Using Identity Premium for Honesty Enforcement and Whitewashing Prevention

One fundamental issue with existing reputation systems, particularly those implemented in open and decentralized environments, is whitewashing attacks by opportunistic participants. If identities are cheap, it is beneficial for a rational provider to simply defect when selling services to its clients, leave the system to avoid punishment and then rejoin with a new identity. Current work usually assumes the existence of an effective identity management scheme to avoid the problem, without proposing concrete solutions to directly prevent this unwanted behavior. This article presents and analyzes an incentive mechanism to effectively motivate honesty of rationally opportunistic providers in the aforementioned scenario, by eliminating incentives of providers to change their identities. The main idea is to give each provider an identity premium, with which the provider may sell services at higher prices depending on the duration of its presence in the system. Our price-based incentive mechanism, implemented with the use of a reputation-based provider selection protocol and a reverse auction scheme, is shown to significantly reduce the impact of malicious and strategic ratings, while still allowing explicit competition among the providers. It is proven that if the temporary cheating gain by a provider is bounded and small and given a trust model with a reasonable low error bound in identifying malicious ratings, our approach can effectively eliminate irrationally malicious providers and enforce honest behavior of rationally opportunistic ones, even when cheap identities are available. We suggest an identity premium function that helps such honesty to be sustained given a certain cost of identities and analyze incentives of participants in accepting the proposed premium. Related implementation issues in different application scenarios are also discussed

Trust-Based Service Selection

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that builds enterprise solutions based on services. In SOA, the lack of trust between different parties affects the adoption of such architecture. Trust is as significant a factor for successful online interactions as it is in real life communities, and consequently, it is an important factor that is used as a criterion for service selection. In the context of online services and SOA, the literature shows that the field of trust is not mature. Trust definition and the consideration of the essentials of trust aspects do not reflect the true nature of trust online. This thesis proposes a trust-based service selection solution, which requires establishing trust for services and supporting service selection based on trust. This work considers building trust for service providers besides rating services, an area that is neglected in the literature. This work follows progressive steps to arrive at a solution. First, this work develops a trust definition and identifies trust principles, which cover different aspects of trust. Next, SOA is extended to build a trust-based SOA that supports trust-based service selection. In particular, a new component, the trust mediator, which is responsible for trust establishment is added to the architecture. Accordingly, a trust mediator framework is built according to the trust definition and principles to identify its main components. Subsequently, this work identifies the trust information, or metrics, for services and service providers. Accordingly, trust models are built to evaluate trust rates for the applicable metrics, services, and service providers. Moreover, this work addresses the trust bootstrapping challenge. The proposed trust bootstrapping approach addresses different challenges in the literature such as whitewashing and cold start. This approach is implemented through experiments, evaluations, and scenarios

Effective Usage of Computational Trust Models in Rational Environments

Computational reputation-based trust models using statistical learning have been intensively studied for distributed systems where peers behave maliciously. However practical applications of such models in environments with both malicious and rational behaviors are still very little understood. In this paper, we study the relation between their accuracy measures and their ability to enforce cooperation among participants and discourage selfish behaviors. We provide theoretical results that show the conditions under which cooperation emerges when using computational trust models with a given accuracy and how cooperation can be still sustained while reducing the cost and accuracy of those models. Specifically, we propose a peer selection protocol that uses a computational trust model as a dishonesty detector to filter out unfair ratings. We prove that such a model with reasonable misclassification error bound in identifying malicious ratings can effectively build trust and cooperation in the system, considering rationality of participants. These results reveal two interesting observations. First, the key to the success of a reputation system in a rational environment is not a sophisticated trust learning mechanism, but an effective identity management scheme to prevent whitewashing behaviors. Second, given an appropriate identity management mechanism, a reputation-based trust model with a moderate accuracy bound can be used to enforce cooperation effectively in systems with both rational and malicious participants. As a result, in heterogeneous environments where peers use different algorithms to detect misbehavior of potential partners, cooperation may still emerge. We verify and extend these theoretical results to a variety of settings involving honest, malicious and strategic players through extensive simulation. These results will enable a much more targeted, cost-effective and realistic design for decentralized trust management systems, such as needed for peer-to-peer, electronic commerce or community systems

Re-feedback: freedom with accountability for causing congestion in a connectionless internetwork

