A Review of Audio Features and Statistical Models Exploited for Voice Pattern Design

Audio fingerprinting, also named as audio hashing, has been well-known as a powerful technique to perform audio identification and synchronization. It basically involves two major steps: fingerprint (voice pattern) design and matching search. While the first step concerns the derivation of a robust and compact audio signature, the second step usually requires knowledge about database and quick-search algorithms. Though this technique offers a wide range of real-world applications, to the best of the authors' knowledge, a comprehensive survey of existing algorithms appeared more than eight years ago. Thus, in this paper, we present a more up-to-date review and, for emphasizing on the audio signal processing aspect, we focus our state-of-the-art survey on the fingerprint design step for which various audio features and their tractable statistical models are discussed.Comment: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2015/PATTERNS15.html ; Seventh International Conferences on Pervasive Patterns and Applications (PATTERNS 2015), Mar 2015, Nice, Franc

Heavyweight Bots in the Clouds: The Wrong Incentives and Poorly Crafted Balances That Lead to the Blocking of Information Online

The United States and the European Union have long recognized the need to protect ISPs from potential liability from customers using their services to infringe intellectual property rights. These protections arise from a long-standing belief that intellectual property right holders should bear the burden of protecting their property, even in the quick moving Internet environment. However, a recent series of cases has called into question the ISPs’ liability protections as their technology is often the only real means to prevent wide scale infringing activity. This series has caused courts to revisit ISPs’ liability and to impose a ‘cooperative burden’ requiring ISPs to assist in the protection of intellectual property rights. In creating this burden, the ISPs and right holders have reacted by working together to craft technology advances that identify infringing activities. However, the technology is not yet ready for wide scale use and is often accompanied by policies that encourage the over-identification of material that should never be considered infringing. The over-identification is even more troubling in the face of automatic blocking activities that allow entities to claim material that is not part of their intellectual property portfolio. This activity is preventing communication, blocking the dissemination of information, and sometimes holding rightful owners of the material hostage to the automatic bot shut down activities. Simply put, this new cooperative burden is creating an odd set of incentives with no regard for individual internet users’ rights. This paper will consider incentives created under the law for ISPs to over-protect intellectual property rights. The paper will then consider the creation of an appropriate balance between stakeholders within the online world—one that re-evaluates the priority given to right holders and instead truly balances the burden of protecting intellectual property in the online world. Finally, the paper will suggest that the law must be reconsidered in light of the new technologies being employed by ISPs and intellectual property right holders in an effort to combat online piracy at the expense of individual users

Heavyweight Bots in the Clouds: The Wrong Incentives and Poorly Crafted Balances That Lead to the Blocking of Information Online

The United States and the European Union have long recognized the need to protect ISPs from potential liability from customers using their services to infringe intellectual property rights. These protections arise from a long-standing belief that intellectual property right holders should bear the burden of protecting their property, even in the quick moving Internet environment. However, a recent series of cases has called into question the ISPs’ liability protections as their technology is often the only real means to prevent wide scale infringing activity. This series has caused courts to revisit ISPs’ liability and to impose a ‘cooperative burden’ requiring ISPs to assist in the protection of intellectual property rights. In creating this burden, the ISPs and right holders have reacted by working together to craft technology advances that identify infringing activities. However, the technology is not yet ready for wide scale use and is often accompanied by policies that encourage the over-identification of material that should never be considered infringing. The over-identification is even more troubling in the face of automatic blocking activities that allow entities to claim material that is not part of their intellectual property portfolio. This activity is preventing communication, blocking the dissemination of information, and sometimes holding rightful owners of the material hostage to the automatic bot shut down activities. Simply put, this new cooperative burden is creating an odd set of incentives with no regard for individual internet users’ rights. This paper will consider incentives created under the law for ISPs to over-protect intellectual property rights. The paper will then consider the creation of an appropriate balance between stakeholders within the online world—one that re-evaluates the priority given to right holders and instead truly balances the burden of protecting intellectual property in the online world. Finally, the paper will suggest that the law must be reconsidered in light of the new technologies being employed by ISPs and intellectual property right holders in an effort to combat online piracy at the expense of individual users

The Dark Side(-Channel) of Mobile Devices: A Survey on Network Traffic Analysis

In recent years, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) have met an increasing commercial success and have become a fundamental element of the everyday life for billions of people all around the world. Mobile devices are used not only for traditional communication activities (e.g., voice calls and messages) but also for more advanced tasks made possible by an enormous amount of multi-purpose applications (e.g., finance, gaming, and shopping). As a result, those devices generate a significant network traffic (a consistent part of the overall Internet traffic). For this reason, the research community has been investigating security and privacy issues that are related to the network traffic generated by mobile devices, which could be analyzed to obtain information useful for a variety of goals (ranging from device security and network optimization, to fine-grained user profiling). In this paper, we review the works that contributed to the state of the art of network traffic analysis targeting mobile devices. In particular, we present a systematic classification of the works in the literature according to three criteria: (i) the goal of the analysis; (ii) the point where the network traffic is captured; and (iii) the targeted mobile platforms. In this survey, we consider points of capturing such as Wi-Fi Access Points, software simulation, and inside real mobile devices or emulators. For the surveyed works, we review and compare analysis techniques, validation methods, and achieved results. We also discuss possible countermeasures, challenges and possible directions for future research on mobile traffic analysis and other emerging domains (e.g., Internet of Things). We believe our survey will be a reference work for researchers and practitioners in this research field.Comment: 55 page