ACUTA Journal of Telecommunications in Higher Education

In This Issue President\u27s Message From the Editor lT-Style Alphabet Soup Software-Defined WAN (SO-WAN)- Moving Beyond MPLS loT: The lnternet of Things ls the LPWAN in Your Future? lngredient for Wireless Success: DAS Hot lssues in Communications Technology Law lnstitutional Excellence Award: CSU Fullerton\u27s Shared Cloud Services DlDs for ELINs? lSE...ERP... KnowBe

Learning from the veg box: designing unpredictability in agency delegation

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two- week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people’s diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices

A Trust-by-Design Framework for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an environment where interconnected entities can interact and can be identifiable, usable, and controllable via the Internet. However, in order to interact among them, such IoT entities must trust each other. Trust is difficult to define because it concerns different aspects and is strongly dependent on the context. For this reason, a holistic approach allowing developers to consider and implement trust in the IoT is highly desirable. Nevertheless, trust is usually considered among different IoT entities only when they have to interact among them. In fact, without considering it during the whole System Developmente Life Cycle (SDLC) there is the possibility that security issues will be raised. In fact, without a clear conception of the possible threats during the development of the IoT entity, the lack of planning can be insufficient in order to protect the IoT entity. For this reason, we believe that it is fundamental to consider trust during the whole SDLC in order to carefully plan how an IoT entity will perform trust decisions and interact with the other IoT entities. To fulfill this goal, in this thesis work, we propose a trust-by-design framework for the IoT that is composed of a K-Model and several transversal activities. On the one hand, the K-Model covers the SDLC from the need phase to the utilization phase. On the other hand, the transversal activities will be implemented differently depending on the phases. A fundamental aspect that we implement in this framework is the relationship that trust has with other related domains such as security and privacy. Thus we will also consider such domains and their characteristics in order to develop a trusted IoT entity

Designing the domestic Internet of Things using a practice-orientated perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of sensing, actuating and networked objects, often discussed as delivering efficiency through machine determined, automated decision making and action to achieve ‘Smartness’ in a logistically based paradigm. When applied to the domestic space these values are touted as beneficially controlling lighting, heating and entertainment to improve efficiency and comfort, while reducing costs. This approach follows the external goods of effectiveness, reducing everything to an objective value/cost proposition; however, the home is a subjectively experienced space incorporating differing values, so this reductive perspective overlooks a wider spectrum of inhabitant’s concerns relating to their daily activities and the domestic space. Furthermore, this approach can supplant involvement in domestic activities by treating these as computable problems to solve, alienating users through automation, a lack of transparency and poor understanding of the reasoning behind machine decision making. Existing attempts to address this topic indicate Techno-Centric approaches impact on understanding and engagement with the domestic space; Human-Centric perspectives focus on supporting people’s subjective experiences by prioritising their activities, sense-making and sensory experiences within the design process; Beyond Human-Centric IoT perspectives broaden this understanding to propose non-hierarchical, flat ontologies for the IoT and the implications this has on integrating human/non-human agency in the IoT, generally and domestically. This supported an approach utilising Practice Theory, a development of organising concepts for theorising social life, with sociality dependent on activities conducted with materials to develop a coherent sense of self and which understands place as a meshwork of human/non-human agency. Practice Theory is applied within a Design Research approach using a synergistic Participatory Action Research (PAR) / Participatory Design (PD) process. Exploring Domestic Practices contextualised the IoT through a range of methods including interactive installations, interviews and design workshops, uncovering participant attitudes towards the IoT, generating Practice Themes and specific examples of practices and constituent elements. These acted as User Generated Values (UGV) in a Values-Led PD process to inform the project pathway and the conceptualisation of a Practice-Oriented IoT through PAR’s Action-Reflection spirals. Additionally, a parallel PD process explored the effective communication of UGV within Professional Design Practice (PDP) workshops with the intent of reducing communicative distance between end-users and developers, supporting communication of user’s attitudes towards the IoT and Practice within PDP through inclusion as guiding values. Models of the IoT balancing Practice and technical concerns, workshops and toolkit were developed iteratively, leading to an outcome modelling the IoT and Practice within a flat ontology. Through this, and by embedding Practice within the IoT itself, IoT agency was reframed from automation towards assistiveness in Practice and IoT values shifted from efficiency in external goods of effectiveness towards internally derived goods of excellence, supporting skill development, engagement and reflection on action. This identifies the value of using PAR and PD to consider people’s values, goals and existing practices when developing the domestic IoT. This was particularly valuable in exploring Practice to understand people’s activities in the home and contextualise attitudes towards the IoT. This informed the development of a framework balancing the IoT’s technological nature with people’s activities and values, a system guided by Practice elements reciprocally informing and supporting participant engagement in dynamically developing domestic practices

