External servers security

Romero Barrero, D. (2010). External servers security. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/9111.Archivo delegad

Insourcing a government information system: a case study from Malaysia.

Insourcing, outsourcing and co-sourcing are three approaches to procuring an information system. This research contributes to the body of knowledge on insourcing an information system; exploring and discussing the enabling and inhibiting factors of the insourcing of an information system in selected government agencies in Malaysia. This study was undertaken in response to a paucity of similar projects and a limited literature focused on developing countries. It considers the post outsourcing context following the decision to insource a major Malaysian Government Information System in 2011. A qualitative research method was used to obtain empirical evidence from selected government agencies through 69 semi-structured interviews in two data collection periods: 2013-2014 and 2015. Interviews were conducted with civil servants at all levels, from senior management to clerical staff, including users of the government information system. By using coding principles from grounded theory to analyse the data, seven exciters and six inhibitors of insourcing a government information system were identified and mapped in the analytical framework. Further, this is the first research to use an enhanced model, devised by combining the OPTIMISM model and two distinct theoretical traditions: institutional theory and the capability approach; in order to analyse the insourcing of government information system adoption. The enhanced model was created by mapping the OPTIMISM model (that has a set of dimensions) to an analytical framework comprising the capability approach, institutional theory and technology (ICTs). The main research contribution of this thesis is in the area of capacity building of the internal development team. The increased budget for training, the selection of appropriate training providers and knowledge sharing among experienced and novice developers all contribute to building capacity in the internal development team; and consequently help to improve the quality of the system which will improve service delivery to the general public. The approach and findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge and understanding of the subject in government information system development and implementation, and can also be applied to improving the quality of service delivery. While this study has focused on government information systems, the wider area of eGovernment, and applications serving the needs of the general public, is equally important, and therefore the researcher suggests that insourcing eGovernment applications would also assist in the capacity building of internal IT staff

Reducing the risk of e-mail phishing in the state of Qatar through an effective awareness framework

In recent years, cyber crime has focused intensely on people to bypass existing sophisticated security controls; phishing is one of the most common forms of such attack. This research highlights the problem of e-mail phishing. A lot of previous research demonstrated the danger of phishing and its considerable consequences. Since users behaviour is unpredictable, there is no reliable technological protective solution (e.g. spam filters, anti-viruses) to diminish the risk arising from inappropriate user decisions. Therefore, this research attempts to reduce the risk of e-mail phishing through awareness and education. It underlines the problem of e-mail phishing in the State of Qatar, one of world s fastest developing countries and seeks to provide a solution to enhance people s awareness of e-mail phishing by developing an effective awareness and educational framework. The framework consists of valuable recommendations for the Qatar government, citizens and organisations responsible for ensuring information security along with an educational agenda to train them how to identify and avoid phishing attempts. The educational agenda supports users in making better trust decisions to avoid phishing that could complement any technical solutions. It comprises a collection of training methods: conceptual, embedded, e-learning and learning programmes which include a television show and a learning session with a variety of teaching components such as a game, quizzes, posters, cartoons and a presentation. The components were tested by trial in two Qatari schools and evaluated by experts and a representative sample of Qatari citizens. Furthermore, the research proves the existence and extent of the e-mail phishing problem in Qatar in comparison with the UK where people were found to be less vulnerable and more aware. It was discovered that Qatar is an attractive place for phishers and that a lack of awareness and e-law made Qatar more vulnerable to the phishing. The research identifies the factors which make Qatari citizens susceptible to e-mail phishing attacks such as cultural, country-specific factors, interests and beliefs, religion effect and personal characteristics and this identified the need for enhancing Qatari s level of awareness on phishing threat. Since literature on phishing in Qatar is sparse, empirical and non-empirical studies involved a variety of surveys, interviews and experiments. The research successfully achieved its aim and objectives and is now being considered by the Qatari Government

A methodology for developing Second Life environments using case-based reasoning techniques

Launched in 2003, Second Life is a computer-based pseudo-environment accessed via the Internet. Although a number of individuals and companies have developed a presence (lands) in Second Life, no appropriate methodology has been put into place for undertaking such developments. Although users have adapted existing methods to their individual needs, this research project explores the development of a methodology for developing lands specifically within Second Life. After researching and examining a variety of different software methods and techniques, it was decided to base this research project methodology on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) techniques, which shares a number of synergies with Second Life itself. With some modifications, a web-based system was designed based on CBR to work in accordance with Second Life. Collecting and analyzing the feedback for the first version of the web-based system identified the adjustments and improvements needed. Therefore, from tracking its progress against previous specifications and future activity, an updated version of the CBR web-based system covering the latest changes and improvements of the tool was introduced. In addition to this, new functionalities have been added in the improved version in order to refine and develop the original prototype to become a highly effective SL development tool. New feedback platforms have been provided to facilitate the use of the system and to obtain results which are more closely related to the users recommendations. Through the feedback process, the tool is becoming ever more useful to developers of Second Life systems. This research project discusses the use of Case-based reasoning techniques and evaluates their application to the development of space within Second Life

