PKI Scalability Issues

This report surveys different PKI technologies such as PKIX and SPKI and the issues of PKI that affect scalability. Much focus is spent on certificate revocation methodologies and status verification systems such as CRLs, Delta-CRLs, CRS, Certificate Revocation Trees, Windowed Certificate Revocation, OCSP, SCVP and DVCS.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Designing privacy for scalable electronic healthcare linkage

A unified electronic health record (EHR) has potentially immeasurable benefits to society, and the current healthcare industry drive to create a single EHR reflects this. However, adoption is slow due to two major factors: the disparate nature of data and storage facilities of current healthcare systems and the security ramifications of accessing and using that data and concerns about potential misuse of that data. To attempt to address these issues this paper presents the VANGUARD (Virtual ANonymisation Grid for Unified Access of Remote Data) system which supports adaptive security-oriented linkage of disparate clinical data-sets to support a variety of virtual EHRs avoiding the need for a single schematic standard and natural concerns of data owners and other stakeholders on data access and usage. VANGUARD has been designed explicit with security in mind and supports clear delineation of roles for data linkage and usage

Collective Intentionality

In this chapter, we focus on collective action and intention, and their relation to conventions, status functions, norms, institutions, and shared attitudes more generally. Collective action and shared intention play a foundational role in our understanding of the social. The three central questions in the study of collective intentionality are: (1) What is the ontology of collective intentionality? In particular, are groups per se intentional agents, as opposed to just their individual members? (2) What is the psychology of collective intentionality? Do groups per se have psychological states, in particular propositional attitudes? What is the psychology of the individuals who participate in collective intentional behavior? What is special about their participatory intentions, their we-intentions, as they are called (Tuomela and Miller 1988), as opposed to their I-intentions? (3) How is collective intentionality implicated in the construction of social reality? In particular, how does the content of we-intentions and the intentional activity of individual agents create social institutions, practices and structures? We first discuss collective action and shared intention in informal groups. Next we discuss mechanisms for constructing institutional structures out of the conceptual and psychological resources made available by our understanding of informal joint intentional action. Then we extend the discussion of collective action and intention to institutional groups, such as the Supreme Court, and explain how concepts of such organizations are constructed out of the concepts of a rule, convention, and status function. Finally we discuss collective attitudes beyond intention

Legitimating institutional choices in the forest ownership : building acceptability for jointly owned forests

Recent demographic changes in the forest-owner structure are suspected to have led to the increasing number of owners with no specific objectives for their forests. In addition, the continuous fragmentation of the forest holdings has increased the threat of the passiveness related to forest management. To decrease the tendency towards passiveness, new policy tools and initiatives have been suggested. In the Finnish context, the idea of an investor-based jointly owned forest has been introduced as facilitating the effective utilization of the forest resource. However, collective ownership has faced prejudice and scepticism among private forest owners. In order to expand, the forest owners need to see the idea of jointly owned forests as a socially legitimate. Thus, by adopting Van Leeuwen's framework for analyzing the legitimation of new social practices, we examine how Finnish forest owners legitimate their participation in jointly owned forests. The qualitative data of the study consist of 20 in-depth interviews with private forest owners who have joined a jointly owned forest. Our study contributes to the recent discussion on jointly owned forests. We show how a change in the type of ownership results in moral, authoritative and rational justifications over the decision while simultaneously renewing the identity of the forest owner. Accordingly, we suggest that forest ownership is not only driven by rational prospects, but the moral and emotional nature of ownership should be better taken into account at the policy level and in structural designs when discussing the promotion of new types of forest ownership.Peer reviewe

WATER POLICIES AND SMALLHOLDING IRRIGATION SCHEMES IN SOUTH AFRICA: A HISTORY AND NEW INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTIONS IN SOCIALLY OWNED LAND IN KOSOVO - PRIZREN

Identification as a problem and treatment of the illegal use of land of socially owned property in Kosovo, with the focal point in Prizren, is the fundamental body-content of this study paper. The illegal use and exploitation of socially owned land in Kosovo, respectively the construction of residential, commercial and public buildings (non social property) on the socially owned land, is the core subject elaborated in this study. These constructions are considered illegal since they are performed on socially owned land, without any permit, previous approval, and license or similar and this topic hasn’t been discussed or elaborated much in Kosovo. Land, on which the houses/buildings are constructed, at the cadastral official registers in Municipal Cadastral Offices, even today are registered as social ownership; actually, they are in the name of Socially Owned Enterprises (SOE). Consequently, the users of the land automatically are to be considered as illegal occupants, or illegal users of the property of social ownership. The violence of war caused the destruction of public records about public and private rights to land and buildings, including the cadastral and court records and the archives of the enterprises that managed the socially owned land, apartments, and other assets. Property maps, cadastral books, possession lists, and transaction document archives, which comprise of the “authoritative” identification about who has what rights to what land and buildings, have been removed to Serbia. In addition, people avoided the formal transaction recording system and carried out transactions informally for several decades due to transaction taxes and the legal prohibition of transactions between Serbs and Albanians. Therefore, in general, the study represents the research of very complex problems of two interactive systems, the land use in the specific state of social ownership and construction of individual buildings in specific illegal status and social /economic implications as consequences