Social Security Programs Throughout the World: The Americas, 2011

[Excerpt] This fourth issue in the current four-volume series of Social Security Programs Throughout the World reports on the countries of the Americas. The combined findings of this series, which also includes volumes on Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa, are published at six-month intervals over a two-year period. Each volume highlights features of social security programs in the particular region. The information contained in these volumes is crucial to our efforts, and those of researchers in other countries, to review different ways of approaching social security challenges that will enable us to adapt our social security systems to the evolving needs of individuals, households, and families. These efforts are particularly important as each nation faces major demographic changes, especially the increasing number of aged persons, as well as economic and fiscal issues

Attendees at 6:30 P.M. Meeting

Attendees at 6:30 P.M. Meeting: The President, Secretary of State Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clifford, Secretary of Treasury Fowler, CIA Director Helms, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Wheeler, and others

Social Security Programs Throughout the World: Africa, 2011

[Excerpt] This third issue in the current four-volume series of Social Security Programs Throughout the World reports on the countries of Africa. The combined findings of this series, which also includes volumes on Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, are published at six-month intervals over a two-year period. Each volume highlights features of social security programs in the particular region. This guide serves as an overview of programs in all regions. A few political jurisdictions have been excluded because they have no social security system or have issued no information regarding their social security legislation. In the absence of recent information, national programs reported in previous volumes may also be excluded. In this volume on Africa, the data reported are based on laws and regulations in force in January 2011 or on the last date for which information has been received

Increased security through open source

In this paper we discuss the impact of open source on both the security and transparency of a software system. We focus on the more technical aspects of this issue, combining and extending arguments developed over the years. We stress that our discussion of the problem only applies to software for general purpose computing systems. For embedded systems, where the software usually cannot easily be patched or upgraded, different considerations may apply

The Australian Cyber Security Centre threat report 2015

Introduction: The number, type and sophistication of cyber security threats to Australia and Australians are increasing. Due to the varied nature of motivations for cyber adversaries targeting Australian organisations, organisations could be a target for malicious activities even if they do not think the information held on their networks is valuable, or that their business would be of interest to cyber adversaries. This first unclassified report by the ACSC describes the range of cyber adversaries targeting Australian networks, explains their motivations, the malicious activities they are conducting and their impact, and provides specific examples of activity targeting Australian networks during 2014. This report also offers mitigation advice on how organisations can defend against these activities. The ACSC’s ability to detect and defend against sophisticated cyber threats continues to improve. But cyber adversaries are constantly improving their tradecraft in their attempts to defeat our network defences and exploit the new technologies we embrace. There are gaps in our understanding of the extent and nature of malicious activity, particularly against the business sector. The ACSC is reaching out to industry to build partnerships to improve our collective understanding. Future iterations of the Threat Report will benefit from these partnerships and help to close gaps in our knowledge

Towards Data Protection Compliance

Privacy and data protection are fundamental issues nowadays for every organization. This paper calls for the development of methods, techniques and infrastructure to allow the deployment of privacy-aware IT systems, in which humans are integral part of the organizational processes and accountable for their possible misconduct. In particular, we discuss the challenges to be addressed in order to improve organizations privacy practices, as well as the approach to ensure compliance with legal requirements and increasing efficiency

Facilitating Effective Food Security Policy Reform

Food Security and Poverty, Downloads December 2008 - July 2009: 10,

Dynamic Tardos Traitor Tracing Schemes

We construct binary dynamic traitor tracing schemes, where the number of watermark bits needed to trace and disconnect any coalition of pirates is quadratic in the number of pirates, and logarithmic in the total number of users and the error probability. Our results improve upon results of Tassa, and our schemes have several other advantages, such as being able to generate all codewords in advance, a simple accusation method, and flexibility when the feedback from the pirate network is delayed.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Dynamic Traitor Tracing for Arbitrary Alphabets: Divide and Conquer

We give a generic divide-and-conquer approach for constructing collusion-resistant probabilistic dynamic traitor tracing schemes with larger alphabets from schemes with smaller alphabets. This construction offers a linear tradeoff between the alphabet size and the codelength. In particular, we show that applying our results to the binary dynamic Tardos scheme of Laarhoven et al. leads to schemes that are shorter by a factor equal to half the alphabet size. Asymptotically, these codelengths correspond, up to a constant factor, to the fingerprinting capacity for static probabilistic schemes. This gives a hierarchy of probabilistic dynamic traitor tracing schemes, and bridges the gap between the low bandwidth, high codelength scheme of Laarhoven et al. and the high bandwidth, low codelength scheme of Fiat and Tassa.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Flow-based reputation: more than just ranking

The last years have seen a growing interest in collaborative systems like electronic marketplaces and P2P file sharing systems where people are intended to interact with other people. Those systems, however, are subject to security and operational risks because of their open and distributed nature. Reputation systems provide a mechanism to reduce such risks by building trust relationships among entities and identifying malicious entities. A popular reputation model is the so called flow-based model. Most existing reputation systems based on such a model provide only a ranking, without absolute reputation values; this makes it difficult to determine whether entities are actually trustworthy or untrustworthy. In addition, those systems ignore a significant part of the available information; as a consequence, reputation values may not be accurate. In this paper, we present a flow-based reputation metric that gives absolute values instead of merely a ranking. Our metric makes use of all the available information. We study, both analytically and numerically, the properties of the proposed metric and the effect of attacks on reputation values