Integrating e-learning technologies into conventional teaching and learning in the school and higher education system with scarce resources: a case study of Mzuzu University

The main aim of this study was to investigate how secondary schools and tertiary education institutions in Malawi can sustainably integrate e-learning technologies into traditional teaching and learning environments. The study was conducted in Malawi at Mzuzu University (MZUNI) and four secondary schools within Mzuzu City. Data were collected in two phases. Phase-one was a baseline study of the status of technology at MZUNI and in four conveniently sampled secondary schools in Mzuzu City. The rationale for conducting the baseline study was to ascertain the status of e-learning before conducting the intervention study. This phase used self-administered questionnaires, focus group discussions (FDGs) and in-depth individual interviews as tools for gathering data. Phase Two was interventional in nature because the researcher tried to implement some solutions which were observed during baseline study. This study used a longitudinal qualitative research approach. A mixed methods approach was used because the nature of the research questions required the use of different data gathering strategies. Study findings revealed that educational institutions that have limited resources can integrate technology in education by using resources they have. This study discovered that the following five media were sustainable and the most used technologies: The Internet, Facebook, memory sticks, personal computers and ordinary cell phones. Furthermore, challenges that institutions are likely to face when implementing technology integration included: intermittent electrical power supply; lack of resources for e-learning; resistance to use recorded e-resources; challenges with e-module production and using WhatsApp for educational purposes. The study recommends the following strategies to ensure that electronic technologies are integrated into the teaching and learning environment: MZUNI and other institutions which have limited resources for teaching and learning purposes should integrate technology in education using the most ubiquitous teaching and learning resources around them by making use of the Teaching and Learning Using Locally Available Resources (TALULAR) concept instead of solely relying on proprietary resources

Developing a collaborative MOOC learning environment utilizing video sharing with discussion summarization as added-value

With the fast-growing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) community and the increase in the number of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) available online, the amount of shared information is massive. Current LMS - in particular MOOC providers - offer many advanced content delivery techniques: interactive video, active retrieval practices, and quizzes to enhance the pedagogical process. The main knowledge creation assets within MOOCs are encapsulated in other tools such as discussion forums, blogs, and wikis. Although these tools exist as separate entities within the platform, they still follow traditional techniques. We believe these tools need to be fully integrated to the main content and encourage spontaneous collaboration. From my experience with some MOOCs, the amount of collaboration and information-sharing is still overwhelming due to the massive number of participants and the limited range of collaborative tools. However, most of the shared information could be redundant or irrelevant. This information must be processed in order to provide the most concise knowledge. Therefore, we need to summarize this information from the discussions, blogs, and wikis and include the most relevant data in the course content. This thesis addresses this shortcoming by suggesting a new system with two primary components to accomplish this task. In the first component, we link the discussion tools to the main course content. Then, in the second component, we apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to present a summary of all shared content. We use techniques such as Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), stemming algorithm, Vector Space Model (VSM), and Cosine Similarity to rank the sentences. We then tune the TF-IDF values and boost the sentence ranks using the main content by delegating the first component’s features. The next step involves choosing the most relevant sentence to build our summary. Finally, we evaluate our result using Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) system, which compares our automated summary to human extracted summaries. These results demonstrate that we can achieve high improvement summar y compared to the baseline and other similar techniques

A game theoretical model for a collaborative e-learning platform on privacy awareness

