2 P2P or Not 2 P2P?

In the hope of stimulating discussion, we present a heuristic decision tree that designers can use to judge the likely suitability of a P2P architecture for their applications. It is based on the characteristics of a wide range of P2P systems from the literature, both proposed and deployed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

MOVING TOWARD NEUTRALITY: THE ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE AND AMERICA’S HISTORIC RELIGIOUS PLACES

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from establishing or directly aiding religion. Over the past thirty years, the opinion of the Supreme Court has shifted from a policy of strict separation between church and state to a position of neutrality. Under this policy, one religion is not favored over another and no distinction is made between religious and non-religious groups in secular issues involving aid unspecific to religious worship. This move toward neutrality has directly affected the eligibility of historic active religious places to receive federal funding for historic preservation and conservation. The Supreme Court has ruled that the religious activity of an institution cannot be assumed to be inextricably tied to its secular activity; that connection must be proved. While this reasoning lends itself to educational challenges, it leaves many questions for historic preservation grants, in which it is more difficult to discern the religious from the secular. Can a building be separated from its use? What if the use is divided between the religious and the secular? The site management of these historic religious properties shows a growing trend toward the professionalizing of secular non-profit organizations to navigate these questions and provide a clear public benefit

Towards Tamper-Evident Storage on Patterned Media

We propose a tamper-evident storage system based on probe storage with a patterned magnetic medium. This medium supports normal read/write operations by out-of-plane magnetisation of individual magnetic dots. We report on measurements showing that in principle the medium also supports a separate class of write-once operation that destroys the out-of-plane magnetisation property of the dots irreversibly by precise local heating. We discuss the main issues of designing a tamper-evident storage device and file system using the properties of the medium

MoPS: A Modular Protection Scheme for Long-Term Storage

Current trends in technology, such as cloud computing, allow outsourcing the storage, backup, and archiving of data. This provides efficiency and flexibility, but also poses new risks for data security. It in particular became crucial to develop protection schemes that ensure security even in the long-term, i.e. beyond the lifetime of keys, certificates, and cryptographic primitives. However, all current solutions fail to provide optimal performance for different application scenarios. Thus, in this work, we present MoPS, a modular protection scheme to ensure authenticity and integrity for data stored over long periods of time. MoPS does not come with any requirements regarding the storage architecture and can therefore be used together with existing archiving or storage systems. It supports a set of techniques which can be plugged together, combined, and migrated in order to create customized solutions that fulfill the requirements of different application scenarios in the best possible way. As a proof of concept we implemented MoPS and provide performance measurements. Furthermore, our implementation provides additional features, such as guidance for non-expert users and export functionalities for external verifiers.Comment: Original Publication (in the same form): ASIACCS 201

Biopiracy <i>versus </i>one-world medicine – from colonial relicts to global collaborative concepts

Background: Practices of biopiracy to use genetic resources and indigenous knowledge by Western companies without benefit-sharing of those, who generated the traditional knowledge, can be understood as form of neocolonialism.Hypothesis: : The One-World Medicine concept attempts to merge the best of traditional medicine from developing countries and conventional Western medicine for the sake of patients around the globe.Study design: Based on literature searches in several databases, a concept paper has been written. Legislative initiatives of the United Nations culminated in the Nagoya protocol aim to protect traditional knowledge and regulate benefit-sharing with indigenous communities. The European community adopted the Nagoya protocol, and the corresponding regulations will be implemented into national legislation among the member states. Despite pleasing progress, infrastructural problems of the health care systems in developing countries still remain. Current approaches to secure primary health care offer only fragmentary solutions at best. Conventional medicine from industrialized countries cannot be afforded by the impoverished population in the Third World. Confronted with exploding costs, even health systems in Western countries are endangered to burst. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular among the general public in industrialized countries, although the efficacy is not sufficiently proven according to the standards of evidence-based medicine. CAM is often available without prescription as over-the-counter products with non-calculated risks concerning erroneous self-medication and safety/toxicity issues. The concept of integrative medicine attempts to combine holistic CAM approaches with evidence-based principles of conventional medicine.Conclusion: To realize the concept of One-World Medicine, a number of standards have to be set to assure safety, efficacy and applicability of traditional medicine, e.g. sustainable production and quality control of herbal products, performance of placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized clinical trials, phytovigilance, as well as education of health professionals and patients

International law and resource extraction : the reconstruction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru

Why has there been a sudden upsurge in the politicization of indigenous identities in Latin America? Drawing upon constructivist assumptions of ethnic identity, I find that ILO 169 and the rights contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have been accompanied by a re-construction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru. Communities that are vulnerable to the deleterious effects of natural resource extraction and have historically identified as non-indigenous, despite having an indigenous identity in their identity repertoire, have re-constructed their indigenous identity as part of a strategy to maintain tenure over traditional lands, but only after the fact that power and rights have been awarded to these communities by international bodies of law and national legal frameworks alike. That is, bodies of law can activate an indigenous cleavage under a condition of grievance.Governmen

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd

The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode, Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation, are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of privacy-preserving software monitoring. (cont.; see the paper