FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Development of variable voltage variable frequency drive system for induction motor speed control

This project describes the development of a Variable Voltage Variable Frequency (VVVF) system that controls the speed of Induction Motor (IM) at specific speed. Texas Instrument C2000 Microcontroller (TMS320F28335) has been used in this project as the interface between the control design with the IM. The Texas Instrument microcontroller has been combined with the MATLAB/Simulink and the VVVF system as the communication interface for processing the speed control system. The combination between power electronic circuits and microcontroller along with variable voltage variable frequency (VVVF) technique is able to control the target speed of IM. The target value of VVVF is implemented inside Lookup table and has been combined with the Proportional Integral (PI) speed control that generates the signal into the sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) for inverter operation. The SPWM signal is produced from the microcontroller with the instruction from MATLAB/Simulink, where the controller performs the output of the motor speed. The PI speed control receives the output of a closed loop feedback system from the motor speed and the error signal is reduced to achieve the value of desired speed reference. In the conclusion, the VVVF closed loop system is very useful to control the desired speed of motor at different variable voltage and variable frequency value. As collected for the results, its show, the VVVF with PI speed control can achieve the actual speed for the IM at 1297rpm and 1499rpm when the reference speeds have been set at 1300rpm and 1500rpm respectively. At the end it can be concluded that the VVVF combined with microcontroller have created an ecosystem for speed control that have achieved the objectives

Defending networked resources against floods of unwelcome requests

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-189).The Internet is afflicted by "unwelcome requests'" defined broadly as spurious claims on scarce resources. For example, the CPU and other resources at a server are targets of denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. Another example is spam (i.e., unsolicited bulk email); here, the resource is human attention. Absent any defense, a very small number of attackers can claim a very large fraction of the scarce resources. Traditional responses identify "bad" requests based on content (for example, spam filters analyze email text and embedded URLs). We argue that such approaches are inherently gameable because motivated attackers can make "bad" requests look "good". Instead, defenses should aim to allocate resources proportionally (so if lo% of the requesters are "bad", they should be limited to lo% of the scarce resources). To meet this goal, we present the design, implementation, analysis, and experimental evaluation of two systems. The first, speak-up, defends servers against application-level denial-of-service by encouraging all clients to automatically send more traffic. The "good" clients can thereby compete equally with the "bad" ones. Experiments with an implementation of speak-up indicate that it allocates a server's resources in rough proportion to clients' upload bandwidths, which is the intended result. The second system, DQE, controls spam with per-sender email quotas. Under DQE, senders attach stamps to emails. Receivers communicate with a well-known, untrusted enforcer to verify that stamps are fresh and to cancel stamps to prevent reuse. The enforcer is distributed over multiple hosts and is designed to tolerate arbitrary faults in these hosts, resist various attacks, and handle hundreds of billions of messages daily (two or three million stamp checks per second). Our experimental results suggest that our implementation can meet these goals with only a few thousand PCs.(cont) The enforcer occupies a novel design point: a set of hosts implement a simple storage abstraction but avoid neighbor maintenance, replica maintenance, and mutual trust. One connection between these systems is that DQE needs a DoS defense-and can use speak-up. We reflect on this connection, on why we apply speak-up to DoS and DQE to spam, and, more generally, on what problems call for which solutions.by Michael Walfish.Ph.D

Physical one-way functions

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-154).Modern cryptography relies on algorithmic one-way functions - numerical functions which are easy to compute but very difficult to invert. This dissertation introduces physical one-way firnctions and physical one-way hash functions as primitives for physical analogs of cryptosystems. Physical one-way functions are defined with respect to a physical probe and physical system in some unknown state. A function is called a physical one-way function if (a) there exists a deterministic physical interaction between the probe and the system which produces an output in constant time (b) inverting the function using either computational or physical means is difficult (c) simulating the physical interaction is computationally demanding and (d) the physical system is easy to make but difficult to clone. Physical one-way hash functions produce fixed-length output regardless of the size of the input. These hash functions can be obtained by sampling the output of physical one-way functions. For the system described below, it is shown that there is a strong correspondence between the properties of physical one-way hash functions and their algorithmic counterparts. In particular, it is demonstrated that they are collision-resistant and that they exhibit the avalanche effect, i.e., a small change in the physical system causes a large change in the hash value. An inexpensive prototype authentication system based on physical one-way hash functions is designed, implemented, and analyzed.(cont.) The prototype uses a disordered three-dimensional microstructure as the underlying physical system and coherent radiation as the probe. It is shown that the output of the interaction between the physical system and the probe can be used to robustly derive a unique tamper-resistant identifier at a very low cost per bit. The explicit use of three-dimensional structures marks a departure from prior efforts. Two protocols, including a one-time pad protocol, that illustrate the utility of these hash functions are presented and potential attacks on the authentication system are considered. Finally, the concept offabrication complexity is introduced as a way of quantifying the difficulty of materially cloning physical systems with arbitrary internal states. Fabrication complexity is discussed in the context of an idealized machine - a Universal Turing Machine augmented with a fabrication head - which transforms algorithmically minimal descriptions of physical systems into the systems themselves.by Pappu Srinivasa Ravinkanth.Ph.D

