50,461 research outputs found
Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism
Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)
Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques
SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability
Command & Control: Understanding, Denying and Detecting - A review of malware C2 techniques, detection and defences
In this survey, we first briefly review the current state of cyber attacks,
highlighting significant recent changes in how and why such attacks are
performed. We then investigate the mechanics of malware command and control
(C2) establishment: we provide a comprehensive review of the techniques used by
attackers to set up such a channel and to hide its presence from the attacked
parties and the security tools they use. We then switch to the defensive side
of the problem, and review approaches that have been proposed for the detection
and disruption of C2 channels. We also map such techniques to widely-adopted
security controls, emphasizing gaps or limitations (and success stories) in
current best practices.Comment: Work commissioned by CPNI, available at c2report.org. 38 pages.
Listing abstract compressed from version appearing in repor
Space time pixels
This paper reports the design of a networked system, the aim of
which is to provide an intermediate virtual space that will
establish a connection and support interaction between multiple
participants in two distant physical spaces.
The intention of the project is to explore the potential of the
digital space to generate original social relationships between
people that their current (spatial or social) position can
difficultly allow the establishment of innovative connections.
Furthermore, to explore if digital space can sustain, in time,
low-level connections like these, by balancing between the two
contradicting needs of communication and anonymity.
The generated intermediate digital space is a dynamic reactive
environment where time and space information of two physical
places is superimposed to create a complex common ground where
interaction can take place. It is a system that provides
awareness of activity in a distant space through an abstract
mutable virtual environment, which can be perceived in several
different ways – varying from a simple dynamic background image
to a common public space in the junction of two private spaces or
to a fully opened window to the other space – according to the
participants will.
The thesis is that the creation of an intermediary environment
that operates as an activity abstraction filter between several
users, and selectively communicates information, could give
significance to the ambient data that people unconsciously
transmit to others when co-existing. It can therefore generate a new layer of connections and original interactivity patterns; in contrary to a straight-forward direct real video and sound
system, that although it is functionally more feasible, it
preserves the existing social constraints that limit interaction
into predefined patterns
Opaque Service Virtualisation: A Practical Tool for Emulating Endpoint Systems
Large enterprise software systems make many complex interactions with other
services in their environment. Developing and testing for production-like
conditions is therefore a very challenging task. Current approaches include
emulation of dependent services using either explicit modelling or
record-and-replay approaches. Models require deep knowledge of the target
services while record-and-replay is limited in accuracy. Both face
developmental and scaling issues. We present a new technique that improves the
accuracy of record-and-replay approaches, without requiring prior knowledge of
the service protocols. The approach uses Multiple Sequence Alignment to derive
message prototypes from recorded system interactions and a scheme to match
incoming request messages against prototypes to generate response messages. We
use a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm for distance calculation during
message matching. Our approach has shown greater than 99% accuracy for four
evaluated enterprise system messaging protocols. The approach has been
successfully integrated into the CA Service Virtualization commercial product
to complement its existing techniques.Comment: In Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software
Engineering Companion (pp. 202-211). arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1510.0142
Designing Familiar Open Surfaces
While participatory design makes end-users part of the design process, we might also want the resulting system to be open for interpretation, appropriation and change over time to reflect its usage. But how can we design for appropriation? We need to strike a good balance between making the user an active co-constructor of system functionality versus making a too strong, interpretative design that does it all for the user thereby inhibiting their own creative use of the system. Through revisiting five systems in which appropriation has happened both within and outside the intended use, we are going to show how it can be possible to design with open surfaces. These open surfaces have to be such that users can fill them with their own interpretation and content, they should be familiar to the user, resonating with their real world practice and understanding, thereby shaping its use
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