Intangible trust requirements - how to fill the requirements trust "gap"?

Previous research efforts have been expended in terms of the capture and subsequent instantiation of "soft" trust requirements that relate to HCI usability concerns or in relation to "hard" tangible security requirements that primarily relate to security a ssurance and security protocols. Little direct focus has been paid to managing intangible trust related requirements per se. This 'gap' is perhaps most evident in the public B2C (Business to Consumer) E- Systems we all use on a daily basis. Some speculative suggestions are made as to how to fill the 'gap'. Visual card sorting is suggested as a suitable evaluative tool; whilst deontic logic trust norms and UML extended notation are the suggested (methodologically invariant) means by which software development teams can perhaps more fully capture hence visualize intangible trust requirements

Civil Society Space in Africa

If there is an event or a series of events that demonstrate the need to protect democracy and reclaim the space for civil society; it is none other than the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. These have reaffirmed the crucial point in democratic and transitional studies; that is; that economic development without political and social progress is not sustainable. By all standards and indices, North Africa was always rated highly in terms of economic performance, yet simmering underneath was a revolution as a result of the closure of the public sphere. So when in 2011, popular uprisings spread like bushfire in that region, many in academia, media, civil society and governments were caught unprepared. Change came from unexpected circles, challenging assumed doctrines and theories associated with the functionality of organised formations

The Legislative Environment for Civil Society In Africa A Synthesis Report

This paper is therefore a discussion of the legislative environment under which civil society, in particular organized formations, operate in Africa. It is based on twelve African countries (Angola, DRC, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe). In all these countries we studied civil/state relations, existing NGO laws and NGO policies, including other laws that have an impact on NGOs, national constitutions, processes and the general political economy of the third sector. The merging findings point to some interesting conclusions. More studies are underway in Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Swaziland. The findings from these will be integrated into the current paper. This paper is therefore work in progress -- nevertheless the countries studied already are significant to begin a discourse on state/civil society relations, public spaces, and the general legislative environment for citizens and their formations. One of the emerging findings is that the political context determined the emergence of these legal instruments

Restorative justice and the right to move on: toward deinstitutionalising the stigma of a criminal conviction

Moves toward restorative justice have tried to reclaim the resolution of conflicts from the exclusive grasp of the state. While much has been achieved in developing new ways of theorising and resolving disputes the consequences of acquiring a criminal record that is retained and deployed by the state have been largely overlooked. In this chapter the authors explore the emergence of the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) in England and Wales and the ways in which the widespread use of criminal records compromises the rights of people to be considered free from the stigma of a criminal conviction. Contemporary developments in legislation and policy regarding the status of criminal convictions are considered and their implications for young people and those who work with them. The authors argue that the principles and practice of restorative justice must address these elements of permanent and increasingly active intrusive scrutiny by the state

Algorithmic Jim Crow

This Article contends that current immigration- and security-related vetting protocols risk promulgating an algorithmically driven form of Jim Crow. Under the “separate but equal” discrimination of a historic Jim Crow regime, state laws required mandatory separation and discrimination on the front end, while purportedly establishing equality on the back end. In contrast, an Algorithmic Jim Crow regime allows for “equal but separate” discrimination. Under Algorithmic Jim Crow, equal vetting and database screening of all citizens and noncitizens will make it appear that fairness and equality principles are preserved on the front end. Algorithmic Jim Crow, however, will enable discrimination on the back end in the form of designing, interpreting, and acting upon vetting and screening systems in ways that result in a disparate impact

DCDIDP: A distributed, collaborative, and data-driven intrusion detection and prevention framework for cloud computing environments

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, the exploitation of possible vulnerabilities grows at the same pace; the distributed nature of the cloud makes it an attractive target for potential intruders. Despite security issues delaying its adoption, cloud computing has already become an unstoppable force; thus, security mechanisms to ensure its secure adoption are an immediate need. Here, we focus on intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPSs) to defend against the intruders. In this paper, we propose a Distributed, Collaborative, and Data-driven Intrusion Detection and Prevention system (DCDIDP). Its goal is to make use of the resources in the cloud and provide a holistic IDPS for all cloud service providers which collaborate with other peers in a distributed manner at different architectural levels to respond to attacks. We present the DCDIDP framework, whose infrastructure level is composed of three logical layers: network, host, and global as well as platform and software levels. Then, we review its components and discuss some existing approaches to be used for the modules in our proposed framework. Furthermore, we discuss developing a comprehensive trust management framework to support the establishment and evolution of trust among different cloud service providers. © 2011 ICST

Making the Most of United States v. Jones in a Surveillance Society: A Statutory Implementation of Mosaic Theory

article published in law journalIn the Supreme Court's recent decision in United States v. Jones, a majority of the Justices appeared to recognize that under some circumstances aggregation of information about an individual through governmental surveillance can amount to a Fourth Amendment search. If adopted by the Court, this notion sometimes called "mosaic theory"-could bring about a radical change to Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, not just in connection with surveillance of public movements-the issue raised in Jonesbut also with respect to the government's increasingly pervasive record-mining efforts. One reason the Court might avoid the mosaic theory is the perceived difficulty of implementing it. This article provides, in the guise of a model statute, a means of doing so. More specifically, this article explains how proportionality reasoning and political process theory can provide concrete guidance for the courts and police in connection with physical and data surveillance

Evaluation of software dependability

It has been said that the term software engineering is an aspiration not a description. We would like to be able to claim that we engineer software, in the same sense that we engineer an aero-engine, but most of us would agree that this is not currently an accurate description of our activities. My suspicion is that it never will be. From the point of view of this essay – i.e. dependability evaluation – a major difference between software and other engineering artefacts is that the former is pure design. Its unreliability is always the result of design faults, which in turn arise as a result of human intellectual failures. The unreliability of hardware systems, on the other hand, has tended until recently to be dominated by random physical failures of components – the consequences of the ‘perversity of nature’. Reliability theories have been developed over the years which have successfully allowed systems to be built to high reliability requirements, and the final system reliability to be evaluated accurately. Even for pure hardware systems, without software, however, the very success of these theories has more recently highlighted the importance of design faults in determining the overall reliability of the final product. The conventional hardware reliability theory does not address this problem at all. In the case of software, there is no physical source of failures, and so none of the reliability theory developed for hardware is relevant. We need new theories that will allow us to achieve required dependability levels, and to evaluate the actual dependability that has been achieved, when the sources of the faults that ultimately result in failure are human intellectual failures