Ur-Priors, Conditionalization, and Ur-Prior Conditionalization

Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors have understood the rule in different ways, and these different understandings solve different problems. In this paper, I aim to map out the terrain regarding these issues. I survey the different problems that might motivate the adoption of such a rule, flesh out the different understandings of the rule that have been proposed, and assess their pros and cons. I conclude by suggesting that one particular batch of proposals, proposals that appeal to what I’ll call “loaded evidential standards”, are especially promising

Verifiable Network-Performance Measurements

In the current Internet, there is no clean way for affected parties to react to poor forwarding performance: when a domain violates its Service Level Agreement (SLA) with a contractual partner, the partner must resort to ad-hoc probing-based monitoring to determine the existence and extent of the violation. Instead, we propose a new, systematic approach to the problem of forwarding-performance verification. Our mechanism relies on voluntary reporting, allowing each domain to disclose its loss and delay performance to its neighbors; it does not disclose any information regarding the participating domains' topology or routing policies beyond what is already publicly available. Most importantly, it enables verifiable performance measurements, i.e., domains cannot abuse it to significantly exaggerate their performance. Finally, our mechanism is tunable, allowing each participating domain to determine how many resources to devote to it independently (i.e., without any inter-domain coordination), exposing a controllable trade-off between performance-verification quality and resource consumption. Our mechanism comes at the cost of deploying modest functionality at the participating domains' border routers; we show that it requires reasonable processing and memory resources within modern network capabilities.Comment: 14 page

Responsibility and non-repudiation in resource-constrained Internet of Things scenarios

The proliferation and popularity of smart autonomous systems necessitates the development of methods and models for ensuring the effective identification of their owners and controllers. The aim of this paper is to critically discuss the responsibility of Things and their impact on human affairs. This starts with an in-depth analysis of IoT Characteristics such as Autonomy, Ubiquity and Pervasiveness. We argue that Things governed by a controller should have an identifiable relationship between the two parties and that authentication and non-repudiation are essential characteristics in all IoT scenarios which require trustworthy communications. However, resources can be a problem, for instance, many Things are designed to perform in low-powered hardware. Hence, we also propose a protocol to demonstrate how we can achieve the authenticity of participating Things in a connectionless and resource-constrained environment