De nos jours, avec l'utilisation croissante des technologies numériques, l'éducation à la préservation de la vie privée joue un rôle important en particulier pour les adolescents. Bien que plusieurs plateformes d'apprentissage en ligne à la sensibilisation à la vie privée aient été mises en œuvre, elles sont généralement basées sur des techniques traditionnelles d'apprentissage. Plus particulièrement, ces plateformes ne permettent pas aux étudiants de coopérer et de partager leurs connaissances afin d’améliorer leur apprentissage ensemble. En d'autres termes, elles manquent d'interactions élève-élève. Des recherches récentes sur les méthodes d'apprentissage montrent que la collaboration entre élèves peut entraîner de meilleurs résultats d'apprentissage par rapport à d'autres approches. De plus, le domaine de la vie privée étant fortement lié à la vie sociale des adolescents, il est préférable de fournir un environnement d'apprentissage collaboratif où l’on peut enseigner la préservation de la vie privée, et en même temps, permettre aux étudiants de partager leurs connaissances. Il serait souhaitable que ces derniers puissent interagir les uns avec les autres, résoudre des questionnaires en collaboration et discuter de problèmes et de situations de confidentialité. À cet effet, ce travail propose « Teens-online », une plateforme d'apprentissage en ligne collaborative pour la sensibilisation à la vie privée. Le programme d'études fourni dans cette plateforme est basé sur le Référentiel de formation des élèves à la protection des données personnelles. De plus, la plateforme proposée est équipée d'un mécanisme d'appariement de partenaires basé sur la théorie des jeux. Ce mécanisme garantit un appariement élève-élève stable en fonction des besoins de l'élève (comportement et / ou connaissances). Ainsi, des avantages mutuels seront obtenus en minimisant les chances de coopérer avec des pairs incompatibles. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que l'utilité moyenne obtenue en appliquant l'algorithme proposé est beaucoup plus élevée que celle obtenue en utilisant d'autres mécanismes d'appariement. Les résultats suggèrent qu'en adoptant l'approche proposée, chaque élève peut être jumelé avec des partenaires optimaux, qui obtiennent également en retour des résultats d'apprentissage plus élevés.Nowadays, with the increasing use of digital technologies, especially for teenagers, privacy education plays an important role in their lives. While several e-learning platforms for privacy awareness training have been implemented, they are typically based on traditional learning techniques. In particular, these platforms do not allow students to cooperate and share knowledge with each other in order to achieve mutual benefits and improve learning outcomes. In other words, they lack student-student interaction. Recent research on learning methods shows that the collaboration among students can result in better learning outcomes compared to other learning approaches. Motivated by the above-mentioned facts, and since privacy domain is strongly linked to the social lives of teens, there is a pressing need for providing a collaborative learning platform for teaching privacy, and at the same time, allows students to share knowledge, interact with each other, solve quizzes collaboratively, and discuss privacy issues and situations. For this purpose, this work proposes “Teens-online”, a collaborative e-learning platform for privacy awareness. The curriculum provided in this platform is based on the Personal Data Protection Competency Framework for School Students. Moreover, the proposed platform is equipped with a partner-matching mechanism based on matching game theory. This mechanism guarantees a stable student-student matching according to a student's need (behavior and/or knowledge). Thus, mutual benefits will be attained by minimizing the chances of cooperating with incompatible students. Experimental results show that the average learning-related utility obtained by applying the proposed partner-matching algorithm is much higher than the average utility obtained using other matching mechanisms. The results also suggest that by adopting the proposed approach, each student can be paired with their optimal partners, which in turn helps them reach their highest learning outcomes

