Web Science emerges

The relentless rise in Web pages and links is creating emergent properties, from social networks to virtual identity theft, that are transforming society. A new discipline, Web Science, aims to discover how Web traits arise and how they can be harnessed or held in check to benefit society. Important advances are beginning to be made; more work can solve major issues such as securing privacy and conveying trust

Goals and Strategies of Peasants in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia

Multidisciplinary research methods such as observatory, participatory and multivariate regression analysis were employed to examine goals and strategies of two peasant communities in the Central highlands of Ethiopia. Continuing the family tradition of participating in social networks is found to be a universal normative goal of most study farmers. Securing subsistence food requirements and goals that may be used to characterise higher level of standard of living were ranked next to the normative goal. Five major goals were examined in relation to the normative goal. Furthermore, strategies identified by households were grouped into opportunistic, risk-minimization and long-range planning. Statistical analysis of relationship between the five goals and strategies indicate that i) most strategies are relatively important in attaining goals selected for statistical analysis, ii) strategies which are proven to be useful from prior experience of other producers prior to this study tend to have a stronger relationship with the current goals of decision-makers (e.g. pesticides and fertilizer ), iii) the ranking of goals and strategies recognize region, enterprise and experience-specific comparative advantages of peasants, and iv) producers rank strategies hierarchically and goals ranked high in the hierarchy are valued high on subsequent goals (e.g. securing subsistence on livestock husbandry). Development projects could successfully increase the attainment of securing food self-sufficiency if they properly identify comparative advantages of farmers and regions, and examine the compatibility of intervention strategies with the goals and strategies of peasants.Multidisciplinary; multivariate regression; Ethiopia; social networks; opportunistic; risk-minimization; long-range planning; peasants; hierarchical ranking; intervention strategies; goals and strategies

Securing email through online social networks

Despite being one of the most basic and popular Internet applications, email still largely lacks user-to-user cryptographic protections. From a research perspective, designing privacy preserving techniques for email services is complicated by the requirement of balancing security and ease-of-use needs of everyday users. For example, users cannot be expected to manage long-term keys (e.g., PGP keypair), or understand crypto primitives. To enable intuitive email protections for a large number of users, we design FriendlyMail by leveraging existing pre-authenticated relationships between a sender and receiver on an Online Social Networking (OSN) site, so that users can send secure emails without requiring direct key exchange with the receiver in advance. FriendlyMail can provide integrity, authentication and confidentiality guarantees for user-selected messages among OSN friends. FriendlyMail is mainly based on splitting the trust without introducing new trusted third parties. A confidentiality-protected email is encrypted by a randomly-generated key and sent through email service providers, while the key and hash of the encrypted content are privately shared with the receiver via the OSN site as a second secure channel. Our implementation consists of a Firefox addon and a Facebook application, and can secure the web-based Gmail service using Facebook as the OSN site. However, the design can be implemented for preferred email/OSN services as long as the email and OSN providers are non-colluding parties. FriendlyMail is a client-end solution and does not require changes to email or OSN servers

A Privacy-Preserving Social P2P Infrastructure for People-Centric Sensing

The rapid miniaturization and integration of sensor technologies into mobile Internet devices combined with Online Social Networks allows for enhanced sensor information querying, subscription, and task placement within People-Centric Sensing networks. However, PCS systems which exploit knowledge about OSN user profiles and context information for enhanced service provision might cause an unsolicited application and dissemination of highly personal and sensitive data. In this paper, we propose a protocol extension to our OSN design Vegas which enables secure, privacy-preserving, and trustful P2P communication between PCS participants. By securing knowledge about social links with standard public key cryptography, we achieve a degree of anonymity at a trust level which is almost good as that provided by a centralized trusted third party

Enterprising women: independence, finance and Virago Press, c.1976-1993

Virago Press were established in 1972 and became one of the twentieth century’s most enduring publishing brands. As a women-led enterprise, articulations of independence have defined key moments in Virago’s history. This article explores two moments when the company re-structured as independent, in 1976 and 1987. To become successful, Virago had to overcome barriers that have historically hindered women’s participation in business, namely limited social capital and difficulties accessing finance. Virago founder Carmen Callil’s friendships with publisher Paul Hamlyn and printing entrepreneur Robert Gavron embedded Virago in networks of male entrepreneurial knowledge that helped shape the evolution of the company. Such networks were vital to Virago securing investment from Rothschilds Ventures Limited in 1987 who were, at that time, leading figures in the UK’s growing private equity industry. This article contributes to growing historical understanding of the synergies between financial, arts and culture industries in the 80s. It argues that while this era offered new opportunities for women to participate in business, such participation was tempered by new forms of legal and financial discipline that re-calibrated existing gender inequalities within business cultures. Due to the time periods under consideration, this article also analyses how entrepreneurial practices and opportunities for women changed dramatically with the onset of Thatcher’s ‘Enterprise Culture’

