Keeping Authorities "Honest or Bust" with Decentralized Witness Cosigning

The secret keys of critical network authorities - such as time, name, certificate, and software update services - represent high-value targets for hackers, criminals, and spy agencies wishing to use these keys secretly to compromise other hosts. To protect authorities and their clients proactively from undetected exploits and misuse, we introduce CoSi, a scalable witness cosigning protocol ensuring that every authoritative statement is validated and publicly logged by a diverse group of witnesses before any client will accept it. A statement S collectively signed by W witnesses assures clients that S has been seen, and not immediately found erroneous, by those W observers. Even if S is compromised in a fashion not readily detectable by the witnesses, CoSi still guarantees S's exposure to public scrutiny, forcing secrecy-minded attackers to risk that the compromise will soon be detected by one of the W witnesses. Because clients can verify collective signatures efficiently without communication, CoSi protects clients' privacy, and offers the first transparency mechanism effective against persistent man-in-the-middle attackers who control a victim's Internet access, the authority's secret key, and several witnesses' secret keys. CoSi builds on existing cryptographic multisignature methods, scaling them to support thousands of witnesses via signature aggregation over efficient communication trees. A working prototype demonstrates CoSi in the context of timestamping and logging authorities, enabling groups of over 8,000 distributed witnesses to cosign authoritative statements in under two seconds.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Human Neurological Development: Past, Present and Future

Neurological development is considered as the major human potential. Vision, vestibular function, intelligence, and nutrition are discussed as well as the treatment of neurological disfunctions, coma, and convulsive seizures

Rogue Science

This review essay considers the tension between the evidence-driven vision of science\u27s mission and the fears of malicious use and terrible consequences that have come to the fore since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These fears have led some to call for government restrictions on the substance of scientific research and communication. In general, this approach is likely to do far more harm than good. But scientists need to take the problem of social consequences more seriously than they have so far. The author argues in this essay that in some circumstances, when rogue use of science can do large-scale harm and when there are strong grounds for believing that a foe has the will and ability to do such harm, self-restraint within the scientific community is called for. The following works are reviewed: Science in the Service of Human Rights, By Richard Pierre Claude, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Science and Technology in a Vulnerable World, Edited by Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson and Stephen J. Lita. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002

Morality and progress:IR narratives on international revisionism and the status quo

Scholars debate the ambitions and policies of today’s ‘rising powers’ and the extent to which they are revising or upholding the international status quo. While elements of the relevant literature provide valuable insight, this article argues that the concepts of revisionism and the status quo within mainstream International Relations (IR) have always constituted deeply rooted, autobiographical narratives of a traditionally Western-dominated discipline. As ‘ordering narratives’ of morality and progress, they constrain and organize debate so that revisionism is typically conceived not merely as disruption, but as disruption from the non-West amidst a fundamentally moral Western order that represents civilizational progress. This often makes them inherently problematic and unreliable descriptors of the actors and behaviours they are designed to explain. After exploring the formations and development of these concepts throughout the IR tradition, the analysis is directed towards narratives around the contemporary ‘rise’ of China. Both scholarly and wider political narratives typically tell the story of revisionist challenges China presents to a US/Western-led status quo, promoting unduly binary divisions between the West and non-West, and tensions and suspicions in the international realm. The aim must be to develop a new language and logic that recognize the contingent, autobiographical nature of ‘revisionist’ and ‘status quo’ actors and behaviours

Libre culture: meditations on free culture

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms

Folding and unfolding : balancing openness and transparency in open source communities

Open source communities rely on the espoused premise of complete openness and transparency of source code and development process. Yet, openness and transparency at times need to be balanced out with moments of less open and transparent work. Through our detailed study of Linux Kernel development we build a theory that explains that transparency and openness are nuanced and changing qualities that certain developers manage as they use multiple digital technologies and create, in moments of needs, more opaque and closed digital spaces of work. We refer to these spaces as digital folds. Our paper contributes to extant literature: by providing a process theory of how transparency and openness are balanced with opacity and closure in open source communities according to the needs of the development work; by conceptualizing the nature of digital folds and their role in providing quiet spaces of work: and, by articulating how the process of digital folding and unfolding is made far more possible by select elite actors’ navigating the line between the pragmatics of coding and the accepted ideology of openness and transparency

Deconstructing teaching English to speakers of other languages: problematising a professional discourse

This thesis provides a post-modern critique of the profession of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). This critique derives from the findings of a progressivist applied ethnographic study of group of ESOL teachers working at an institution of higher education in Britain. The analysis of the findings using post-modern theory revealed that there was a complex mêlée of discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) at work in the research setting: a localised idiosyncratic discourse containing the voices of the teachers and the management, and a dominating mainstream discourse containing institutional and academic voices. The teachers in their classroom practices and their construction of these practices reproduced the norms of this dominant discourse in a pedagogy which can be described as weak communicative language teaching. This reproduction resulted in contradictions in their practices and constructions of their practices with regard to learner-centredness and to the superiority of the pedagogy, as well as to tensions and conflicts between the ethos of education and the requirements of an ‘industry’. Three arguments emerge from these problems: 1. The pedagogy helps to maintain the low-status of TESOL because it reduces teaching to a series of ‘universally-applicable’ techniques and skills, the rudiments of which can be taught on a one-month training course. This pedagogy suits the institutional voice which regards TESOL as a private-sector industry. 2. This modernist ‘scientific’ pedagogy constructed as ‘universally-applicable’ and superior to other ways of teaching is potentially inappropriate because it cannot respond to social, cultural and political contexts of the classrooms in which it is used. 3. The pedagogy is legitimised with theories of learner-centredness that claim to be responsive to students’ needs engendering learner autonomy and self-actualisation while creating a ‘democratic’ and participative classroom. Using Focauldian theory, it can be seen that learner-centredness in fact masks the subtle operation of biopower, and is commensurate with a pedagogy designed as a commodity. These arguments can be located in wider shifts in education and professionalism in late-modern consumer capitalism where the public sector is being invaded by private-sector discourses. I finally propose the possibility of an alternative post-modern pedagogy with a commensurate post-modern critical profession

'Triple wins' or 'triple faults'? Analysing policy discourse on climate-smart agriculture (CSA)

This paper aims to unpack the equity implications of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA). The CSA approach has gained considerable traction in recent years, but remains highly contested. One of the principal areas of contestation relates to CSA’s contribution to social equity, yet equity is rarely defined in the CSA literature. To fill this gap, we apply an equity framework to four discourses that are commonly encountered in debates on the challenges and opportunities for applying CSA in different contexts and for different purposes. From this, we identify three important equity issues: First, distributive equity implies a need to acknowledge how CSA may transfer the burden of responsibility for climate change mitigation to marginalized producers and resource managers. Second, a procedural equity perspective reveals how CSA discourses generally fail to confront entrenched power relations that may constrain or block the emergence of more ‘pro-poor’ forms of agricultural development, adaptation to climate change, or carbon sequestration and storage. Third, to improve CSA outcomes, a focus on contextual equity means the need to pay more attention to the institutions that underpin the bargaining power of the poorest and most vulnerable groups, as well as a deeper acknowledgement of the political nature of transformations that are needed to address challenges around the agricultural sector in a changing climate