180 research outputs found

    Evaluation Methodologies in Software Protection Research

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    Man-at-the-end (MATE) attackers have full control over the system on which the attacked software runs, and try to break the confidentiality or integrity of assets embedded in the software. Both companies and malware authors want to prevent such attacks. This has driven an arms race between attackers and defenders, resulting in a plethora of different protection and analysis methods. However, it remains difficult to measure the strength of protections because MATE attackers can reach their goals in many different ways and a universally accepted evaluation methodology does not exist. This survey systematically reviews the evaluation methodologies of papers on obfuscation, a major class of protections against MATE attacks. For 572 papers, we collected 113 aspects of their evaluation methodologies, ranging from sample set types and sizes, over sample treatment, to performed measurements. We provide detailed insights into how the academic state of the art evaluates both the protections and analyses thereon. In summary, there is a clear need for better evaluation methodologies. We identify nine challenges for software protection evaluations, which represent threats to the validity, reproducibility, and interpretation of research results in the context of MATE attacks

    A Departmental Dilemma: The Genesis of Canadian Military Export Policy, 1945-1960

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    Recent sales of Canadian military equipment to Saudi Arabia have highlighted a contradiction between Canadian policy on paper and in practice. This dissertation seeks to explain these contradictions by exploring the evolution of Canadian conventional military export policy in the key years between 1946 and 1960. It loosely divides this 15-year span into three periods, which correspond to the genesis of Canadian military export policy (1946-1949), its expansion and formalization (1950-1955), and its first existential challenge (1956-1960). With a particular focus on the Department of External Affairs, this work explores the political considerations and bureaucratic debates which shaped government decision-making during these periods. After the Second World War, Canadian policymakers struggled to reconcile the commercial and strategic benefits of selling arms with the political risks in both the domestic and international environments. Through a series of reactive and somewhat contradictory precedents, they engineered a bureaucratic system of export controls to evaluate potential military exports, as well as a series of rudimentary restrictions to guide their implementation. By 1950, the Canadian government had accepted that military exports were economically and strategically necessary, and become an opportunistic exporter of military equipment to the non-communist world. This consensus would be challenged in 1956 due to geopolitical instability and domestic scandal but would prove too entrenched for significant modification. The military export policies adopted during these years were flexible, pragmatic, and reactive; they incentivized risk-aversion and commercial competitiveness, but not internal consistency. Policymakers emphasized a rotating series of idealistic restrictions in official reviews and public statements, yet the defining internal principle was discretionary flexibility. In other words, preserving the ability of Canadian officials to evaluate exports on a case-by-case basis, not consistently enforcing export restrictions based on specific criteria. Flexibility was important because of the key external objective: mirroring American military export policy specifically and other allied policies generally. This alignment maintained western solidarity and multilateral agreements regarding military exports, used collective action to diffuse the reputational risks of arms dealing, maintained privileged Canadian access to the American military industrial complex, and allowed Canadian military producers to compete equally in the global market. Policymakers often found themselves trapped between the idealistic multilateralism which ostensibly guided Canadian foreign policy, and the pragmatic considerations incentivizing Canadian arms sales. Obscuring this contradiction required the government to resort to a sort of categorical ambiguity in which key binaries such as military/civilian, offensive/defensive, enemy/ally, and peace/conflict were redefined as convenient. The resulting policy/praxis gap can be construed as hypocrisy and remains a foundational component of Canadian military export policy today

    A Social Ontological Account of Alienation and Its Place in the History of Alienation Theory

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    Alienation is a sociological term that has found itself severely out of favor as an analytical concept due to what are perceived as inextricable theoretical shortcomings despite having once enjoyed a time when it was taken to be essential for a robust and critical analysis of society. This dissertation looks to contribute to a revitalization of alienation theory by offering an understanding of alienation that is grounded in the framework of social ontology as forwarded in the works of John Searle. This social ontological account conceives of alienation as a fallout fact that arises when there is a performative contradiction between the enactment of a deontic power and the collective recognition of the status function that made possible that self-same deontic power in the first place. Framing alienation in this way provides the means for resolving those central aporias that have otherwise stymied its more widespread usage, namely, the question of alienation theory’s fundamental unity, the division between objective and subjective approaches, and the term’s normative status. The second half of the project is then dedicated to a critical engagement between the social ontological account and the long and diverse history of alienation theory beginning with its pre-philosophical uses and continuing into its philosophical appropriation in the 19th Century, its golden era in the mid-20th Century, and finally its place in second- and third-wave Critical Theory

    Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law

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    Making Endless War is built on the premise that any attempt to understand how the content and function of the laws of war changed in the second half of the twentieth century should consider two major armed conflicts, fought on opposite edges of Asia, and the legal pathways that link them together across time and space. The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli conflicts have been particularly significant in the shaping and attempted remaking of international law from 1945 right through to the present day. This carefully curated collection of essays by lawyers, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and political geographers of war explores the significance of these two conflicts, including their impact on the politics and culture of the world's most powerful nation, the United States of America. The volume foregrounds attempts to develop legal rationales for the continued waging of war after 1945 by moving beyond explaining the end of war as a legal institution, and toward understanding the attempted institutionalization of endless war

    Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

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    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

    Digital writing technologies in higher education : theory, research, and practice

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    This open access book serves as a comprehensive guide to digital writing technology, featuring contributions from over 20 renowned researchers from various disciplines around the world. The book is designed to provide a state-of-the-art synthesis of the developments in digital writing in higher education, making it an essential resource for anyone interested in this rapidly evolving field. In the first part of the book, the authors offer an overview of the impact that digitalization has had on writing, covering more than 25 key technological innovations and their implications for writing practices and pedagogical uses. Drawing on these chapters, the second part of the book explores the theoretical underpinnings of digital writing technology such as writing and learning, writing quality, formulation support, writing and thinking, and writing processes. The authors provide insightful analysis on the impact of these developments and offer valuable insights into the future of writing. Overall, this book provides a cohesive and consistent theoretical view of the new realities of digital writing, complementing existing literature on the digitalization of writing. It is an essential resource for scholars, educators, and practitioners interested in the intersection of technology and writing

    Demystifying security and compatibility issues in Android Apps

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    Never before has any OS been so popular as Android. Existing mobile phones are not simply devices for making phone calls and receiving SMS messages, but powerful communication and entertainment platforms for web surfing, social networking, etc. Even though the Android OS offers powerful communication and application execution capabilities, it is riddled with defects (e.g., security risks, and compatibility issues), new vulnerabilities come to light daily, and bugs cost the economy tens of billions of dollars annually. For example, malicious apps (e.g., back-doors, fraud apps, ransomware, spyware, etc.) are reported [Google, 2022] to exhibit malicious behaviours, including privacy stealing, unwanted programs installed, etc. To counteract these threats, many works have been proposed that rely on static analysis techniques to detect such issues. However, static techniques are not sufficient on their own to detect such defects precisely. This will likely yield false positive results as static analysis has to make some trade-offs when handling complicated cases (e.g., object-sensitive vs. object-insensitive). In addition, static analysis techniques will also likely suffer from soundness issues because some complicated features (e.g., reflection, obfuscation, and hardening) are difficult to be handled [Sun et al., 2021b, Samhi et al., 2022].Comment: Thesi

    International Yeats Society, Vol. 7, Issue 1

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    "All the Feels!”: Music, Critique and Affect in Fanmade Music Videos

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    This study explores the fan practice of vidding and the resulting works, vids. Vids, created within transformative media fandom, are narrative grassroots music videos, which argue something about their visual source/s and use the combination of music and moving images to do so. I argue that the use of music in vids is a key element in creating meaning, and that affect is a central part of how this happens. Thereby, vids play an important part in fandom's 'feels' culture as critical reflections on media that also inspire such reflection in their (fan) audiences. Previous studies of vids have established their narrative nature and their ability to communicate through images and lyrics, but have not explored the role of music or affect in this. This study investigates these two factors. Drawing on a theoretical framework that engages with fan studies, audiovisual music and affect, I introduce an innovative ethnographic methodology, that incorporates interviews with vidders, analysis of vids where music analysis is included and online observation of their reception. I show how such an approach allows for scholars to understand a vid's ability to communicate through an audiovisual language comprised of music and images together. The findings from this method are interrogated using a theoretical framework that incorporates fan studies, audiovisual music studies and affect theory. I argue that vids speak through an audiovisual language that is received and understood within media fandom, and that 'feels' are a central part of the communication in this language. 'Feels', inspired through music and editing, are important to how a vid becomes critically reflexive and to its ability to inspire critical engagement in other fans. Vids merit further study within not only fan studies, but musicology and wider media studies because of their ability to communicate in this manner
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