57,953 research outputs found
The challenges of cybercrime governance in the European Union
Information and Communications Technologies, in particular the Internet, have been an increasingly important aspect of global social, political and economic life for two decades, and are the backbone of the global information society today. Their evolution and development has brought many benefits but also the threat and practice of serious cyber attacks, cyber espionage and cybercrime within the virtual, networked ecosystem that we live in. In this context, the European Union over the past ten years has been developing its policies towards cyber threats. Drastically reducing cybercrime featured as a key priority objective in the Cybersecurity Strategy of the European Union (2013) delineating several lines of action, including enhanced operational capability to combat cybercrime. Focusing on the operational aspects and in particular the European Cybercrime Centre’s Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce, this article demonstrates how this represents novel, collaborative and flexible (informal) governance bounded by a broader formal milieu, reflecting the complexity of cybercrime investigations. It is also shown that, despite the relative success of J-CAT, challenges still remain
Taking Blockchain Seriously
In the present techno-political moment it is clear that ignoring or dismissing the hype surrounding blockchain is unwise, and certainly for regulatory authorities and governments who must keep a grip on the technology and those promoting it, in order to ensure democratic accountability and regulatory legitimacy within the blockchain ecosystem and beyond. Blockchain is telling (and showing) us something very important about the evolution of capital and neoliberal economic reason, and the likely impact in the near future on forms and patterns of work, social organization, and, crucially, on communities and individuals who lack influence over the technologies and data that increasingly shape and control their lives. In this short essay I introduce some of the problems in the regulation of blockchain and offer counter-narratives aimed at cutting through the hype fuelling the ascendency of this most contemporary of technologies
Biology of Applied Digital Ecosystems
A primary motivation for our research in Digital Ecosystems is the desire to
exploit the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems. Ecosystems are
thought to be robust, scalable architectures that can automatically solve
complex, dynamic problems. However, the biological processes that contribute to
these properties have not been made explicit in Digital Ecosystems research.
Here, we discuss how biological properties contribute to the self-organising
features of biological ecosystems, including population dynamics, evolution, a
complex dynamic environment, and spatial distributions for generating local
interactions. The potential for exploiting these properties in artificial
systems is then considered. We suggest that several key features of biological
ecosystems have not been fully explored in existing digital ecosystems, and
discuss how mimicking these features may assist in developing robust, scalable
self-organising architectures. An example architecture, the Digital Ecosystem,
is considered in detail. The Digital Ecosystem is then measured experimentally
through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, to
confirm its likeness to a biological ecosystem. Including the responsiveness to
requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the 'ecological
succession' (development).Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure, conferenc
"Internet universality": Human rights and principles for the internet
This paper details proposals by UNESCO to manufacture and draft a concept of “Internet Universality” that adopts a human-rights framework as a basis for articulating a set of principles and rights for the Internet. The paper discusses various drafts of this concept before examining the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet put forward by The Internet Rights & Principles Dynamic Coalition based at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the working law Marco Civil da Internet introduced by Brazil
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Regulating Disruption: Blockchain, GDPR, and Questions of Data Sovereignty
The article discusses the nature of law in cyberspace. Topics discussed include distinction between regulation as infringement of private autonomy and regulation as a collaborative enterprise; blockchain regulatory conundrum; and neoliberal market-complementing regulation. Also being discussed is the regulation for economic efficiency and consumer choice
Evolutionary ecology in-silico:evolving foodwebs, migrating population and speciation
We have generalized our ``unified'' model of evolutionary ecology by taking
into account the possible movements of the organisms from one ``patch'' to
another within the same eco-system. We model the spatial extension of the
eco-system (i.e., the geography) by a square lattice where each site
corresponds to a distinct ``patch''. A self-organizing hierarchical food web
describes the prey-predator relations in the eco-system. The same species at
different patches have identical food habits but differ from each other in
their reproductive characteristic features. By carrying out computer
simulations up to time steps, we found that, depending on the values of
the set of parameters, the distribution of the lifetimes of the species can be
either exponential or a combination of power laws. Some of the other features
of our ``unified'' model turn out to be robust against migration of the
organisms.Comment: 12 pages of PS file, including LATEX text and 9 EPS figure
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Phase Changes in the Evolution of the IPv4 and IPv6 AS-Level Internet Topologies
In this paper we investigate the evolution of the IPv4 and IPv6 Internet
topologies at the autonomous system (AS) level over a long period of time.We
provide abundant empirical evidence that there is a phase transition in the
growth trend of the two networks. For the IPv4 network, the phase change
occurred in 2001. Before then the network's size grew exponentially, and
thereafter it followed a linear growth. Changes are also observed around the
same time for the maximum node degree, the average node degree and the average
shortest path length. For the IPv6 network, the phase change occurred in late
2006. It is notable that the observed phase transitions in the two networks are
different, for example the size of IPv6 network initially grew linearly and
then shifted to an exponential growth. Our results show that following decades
of rapid expansion up to the beginning of this century, the IPv4 network has
now evolved into a mature, steady stage characterised by a relatively slow
growth with a stable network structure; whereas the IPv6 network, after a slow
startup process, has just taken off to a full speed growth. We also provide
insight into the possible impact of IPv6-over-IPv4 tunneling deployment scheme
on the evolution of the IPv6 network. The Internet topology generators so far
are based on an inexplicit assumption that the evolution of Internet follows
non-changing dynamic mechanisms. This assumption, however, is invalidated by
our results.Our work reveals insights into the Internet evolution and provides
inputs to future AS-Level Internet models.Comment: 12 pages, 21 figures; G. Zhang et al.,Phase changes in the evolution
of the IPv4 and IPv6 AS-Level Internet topologies, Comput. Commun. (2010
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