This dissertation concerns adding resource accountability to a simplex internetwork such as the Internet, with only necessary but sufficient constraint on freedom. That is, both freedom for applications to evolve new innovative behaviours while still responding responsibly to congestion; and freedom for network providers to structure their pricing in any way, including flat pricing. The big idea on which the research is built is a novel feedback arrangement termed ‘re-feedback’. A general form is defined, as well as a specific proposal (re-ECN) to alter the Internet protocol so that self-contained datagrams carry a metric of expected downstream congestion. Congestion is chosen because of its central economic role as the marginal cost of network usage. The aim is to ensure Internet resource allocation can be controlled either by local policies or by market selection (or indeed local lack of any control). The current Internet architecture is designed to only reveal path congestion to end-points, not networks. The collective actions of self-interested consumers and providers should drive Internet resource allocations towards maximisation of total social welfare. But without visibility of a cost-metric, network operators are violating the architecture to improve their customer’s experience. The resulting fight against the architecture is destroying the Internet’s simplicity and ability to evolve. Although accountability with freedom is the goal, the focus is the congestion metric, and whether an incentive system is possible that assures its integrity as it is passed between parties around the system, despite proposed attacks motivated by self-interest and malice. This dissertation defines the protocol and canonical examples of accountability mechanisms. Designs are all derived from carefully motivated principles. The resulting system is evaluated by analysis and simulation against the constraints and principles originally set. The mechanisms are proven to be agnostic to specific transport behaviours, but they could not be made flow-ID-oblivious

Aspects of the New Commonwealth immigration question and its impacts: a study in policy making and elite politics, 1968-1981

[Author's synopsis]:This thesis offers an analysis of policy making on aspects of the New Commonwealth immigration issue in Britain between 1968 and 1981. It concerns three formally distinct but profoundly interlocking issues: immigration control itself, the development of race relations policy and the pursuit of nationality law reform.I argue that a populist critique of prevailing bipartisanship on the subject grew up around the notion that immigration policy, and the notion of multiracial Britain itself, was subject to a profound shortfall in political legitimacy. These arguments were introduced by Enoch Powell in 1968, but remained too controversially wedded to race issues to achieve purchase in the mainstream. A limited form of bipartisanship therefore survived this early assault, to be rephrased by Edward Heath as a managerial compromise that sought to accept stronger immigration controls (and, significantly, the reform of nationality law), justifiable in the national interest, and to remove the issues from the political sphere through strong administration and wide governmental discretion.This compromise was subsequently weakened by threats to the governing competence that underlay it in the form of problems in the control system highlighted by officials (some of which became public knowledge), the possibility of a deterioration in race relations and an increase in immigration perceived to originate in policy defects and a more liberal management of entry by the Labour government. These perceived failures permitted a restatement of the political legitimacy critique by individuals within the Conservative Party. In seeking to repudiate ideas of 'consensus' more broadly, the party under Margaret Thatcher's leadership reincorporated the populist idea that high minded and elitist bipartisanship was a failed form of governance, emphasising the redress of putatively valid public grievances through a strengthened system of immigration control, designed to cure systematic weaknesses in regulating what had become largely secondary (family) migration, and through the realisation of the 1981 British Nationality Act, intended to close off the period of post-colonial migration

The adequacy and efficacy of anti-money laundering legislations within the context of electronic banking and informal remittance systems in developing countries with particular reference to Nigeria and South Africa

In recent times, international, regional and local legislation has been couched to strengthen anti-corruption institutions and deter corrupt public officials from syphoning public wealth for their benefits, but this has continued unabated in spite of some successes recorded from these anti-graft agencies. Electronic banking notable for timeliness in executing transfers have helped in facilitating ease of doing business and as well accelerated the transfer of illicit wealth to secrecy jurisdictions. So regardless of internal and prudential controls instituted by regulatory authorities to ensure transparency in handling transactions and the reporting requirements for suspicious transactions, money laundering persists. Tracing and recovering the loot becomes another financial, legal and inter-state hurdle on the part of law enforcement agencies while the perpetrators live in exquisite luxury believing that the loot is their fair share of the ‘national cake.' This dissertation sought to assess the adequacy and efficacy of anti-money laundering legislation given the complexities of the local environment: namely nepotism, weak institutions, and predominance of a cash-based economy, lack of independence and the politicisation of corruption. First, we consider the enormity of the problem of corruption and its effect on developing countries with due regard to security, judicial fairness and stability of the economy. After that is an examination of international and local money laundering initiatives with a considerable emphasis on the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the role of the Financial Intelligence Unit in providing intelligence for tracing of corrupt proceeds. The researcher asserts that anti-money laundering legislation will be efficacious where good governance prevails and the incentives for corruption including nepotism and prebendal attitudes are discouraged. A State, which provides social safety nets for its populace, would strengthen the anticorruption fight thereby discouraging new entrants into public office positions from graft and abuse of those positions of authority