A comparison of discrete cosine transform and discrete wavelet transform algorithm in watermarking against common attacks

Digital watermarking is a technique to embed additional data to digital images, audios and videos without affecting the quality of the original image. Watermark can be extracted for ownership verification or authentication. Currently, there is no comparison documented done between Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In this report, the DCT watermarking algorithms and DWT watermarking algorithms were compared based on robustness and imperceptibility criteria. With DCT, the watermark bits were embedded into the mid-band coefficients of the DCT in the cover image where the DWT algorithm was embedded the watermark bits into the horizontal and vertical sub-bands of DWT in the cover image. Experimental results had shown that the watermark is robust to geometric attacks and removal attacks. DCT and DWT are compared with regard to peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Normalized Correlation (NC). The PSNR value of the watermarked Lena image in DWT is 47, higher than the DCT which is 44. The Normalized Correlation (NC) also had clarified that the extracted watermark in DWT 0.9964 is greater than the extracted watermark in DCT 0.2057. Thus, the results had indicated that the DWT gives better image quality than DCT

Dynamic block encryption with self-authenticating key exchange

One of the greatest challenges facing cryptographers is the mechanism used for key exchange. When secret data is transmitted, the chances are that there may be an attacker who will try to intercept and decrypt the message. Having done so, he/she might just gain advantage over the information obtained, or attempt to tamper with the message, and thus, misguiding the recipient. Both cases are equally fatal and may cause great harm as a consequence. In cryptography, there are two commonly used methods of exchanging secret keys between parties. In the first method, symmetric cryptography, the key is sent in advance, over some secure channel, which only the intended recipient can read. The second method of key sharing is by using a public key exchange method, where each party has a private and public key, a public key is shared and a private key is kept locally. In both cases, keys are exchanged between two parties. In this thesis, we propose a method whereby the risk of exchanging keys is minimised. The key is embedded in the encrypted text using a process that we call `chirp coding', and recovered by the recipient using a process that is based on correlation. The `chirp coding parameters' are exchanged between users by employing a USB flash memory retained by each user. If the keys are compromised they are still not usable because an attacker can only have access to part of the key. Alternatively, the software can be configured to operate in a one time parameter mode, in this mode, the parameters are agreed upon in advance. There is no parameter exchange during file transmission, except, of course, the key embedded in ciphertext. The thesis also introduces a method of encryption which utilises dynamic blocks, where the block size is different for each block. Prime numbers are used to drive two random number generators: a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) which takes in the seed and initialises the system and a Blum-Blum Shum (BBS) generator which is used to generate random streams to encrypt messages, images or video clips for example. In each case, the key created is text dependent and therefore will change as each message is sent. The scheme presented in this research is composed of five basic modules. The first module is the key generation module, where the key to be generated is message dependent. The second module, encryption module, performs data encryption. The third module, key exchange module, embeds the key into the encrypted text. Once this is done, the message is transmitted and the recipient uses the key extraction module to retrieve the key and finally the decryption module is executed to decrypt the message and authenticate it. In addition, the message may be compressed before encryption and decompressed by the recipient after decryption using standard compression tools

Interception: law, media, and techniques

In 2013, Edward Snowden provided journalists with copies of classified documents detailing the operations of the National Security Agency of the United States and its allies; in particular, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. Snowden explained that he hoped to set the conditions for a new technical literacy that would alter understandings of the relationship between digital communications and law. This thesis asks whether or not law is capable of repaying Snowden’s faith. To that end, it offers a media-theoretical genealogy of the interception of communication in the UK. Interception is presented as an effect of different sets of technical operations, mediated and processed by communication devices and networks. The thesis traces interception techniques: from their beginnings in the General Post Office; in their evolution through the operations of technical media; to their reappearance in the operations of digital media that constitute the internet. The authorisation of interception, meanwhile, has always depended upon legal techniques mediated by interception warrants. A genealogy of the interception warrant is presented through an archival study of the distinctly different practices of document production that manufactured and programmed warrants in different media epochs; from the medieval Chancery and paper bureaucracies of state institutions to the graphical user interface, which mediates between interception techniques and law today. Finally, the thesis addresses the function of legislation as it in turn addresses warrants and interception techniques. Law and legislation, it is argued, are incapable of constraining technical operations of interception because, like interception, law is already an effect of media-technical operations. The law operates not by controlling interception, but by processing it, assigning meaning to it, and protecting the secrecy of ongoing interception operations

The Cryptographic Imagination

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing—his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them—requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Colleg