Mega, Digital Storage Lockers, and the DMCA: Will Innovation Be Stifled by Fears of Piracy?

Kim Dotcom, founder of Megaupload Limited, has been in many news headlines over the past year. Megaupload—one of Dotcom’s many peer-to-peer sharing sites—was the center of controversy, as it allowed users to upload and share all sorts of files, including copyrighted material. After an organized effort by the Department of Justice and several foreign governments, Dotcom was arrested for (secondary) copyright infringement and his site was ultimately shut down. Dotcom has recently launched a new service, MEGA, which he claims will evade copyright laws entirely. Like other well-known cloud-sharing services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, MEGA allows users to upload files and to share them with select users. In an attempt to avoid liability, MEGA locally encrypts all files on the user’s computer before they are uploaded to the site. The private key and public key used to encrypt and decrypt the file are retained solely by the user; MEGA gets no part of that information. This, Dotcom argues, will shift the entirety of the copyright onus to the user. This Issue Brief analyzes the protections afforded cyberlocker services like MEGA by the DMCA, including tensions raised in actual litigation. This Issue Brief argues that, while an ex ante secondary-liability analysis is difficult due to its contextual nature, MEGA’s use of user-controlled encryption (UCE), deduplication, and distributed host servers may lend to an affirmative finding of liability

Data-Driven Application Maintenance: Views from the Trenches

In this paper we present our experience during design, development, and pilot deployments of a data-driven machine learning based application maintenance solution. We implemented a proof of concept to address a spectrum of interrelated problems encountered in application maintenance projects including duplicate incident ticket identification, assignee recommendation, theme mining, and mapping of incidents to business processes. In the context of IT services, these problems are frequently encountered, yet there is a gap in bringing automation and optimization. Despite long-standing research around mining and analysis of software repositories, such research outputs are not adopted well in practice due to the constraints these solutions impose on the users. We discuss need for designing pragmatic solutions with low barriers to adoption and addressing right level of complexity of problems with respect to underlying business constraints and nature of data.Comment: Earlier version of paper appearing in proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice (SER&IP), IEEE Press, pp. 48-54, 201

Entity Identity Reconciliation based Big Data Federation A MDE approach

“Information is power” is a sentence attributed to Francis Bacon that acquired a high important in the current era of the information. However, too much information can be a negative aspect. The term of “Infoxication” refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. With the increasing of relevance of open data and big database, the application of mechanisms and solutions to manage information is critical. This paper introduces the problem of unique identification and data reconciliation and offers a discussion about how to solve this problem in big and open data environment. The problem of data reconciliation in multiple databases and the unique identification of entities is not a new problem, but, how effective are classical mechanisms in the new internet environment? In this paper a solution based on model-driven engineering and virtual graph is presented in order to improve the processing of information in big open repositories. The paper illustrates the idea with a real example for the right exploitation of heritage information in the south of Spain.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

Entity Identity Reconciliation based Big Data Federation-A MDE approach

“Information is power” is a sentence attributed to Francis Bacon that acquired a high important in the current era of the information. However, too much information can be a negative aspect. The term of “Infoxication” refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information. With the increasing of relevance of open data and big database, the application of mechanisms and solutions to manage information is critical. This paper introduces the problem of unique identification and data reconciliation and offers a discussion about how to solve this problem in big and open data environment. The problem of data reconciliation in multiple databases and the unique identification of entities is not a new problem, but, how effective are classical mechanisms in the new internet environment? In this paper a solution based on model-driven engineering and virtual graph is presented in order to improve the processing of information in big open repositories. The paper illustrates the idea with a real example for the right exploitation of heritage information in the south of Spain

Name Disambiguation from link data in a collaboration graph using temporal and topological features

In a social community, multiple persons may share the same name, phone number or some other identifying attributes. This, along with other phenomena, such as name abbreviation, name misspelling, and human error leads to erroneous aggregation of records of multiple persons under a single reference. Such mistakes affect the performance of document retrieval, web search, database integration, and more importantly, improper attribution of credit (or blame). The task of entity disambiguation partitions the records belonging to multiple persons with the objective that each decomposed partition is composed of records of a unique person. Existing solutions to this task use either biographical attributes, or auxiliary features that are collected from external sources, such as Wikipedia. However, for many scenarios, such auxiliary features are not available, or they are costly to obtain. Besides, the attempt of collecting biographical or external data sustains the risk of privacy violation. In this work, we propose a method for solving entity disambiguation task from link information obtained from a collaboration network. Our method is non-intrusive of privacy as it uses only the time-stamped graph topology of an anonymized network. Experimental results on two real-life academic collaboration networks show that the proposed method has satisfactory performance.Comment: The short version of this paper has been accepted to ASONAM 201