Contagious Discourse: Germs, Mass Media, and the Shaping of Reality

Over the past two decades, mass media coverage of certain infectious diseases has become more abundant. News reports of many of these contagious illnesses invoke fear in many people, such as Ebola and pandemic influenza; multidrug-resistant strains of infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis; and agents of biological warfare, a concern that is now at the forefront with many Americans due to the most recent act of bioterrorism on American soil following the events of September 11th. This dissertation focuses on the American public\u27s perception of infectious diseases, particularly as portrayed in the cultural science curriculum. I examine the cyclic nature of the discourse of contagion and its consequences. In doing so, I present a critical analysis of who controls what is included in the discourse, how agendas contribute to what is considered important, and how various threads of the discourse intertwine to create a gestalt-like complex. With this controlled discourse in mind, I discuss how experiencing the conversation contributes to what people believe about the threat of contagion and present how these assumptions shape our perception of reality. Lastly, I demonstrate how our altered perception of reality leads to behavioral changes that alter our world. To illustrate this, I provide examples of two types of reality shifts that occurred over the past few decades: the increase in commercial antibacterial products and antibiotic use contributed to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains (a biological shift), and the fear of weapons of mass destruction lead to increased support for a war against Iraq (a sociological shift)

Corruption as an Empty Signifier

Corruption as an Empty Signifier critically explores the ways in which corruption in Africa has been equated with African politics and political order, and offers a novel approach to understanding corruption as a potentially emancipatory discourse of political transformation. Conventionally, both academic literature as well as development policies depict corruption as the lynchpin of politics in Africa, locking African societies into political orders which subvert democratic change

An explorative study of the current practises of greenwashing in social media

The first section of this paper looks specifically at the concept of greenwashing from a theoretical perspective. It aims to establish exactly what greenwashing is, what it involves and how it has been used. The second section incorporates both the first section of this paper, and delves deeper into how greenwashing has been present in social media. The third section of this paper is a case study. This section has been broken down into three categories of industries in consideration of greenwashing practises. The first is ‘The Obvious’ - this looks at the obvious examples of industries that use greenwashing practises. ‘The Overlooked’ looks at the industries which are often disregarded in terms of greenwashing practises. The last is ‘The Unexpected’ which looks into the industries that focus on supporting the environment and would not commonly be associated with any form of greenwashing practises at all. This case study aims to identify how the selected companies chosen for the study have been associated with greenwashing in the past, and how their current social presence may still be contributing to greenwashed advertising. As the concept of greenwashing is based on a theory developed around two decades ago and mostly consisted of very direct claims and statements using traditional advertising mediums such as billboards and magazine adverts, and considering the amount of well-known corporations who were proven guilty of such greenwashing practises, it would be ignorant to consider that such practises have simply subsided and ceased to occur. Corporations are aware of being called-out with negative press, especially with regards to issues such as false environmental practises, therefore as the advertising industry has changed with time, wouldn’t such greenwashing practises have adapted as well? Corporations in the past have learnt that direct greenwash statements have backfired negatively, therefore in collaboration with the use of social media, the prospect of using subtle, or even subconscious greenwash strategies seem to create an issue which requires investigation

A comparative analysis of anti-corruption legislation and anti-corruption agencies in the Eastern Cape and Northern Cape provices : a governance perspective

This thesis analysed and compared the effectiveness of the anti-corruption legislation and anti-corruption agencies in the Eastern Cape and Northern Cape provinces. The thesis consists of six chapters. This study is based on the assumption that the struggle against corruption is best approached by developing a system of laws, institutions and supporting practices which promote integrity and make corrupt conduct a high-risk activity. It is imperative that a systemic approach is embarked upon in order to address the manner in which the major institutions and processes of the state are conquered and exploited by corrupt individuals and groups. With the magnitude in which hurdles exist that hamper the effectiveness of the country's anti-corruption legislation and anti-corruption agencies; South Africa is incapable of curbing corruption. With the purpose to determine a desired state of affairs, characteristics of effective anti-corruption agencies and anti-corruption legislation were presented. These served as a yardstick in measuring how effective such agencies and legislation are in South Africa. Reasons for failure of agencies and legislation are discussed. After discussing types of anti-corruption agencies, those that perform better than ix others were identified. Through literature review, the status quo concerning anti-corruption initiatives in South Africa was assessed. It was revealed that the level of the success of South African anti-corruption agencies and legislation has been limited. In the case of anti-corruption agencies, weaknesses such as fragmentation; insufficient coordination; poor delineation of responsibility; and assimilation of corruption work into a broader mandate were identified as major causes. Measures that are needed, such as informed citizens; a need to foster and sustain high levels of professional and ethically imbued civil servants; and legislation that supports the transition towards a corruption-free society that are needed to complement implementation of anti-corruption legislation, were also recognised. Ways of addressing such shortcomings that the writers identified are also presented. The methodology and design followed in the study are described. This is followed by the analysis and interpretation of the survey. The research findings are then presented. Based on the findings a number of recommendations that would assist in improving the effectiveness of anticorruption agencies and anti-corruption legislation are made. Flowing from the discussion of effective anti-corruption models that were identified by literature a model that would be ideal for South Africa is recommended