Exploring how social networks contribute to African immigrants’ ability to procure a sustainable livelihood in New York City

This research explores the effects of social networks on the ways that African immigrants in New York City secure, and sustain their livelihoods. Through lines of inquiry including social capital, livelihood resources, and economic activities, this research explores possible livelihood outcomes of Africans immigrants in New York City in relation to their social networks. By exploring themes through case studies of immigrants from different countries on the African continent, this research illustrates how becoming embedded in social networks in ones’ geographical jurisdiction widens an individual’s social capital, which in turn contributes to the probability of that individual in securing and holding a job and experiencing less significant economic shocks. There is a high possibility that when a person moved from their country of origin to a new geographical area, their social ties, ethnic linguistic and cultural traits, as well as the opportunity for early labor market will be diminish. Many African immigrants immigrate and end up in areas that are friendly to their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural traits, which is often areas with other minority groups. The interviews and focus group discussion provided an opportunity for participants to express themselves about how social networks have contributed to their means of living in New York City, how they were able to adopt to the new culture as new comers in the United States, and how they managed to secured and maintained their livelihood in New York City. Keywords: Social Networks, Sustainable Livelihood, Social Capital, Africa, Immigrant

k-Connectivity in Random Key Graphs with Unreliable Links

Random key graphs form a class of random intersection graphs and are naturally induced by the random key predistribution scheme of Eschenauer and Gligor for securing wireless sensor network (WSN) communications. Random key graphs have received much interest recently, owing in part to their wide applicability in various domains including recommender systems, social networks, secure sensor networks, clustering and classification analysis, and cryptanalysis to name a few. In this paper, we study connectivity properties of random key graphs in the presence of unreliable links. Unreliability of the edges are captured by independent Bernoulli random variables, rendering edges of the graph to be on or off independently from each other. The resulting model is an intersection of a random key graph and an Erdos-Renyi graph, and is expected to be useful in capturing various real-world networks; e.g., with secure WSN applications in mind, link unreliability can be attributed to harsh environmental conditions severely impairing transmissions. We present conditions on how to scale this model's parameters so that i) the minimum node degree in the graph is at least k, and ii) the graph is k-connected, both with high probability as the number of nodes becomes large. The results are given in the form of zeroone laws with critical thresholds identified and shown to coincide for both graph properties. These findings improve the previous results by Rybarczyk on the k-connectivity of random key graphs (with reliable links), as well as the zero-one laws by Yagan on the 1-connectivity of random key graphs with unreliable links.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

A Survey On Securing User Data in Social Networks Using Privacy Preserving Options

Privacy is one of greatest rubbing focuses that rises when interchanges get interceded in Online Social Networks (OSNs).different groups of software engineering analysts have been surrounded the 'OSN security issue' as one of the observation, institutional or social protection. On account of handling these issues they have likewise treated them as though they were free. The principle contends is that the diverse security issues are snared and that the examination on protection in OSNs would profit from a more all encompassing methodology. In this paper, we first give a prologue to the observation and social security viewpoint stressing the account that the educate them, and their suspicions, objectives and techniques. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15022

Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices

Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

Examining the use of informal networks by NGOs in Azerbaijan and Georgia

To date little is known about the non-governmental organizations' (NGOs) use of informal networks, contacts and connections, as well as about the ‘informalization’ of post-communist civil society in the former Soviet Union. Research on the subject has been mostly restricted to the study of civil society organizations in Central Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Russia, leaving the use and significance of informality among the South Caucasus's NGOs largely ignored. Drawing on qualitative in-depth elite interviews, this study examines the importance of informal networking within the NGO sectors of post-Soviet-rule Azerbaijan and Georgia. The findings of this study document that in Azerbaijan and Georgia the practices of using informal networks of relying on patron–client relations with donors and of individuals using their positions within organizations for profit-making are widespread among the NGOs included in this research