A citizen journalism primer

Citizen journalism is a hot topic at present, but there remains a degree of conceptual wooliness about its definition and meaning, with everything from lifestyle blogs to live footage of freak weather events being included in this category. This paper will identify factors underpinning the emergence of citizen journalism, including the rise of Web 2.0, rethinking journalism as a professional ideology, the decline of ‘high modernist’ journalism, divergence between elite and popular opinion, changing revenue bases for news production, and the decline of deference in democratic societies. It will consider case studies such as the Korean OhMyNews web site, and connect these issues to wider debates about the implications of journalism and news production increasingly going into the Internet environment

New literacies and future educational culture

The paper draws attention to three developments that are crucial to online education. First, the new literacy required by group discussion in writing, i.e. by computer‐mediated communication ('e‐talk') is discussed Educators are urged to delimit and structure their courses so that online conversations in writing are successfully framed for effective discourse. Second, new literacy arising from the merging of multimedia with text is considered It is maintained that this will enhance communication, not debase it. Third, the way that increasing ease of information retrieval is eroding boundaries between traditional disciplines is discussed It is argued that this may create new difficulties in education. The paper recommends various ways of overcoming the problems that arise from the three developments

Formal security analysis of registration protocols for interactive systems: a methodology and a case of study

In this work we present and formally analyze CHAT-SRP (CHAos based Tickets-Secure Registration Protocol), a protocol to provide interactive and collaborative platforms with a cryptographically robust solution to classical security issues. Namely, we focus on the secrecy and authenticity properties while keeping a high usability. In this sense, users are forced to blindly trust the system administrators and developers. Moreover, as far as we know, the use of formal methodologies for the verification of security properties of communication protocols isn't yet a common practice. We propose here a methodology to fill this gap, i.e., to analyse both the security of the proposed protocol and the pertinence of the underlying premises. In this concern, we propose the definition and formal evaluation of a protocol for the distribution of digital identities. Once distributed, these identities can be used to verify integrity and source of information. We base our security analysis on tools for automatic verification of security protocols widely accepted by the scientific community, and on the principles they are based upon. In addition, it is assumed perfect cryptographic primitives in order to focus the analysis on the exchange of protocol messages. The main property of our protocol is the incorporation of tickets, created using digests of chaos based nonces (numbers used only once) and users' personal data. Combined with a multichannel authentication scheme with some previous knowledge, these tickets provide security during the whole protocol by univocally linking each registering user with a single request. [..]Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 8 listings, 1 tabl