Sound based social networks

The sound environment is an eco of the activity and character of each place, often carrying additional information to that made available to the eyes (both new and redundant). It is, therefore, an intangible and volatile acoustic fingerprint of the place, or simply an acoustic snapshot of a single event. Such rich resource, full of meaning and subtleness, Schaeffer called Soundscape. The exploratory research project presented here addresses the Soundscape in the context of Mobile Online Social Networking, aiming at determining the extent of its applicability regarding the establishment and/or strengthening of new and existing social links. Such research goal demanded an interdisciplinary approach, which we have anchored in three main stems: Soundscapes, Mobile Sound and Social Networking. These three areas pave the scientific ground for this study and are introduced during the first part of the thesis. An extensive survey of the state-of-the-arte projects related with this research is also presented, gathering examples from different but adjacent areas such as mobile sensing, wearable computing, sonification, social media and contextaware computing. This survey validates that our approach is scientifically opportune and unique, at the same time. Furthermore, in order to assess the role of Soundscapes in the context of Social Networking, an experimental procedure has been implemented based on an Online Social Networking mobile application, enriched with environmental sensing mechanisms, able to capture and analyze the surrounding Soundscape and users' movements. Two main goals guided this prototypal research tool: collecting data regarding users' activity (both sonic and kinetic) and providing users with a real experience using a Sound-Based Social Network, in order to collect informed opinions about this unique type of Social Networking. The application – Hurly-Burly – senses the surrounding Soundscape and analyzes it using machine audition techniques, classifying it according to four categories: speech, music, environmental sounds and silence. Additionally, it determines the sound pressure level of the sensed Soundscape in dB(A)eq. This information is then broadcasted to the entire online social network of the user, allowing each element to visualize and audition a representation of the collected data. An individual record for each user is kept available in a webserver and can be accessed through an online application, displaying the continuous acoustic profile of each user along a timeline graph. The experimental procedure included three different test groups, forming each one a social network with a cluster coefficient equal to one. After the implementation and result analysis stages we concluded that Soundscapes can have a role in the Online Social Networking paradigm, specially when concerning mobile applications. Has been proven that current offthe- shelf mobile technology is a promising opportunity for accomplishing this kind of tasks (such as continuous monitoring, life logging and environment sensing) but battery limitations and multitasking's constraints are still the bottleneck, hindering the massification of successful applications. Additionally, online privacy is something that users are not enthusiastic in letting go: using captured sound instead of representations of the sound would abstain users from utilizing such applications. We also demonstrated that users who are more aware of the Soundscape concept are also more inclined to assume it as playing an important role in OSN. This means that more pedagogy towards the acoustic phenomenon is needed and this type of research gives a step further in that direction.O ambiente sonoro de um lugar é um eco da sua atividade e carácter, transportando, na maior parte da vezes, informação adicional àquela que é proporcionada à visão (quer seja redundante ou complementar). É, portanto, uma impressão digital acústica - tangível e volátil - do lugar a que pertence, ou simplesmente uma fotografia acústica de um evento pontual. A este opulento recurso, carregado de significados e subtilezas, Schafer chamou de Paisagem-Sonora. O projeto de investigação de carácter exploratório que aqui apresentamos visa o estudo da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes Sociais Móveis Em-Linha, procurando entender os moldes e limites da sua aplicação, tendo em vista o estabelecimento e/ou reforço de novos ou existente laços sociais, respectivamente. Para satisfazer este objectivo foi necessária uma abordagem multidisciplinar, ancorada em três pilares principais: a Paisagem-Sonora, o Som Móvel e as Redes Sociais. Estas três áreas determinaram a moldura científica de referência em que se enquadrou esta investigação, sendo explanadas na primeira parte da tese. Um extenso levantamento do estado-da-arte referente a projetos relacionados com este estudo é também apresentado, compilando exemplos de áreas distintas mas adjacentes, tais como: Computação Sensorial Móvel, Computação Vestível, Sonificação, Média Social e Computação Contexto-Dependente. Este levantamento veio confirmar quer a originalidade quer a pertinência científica do projeto apresentado. Posteriormente, a fim de avaliar o papel da Paisagem-Sonora no contexto das Redes Sociais, foi posto em prática um procedimento experimental baseado numa Rede Social Sonora Em-Linha, desenvolvida de raiz para dispositivos móveis e acrescida de mecanismos sensoriais para estímulos ambientais, capazes de analisar a Paisagem-Sonora envolvente e os movimentos do utilizador. Dois objectivos principais guiaram a produção desta ferramenta de investigação: recolher dados relativos à atividade cinética e sonora dos utilizadores e proporcionar a estes uma experiência real de utilização uma Rede Social Sonora, de modo a recolher opiniões fundamentadas sobre esta tipologia específica de socialização. A aplicação – Hurly-Burly – analisa a Paisagem-Sonora através de algoritmos de Audição Computacional, classificando- a de acordo com quatro categorias: diálogo (voz), música, sons ambientais (“ruídos”) e silêncio. Adicionalmente, determina o seu nível de pressão sonora em dB(A)eq. Esta informação é então distribuída pela rede social dos utilizadores, permitindo a cada elemento visualizar e ouvir uma representação do som analisado. É mantido num servidor Web um registo individual da informação sonora e cinética captada, o qual pode ser acedido através de uma aplicação Web que mostra o perfil sonoro de cada utilizador ao longo do tempo, numa visualização ao estilo linha-temporal. O procedimento experimental incluiu três grupos de teste distintos, formando cada um a sua própria rede social com coeficiente de aglomeração igual a um. Após a implementação da experiência e análise de resultados, concluímos que a Paisagem- Sonora pode desempenhar um papel no paradigma das Redes Sociais Em- Linha, em particular no que diz respeito à sua presença nos dispositivos móveis. Ficou provado que os dispositivos móveis comerciais da atualidade apresentam-se com uma oportunidade promissora para desempenhar este tipo de tarefas (tais como: monitorização contínua, registo quotidiano e análise sensorial ambiental), mas as limitações relacionadas com a autonomia energética e funcionamento em multitarefa representam ainda um constrangimento que impede a sua massificação. Além disso, a privacidade no mundo virtual é algo que os utilizadores atuais não estão dispostos a abdicar: partilhar continuamente a Paisagem-Sonora real em detrimento de uma representação de alto nível é algo que refrearia os utilizadores de usar a aplicação. Também demonstrámos que os utilizadores que mais conhecedores do fenómeno da Paisagem-Sonora são também os que consideram esta como importante no contexto das Redes Sociais Em-Linha. Isso significa que uma atitude pedagógica em relação ao fenómeno sonoro é essencial para obter dele o maior ganho possível. Esta investigação propõe-se a dar um passo em frente nessa direção

Документация по Moodle 2.5. Ч. 1-4

Текст парал. англ., рус.Содерж.: Ч. 1: О системе Moodle. Ч. 2: Инсталляция Moodle для Windows. Ч. 3: Управление сайтом Moodle. Ч. 4: Управление курсом Moodle. Презентация перевода на русский язык документации по Moodle 2.5 / сост. переводчик В. А. Тунд