New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet

In this article we analyse the emergence of Internet activity addressing the experiences of young people in two British communities: South Asian and Chinese.We focus on two web sites: www.barficulture.com and www.britishbornchinese.org.uk, drawing on interviews with site editors, content analysis of the discussion forums, and E-mail exchanges with site users. Our analysis of these two web sites shows how collective identities still matter, being redefined rather than erased by online interaction. We understand the site content through the notion of reflexive racialisation. We use this term to modify the stress given to individualisation in accounts of reflexive modernisation. In addition we question the allocation of racialised meaning from above implied by the concept of racialisation. Internet discussion forums can act as witnesses to social inequalities and through sharing experiences of racism and marginalisation, an oppositional social perspective may develop. The online exchanges have had offline consequences: social gatherings, charitable donations and campaigns against adverse media representations. These web sites have begun to change the terms of engagement between these ethnic groups and the wider society,and they have considerable potential to develop new forms of social action

A Systematic Review on Using Hacker Forums on the Dark Web for Cyber Threat Intelligence

Urgent warnings for private businesses and public organizations to monitor and predict disruptive cyberattacks have been on the rise. The annual cost of cyber-attacks in the worldwide economy is expected to be more than $10.5 trillion in 2025. To that end, new methods are being developed to fight cyberattacks. One such method builds upon leveraging cybercriminal/hacker forums on the dark web to design ‘cyberthreat intelligence’ solutions. The dark web, which is not accessible by the conventional browsers that are normally used to access the surface web, is the part of the web where most of the illegal and illicit content is hosted. It is a major market resource for cybercriminal-hackers for trading and developing cyberthreat content (e.g., malware; novel hacking methods; malicious source code). Therefore, the study of designing cyber threat intelligence solutions (i.e., methods; artifacts) based upon analyzing hacker forums has been undertaken in the literature. To enhance this structured inquiry and to formulate new research directions, we conduct a systematic literature review on leveraging hacker forums and designing ‘threat intelligence’ solutions. In our systematic review, we report our findings based on the PRISMA - Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses - checklist. We conducted our search on Scopus and Ebscohost, and our search query was the following: (“dark web” OR “dark net” OR “darknet” OR “hacker* forum” OR “underground forum ) AND ( security OR threat intelligence ). Our search included abstracts and English-language documents published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. We extracted a total of 295 papers and retained 69 papers. Our findings indicate the proposed threat intelligence solutions have been built upon the analysis of different forms of unstructured data, including text, videos, and images. Different solutions had different objectives, including: (1) key actor (hacker) identification (i.e., identifying the key active hackers on the forum who actively engage in and lead discussions and posts), (2) hacker ranking according to expertise (i.e., ranking the forum participant hackers based on their hacking domain-knowledge expertise reflected in their posts), (3) malware identification (i.e., identifying novel malware from hackers’ posts on the forums), and (4) organizational information security risk management and mitigation (i.e., identifying organizational vulnerabilities and developing strategies to mitigate them based on the knowledge retrieved from hacker forums). We found that as of now, the proposed solutions do not consider the factor of temporality, or temporal-based dynamism, in the forums. Key hackers may change, expertise may change, and vulnerabilities may evolve in organizations. We hope that our review catalyzes future research in this area

The Metabolism and Growth of Web Forums

We view web forums as virtual living organisms feeding on user's attention and investigate how these organisms grow at the expense of collective attention. We find that the "body mass" ($PV$) and "energy consumption" ($UV$) of the studied forums exhibits the allometric growth property, i.e., $PV_t \sim UV_t ^ \theta$. This implies that within a forum, the network transporting attention flow between threads has a structure invariant of time, despite of the continuously changing of the nodes (threads) and edges (clickstreams). The observed time-invariant topology allows us to explain the dynamics of networks by the behavior of threads. In particular, we describe the clickstream dissipation on threads using the function $D_i \sim T_i ^ \gamma$, in which $T_i$ is the clickstreams to node $i$ and $D_i$ is the clickstream dissipated from $i$. It turns out that $\gamma$, an indicator for dissipation efficiency, is negatively correlated with $\theta$ and $1/\gamma$ sets the lower boundary for $\theta$. Our findings have practical consequences. For example, $\theta$ can be used as a measure of the "stickiness" of forums, because it quantifies the stable ability of forums to convert $UV$ into $PV$, i.e., to remain users "lock-in" the forum. Meanwhile, the correlation between $\gamma$ and $\theta$ provides a convenient method to evaluate the `stickiness" of forums. Finally, we discuss an optimized "body mass" of forums at around $10^5$ that minimizes $\gamma$ and maximizes $\theta$.Comment: 6 figure

