech cooking equipment and sanitation devices to provide sophisticated, safe food usually prepared to order. Increasingly, city leaders are recognizing that food trucks are here to stay. They also recognize that there is no "one size fits all" prescription for how to most effectively incorporate food trucks into the fabric of a community. With the intent of helping city leaders with this task, this guide examines the following questions: What policy options do local governments have to regulate food trucks? What is the best way to incorporate food trucks into the fabric of a city, taking into account the preferences of all stakeholders?Thirteen cities of varying size and geographic location were analyzed for this study. Information on vending regulations within each of these cities was collected and analyzed, and supplemented with semi-structured interviews with city staff and food truck vendors

Performance-oriented Cloud Provisioning: Taxonomy and Survey

Cloud computing is being viewed as the technology of today and the future. Through this paradigm, the customers gain access to shared computing resources located in remote data centers that are hosted by cloud providers (CP). This technology allows for provisioning of various resources such as virtual machines (VM), physical machines, processors, memory, network, storage and software as per the needs of customers. Application providers (AP), who are customers of the CP, deploy applications on the cloud infrastructure and then these applications are used by the end-users. To meet the fluctuating application workload demands, dynamic provisioning is essential and this article provides a detailed literature survey of dynamic provisioning within cloud systems with focus on application performance. The well-known types of provisioning and the associated problems are clearly and pictorially explained and the provisioning terminology is clarified. A very detailed and general cloud provisioning classification is presented, which views provisioning from different perspectives, aiding in understanding the process inside-out. Cloud dynamic provisioning is explained by considering resources, stakeholders, techniques, technologies, algorithms, problems, goals and more.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Mobile Edge Computing Empowers Internet of Things

In this paper, we propose a Mobile Edge Internet of Things (MEIoT) architecture by leveraging the fiber-wireless access technology, the cloudlet concept, and the software defined networking framework. The MEIoT architecture brings computing and storage resources close to Internet of Things (IoT) devices in order to speed up IoT data sharing and analytics. Specifically, the IoT devices (belonging to the same user) are associated to a specific proxy Virtual Machine (VM) in the nearby cloudlet. The proxy VM stores and analyzes the IoT data (generated by its IoT devices) in real-time. Moreover, we introduce the semantic and social IoT technology in the context of MEIoT to solve the interoperability and inefficient access control problem in the IoT system. In addition, we propose two dynamic proxy VM migration methods to minimize the end-to-end delay between proxy VMs and their IoT devices and to minimize the total on-grid energy consumption of the cloudlets, respectively. Performance of the proposed methods are validated via extensive simulations

MANAGING IT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR INFORMATION SOCIETY DEVELOPMENT. THE ALBANIAN CASE

Information has become an important element without which society cannot achieve its objectives. The term “information society” is increasingly used nowadays, instead of the terms “production” or “consumption society”, because of the importance and necessity of information in today's dynamic environment. Since IT became commercial in the early 1990s, it has diffused rapidly in developed countries but generally slowly in developing ones. The ICT development requires preparation, largely in the form of investment in network infrastructure, skills and regulatory frameworks. So the physical infrastructure of information systems is one of the important components of the information society. The aim of this paper is to identify ICT infrastructure indicator and to find what factors Albania need to take in consideration for managing ICT infrastructure to compare with other countries for building an information society. Many technological changes have brought new developments in IT infrastructure, such as data and digitalization, packet switching and broadband networks, as well as increased role of wireless and Internet. Albania, as a developing country have tried do benefit in maximum from these developments, focusing in the IT infrastructure management as one of the elements for building information society.ICT, physical infrastructure, e-readiness, IT services