Pan-European backcasting exercise, enriched with regional perspective, and including a list of short-term policy options

This deliverable reports on the results of the third and final pan-European stakeholder meeting and secondly, on the enrichment with a Pilot Area and regional perspective. The main emphasis is on backcasting as a means to arrive at long-term strategies and short-term (policy) actions

IT for more effective team collaboration

ICT bring new possibilities in support of team cooperation, above all in creation and sharing of common content. On base of comparison of various systems for support of the cooperation it was found out that some systems purposefully solve a flow of time planning in a firm environment (e.g. Novell GroupWise), others supports in various way a cooperation in common contents space (discussion groups, Wiki, WCMS). Changes in approach to cooperation management appear in the social network. A substantial phenomenon of the present systems for cooperation support is their virtuality. The common space is „somewhere“ and a user can share (use) it from anywhere, if he/she is connected to the internet. An example still more often used is Google Apps.Collaborative software, groupware, GroupWise, Moodle Forums, Wiki, CMS, social networks, Google docs, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, GA, IN,

Co-opetition of TV broadcasters in online video markets : a winning strategy?

This article focuses on TV broadcasters adopting co-opetition strategies for launching online video services. It is claimed that the emergence of online video platforms like YouTube and Netflix is driving TV broadcasters to collaborate with their closest competitors to reduce costs and reach the necessary scale in the global marketplace. The article sheds light on online video platforms that were developed following a co-opetition strategy (Hulu and YouView). The establishment of joint ventures in online video, however, has been scrutinised by competition authorities which fear that collaboration between close competitors lessens rivalry and reduces consumer choice. Therefore, several co-opetition projects (among others BBC’s Kangaroo and Germany’s Gold) have been prohibited by competition authorities

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

Democracy and Digital Authoritarianism: An Assessment of the EU’s External Engagement in the Promotion and Protection of Internet Freedom. College of Europe EU Diplomacy Paper 01/2020

The past decade has seen a gradual global increase in digital authoritarianism. Internet shutdowns, online censorship, mass surveillance and violations of privacy rights have all become more frequent in parts of the world where citizens are not guaranteed sufficient digital rights. The task of defending, promoting and protecting internet freedom is becoming increasingly relevant for the European Union (EU) − for internal digital and cybersecurity policies as well as for the EU’s external promotion of democracy and human rights. Whilst much has been written about the various internal policies which establish and protect internet freedom within the European Union and its member states, the EU’s external engagement in this field remains critically under-researched. To what extent does the EU engage externally in the promotion and protection of internet freedom? This paper answers this question by covering a wide variety of policy fields including human rights and democracy promotion, digital policy, enlargement and neighbourhood policy, development cooperation and trade policy. Whereas the EU faces a limited opportunity to shape global norms with regard to internet freedom or to change the course of digitally authoritarian states, it has demonstrated several strengths which deserve not to be overlooked. These include, for example, the externalisation of internal data protection and policies and the provision of direct support and protection for civil society. Despite facing significant obstacles, the promotion and protection of internet freedom has become an important area of the EU’s external action which is only set to become more relevant in the coming years

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201

European Energy Security. ZEI Discussion Paper C260 2020

In the wake of the European Union’s (EU) enlargements in 2004 and 2007, which saw the accession of 12 new member states, lengthy debates and discussion took place on the burden of onboarding the new member states, the difficulty of ensuring their compliance with EU rules and regulations and the dependence of many of these states on a single supplier for their energy needs. This paper aims to assess the EU’s efforts to form a comprehensive energy security policy in recent decades, paying particular attention to the development of the theory of energy security and the main developments of the EU’s energy security policy in recent years. The Energy Union, a flagship initiative launched by the European Commission in 2015, will be assessed through an examination of its governance structure and achievements in specific policy domains