On the edge: ICT and the transformation of professional legal education

Information and communications technology in professional legal education courses is perceived as problematic for teachers and course designers. It is so not because technology is inherently difficult or strange, but because at a deep level it can threaten the practice and identity of teachers. However the contextual challenges of their position, caught between academy and practice, may actually enable professional legal educators to take account of new technologies. The article discusses this proposal, using the example of the incremental development of a discussion forum. It suggests that the tools of pragmatist and transformative meta-theory may point the way forward for professional legal educators to create their own community of practice in the use of ICT in professional legal learning

Solutions to Detect and Analyze Online Radicalization : A Survey

Online Radicalization (also called Cyber-Terrorism or Extremism or Cyber-Racism or Cyber- Hate) is widespread and has become a major and growing concern to the society, governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Research shows that various platforms on the Internet (low barrier to publish content, allows anonymity, provides exposure to millions of users and a potential of a very quick and widespread diffusion of message) such as YouTube (a popular video sharing website), Twitter (an online micro-blogging service), Facebook (a popular social networking website), online discussion forums and blogosphere are being misused for malicious intent. Such platforms are being used to form hate groups, racist communities, spread extremist agenda, incite anger or violence, promote radicalization, recruit members and create virtual organi- zations and communities. Automatic detection of online radicalization is a technically challenging problem because of the vast amount of the data, unstructured and noisy user-generated content, dynamically changing content and adversary behavior. There are several solutions proposed in the literature aiming to combat and counter cyber-hate and cyber-extremism. In this survey, we review solutions to detect and analyze online radicalization. We review 40 papers published at 12 venues from June 2003 to November 2011. We present a novel classification scheme to classify these papers. We analyze these techniques, perform trend analysis, discuss limitations of existing techniques and find out research gaps

Trufax about discussion group netspeak : an historical analysis of semantic change in the English slang of newsgroups and web forums

This dissertation offers an examination of the ways in which English writers in Internet discussion groups—that is, newsgroups and web forums—draw upon techniques of semantic change to create slang words. The dissertation hypothesizes that the techniques involved will be similar to those found underpinning semantic change in other varieties of the English language, both the standard form and other, offline varieties of modern slang. However, the precise constraints of the online platform—its basis in text rather than speech and gesture—will also lead to some differences in how the semantic change is carried out. The hypothesis is put to the test using diachronic analyses of 67 slang words, which are represented in data drawn from a variety of Internet discussion groups dating from 1980 to the present day. In analysing these words, the dissertation also examines whether the techniques documented are explainable within established theoretical frameworks of semantic change, particularly whether they conform to the tendencies in the directionality of semantic change identified by Elizabeth Close Traugott as part of her Invited Inferencing Theory of Semantic Change

Online social lending: Borrower-generated content

This article explores online social lending, an innovative venture that represents a reintermediation in financial services. Borrowers and lenders now have access to online financial information services such as Motley Fool, http://www.fool.com/ , and the opportunity to communicate directly with each other online, sharing user-generated content, in the spirit of Web 2.0. In this environment, new possibilities emerge. Drawing on the literature of community banks, finance, and online banking, we conducted a structurational analysis of ZOPA(2007) a newly founded venture in online social lending whereby borrower/lender interactions take place within an open and transparent environment using discussion boards and blogs. ZOPA offers a service as an intermediary but one that differs from the intermediating role played by a traditional bank. We analyzed the possible attractions and risks of ZOPA’s service to customers, from the perspective of social lending and social networking, using public data from ZOPA’s website. Our intention is to understand the nature of this reintermediation and explain the development of this process through Giddens’ propositions

Science 3.0: Corrections to the Science 2.0 paradigm

The concept of Science 2.0 was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing. Although technically sound, the concept still does not work as expected. Here we provide a systematic line of arguments to modify the concept of Science 2.0, making it more consistent with the spirit and traditions of science and Internet. Our first correction to the Science 2.0 paradigm concerns the open-access publication models charging fees to the authors. As discussed elsewhere, we show that the monopoly of such publishing models increases biases and inequalities in the representation of scientific ideas based on the author's income. Our second correction concerns post-publication comments online, which are all essentially non-anonymous in the current Science 2.0 paradigm. We conclude that scientific post-publication discussions require special anonymization systems. We further analyze the reasons of the failure of the current post-publication peer-review models and suggest what needs to be changed in Science 3.0 to convert Internet into a large journal club.Comment: 7 figure

A qualitative evaluation of two different law enforcement approaches on dark net markets

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study on discussions about two major law enforcement interventions against Dark Net Market (DNM) users extracted from relevant Reddit forums. We assess the impact of Operation Hyperion and Operation Bayonet (combined with the closure of the site Hansa) by analyzing posts and comments made by users of two Reddit forums created for the discussion of Dark Net Markets. The operations are compared in terms of the size of the discussions, the consequences recorded, and the opinions shared by forum users. We find that Operation Bayonet generated a higher number of discussions on Reddit, and from the qualitative analysis of such discussions it appears that this operation also had a greater impact on the DNM ecosystem. Index Terms—cybercrime, policy, law enforcement, qualitative, drug markets, dark webAccepted manuscrip