Principled Flow Tracking in IoT and Low-Level Applications

Significant fractions of our lives are spent digitally, connected to and dependent on Internet-based applications, be it through the Web, mobile, or IoT. All such applications have access to and are entrusted with private user data, such as location, photos, browsing habits, private feed from social networks, or bank details.In this thesis, we focus on IoT and Web(Assembly) apps. We demonstrate IoT apps to be vulnerable to attacks by malicious app makers who are able to bypass the sandboxing mechanisms enforced by the platform to stealthy exfiltrate user data. We further give examples of carefully crafted WebAssembly code abusing the semantics to leak user data.We are interested in applying language-based technologies to ensure application security due to the formal guarantees they provide. Such technologies analyze the underlying program and track how the information flows in an application, with the goal of either statically proving its security, or preventing insecurities from happening at runtime. As such, for protecting against the attacks on IoT apps, we develop both static and dynamic methods, while for securing WebAssembly apps we describe a hybrid approach, combining both.While language-based technologies provide strong security guarantees, they are still to see a widespread adoption outside the academic community where they emerged.In this direction, we outline six design principles to assist the developer in choosing the right security characterization and enforcement mechanism for their system.We further investigate the relative expressiveness of two static enforcement mechanisms which pursue fine- and coarse-grained approaches for tracking the flow of sensitive information in a system.\ua0Finally, we provide the developer with an automatic method for reducing the manual burden associated with some of the language-based enforcements

What is the next chapter in the organized food retail industry in Portugal, up to 2030, and what are the strategic options that should be considered for strategy formulation? - Evolving supply chain management: internet of things

This project focus on the analysis of the organized food retail industry in Portugal, up to 2030. For this purpose, four scenarios were created using two critical uncertainties-shoppers’ e-commerce usage and producers’ direct-to-consumer adoption-and recommendations were developed. Moreover, the applications and impact that Internet of Things can have in supply chain management were considered for analysis, as this technology is evolving and already disrupting the way the supply chain operates. It is concluded that the key break throughs are on processes optimization, control of operations, communication across the whole supply chain and the information extracted throughout the full process

Originality and the Future of Copyright in an Age of Generative AI

This papers explores the question of human authorship when works are created with generative AI tools.Comment: 3 figure

Peekaboo: A Hub-Based Approach to Enable Transparency in Data Processing within Smart Homes (Extended Technical Report)

We present Peekaboo, a new privacy-sensitive architecture for smart homes that leverages an in-home hub to pre-process and minimize outgoing data in a structured and enforceable manner before sending it to external cloud servers. Peekaboo's key innovations are (1) abstracting common data pre-processing functionality into a small and fixed set of chainable operators, and (2) requiring that developers explicitly declare desired data collection behaviors (e.g., data granularity, destinations, conditions) in an application manifest, which also specifies how the operators are chained together. Given a manifest, Peekaboo assembles and executes a pre-processing pipeline using operators pre-loaded on the hub. In doing so, developers can collect smart home data on a need-to-know basis; third-party auditors can verify data collection behaviors; and the hub itself can offer a number of centralized privacy features to users across apps and devices, without additional effort from app developers. We present the design and implementation of Peekaboo, along with an evaluation of its coverage of smart home scenarios, system performance, data minimization, and example built-in privacy features.Comment: 18 page

Presidential Inability: Hearing Before the Special Subcommittee on Study of Presidential Inability of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 85th Congress

Text of proposed legislation, testimony, and documents relating to situations in which the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/twentyfifth_amendment_congressional_materials/1003/thumbnail.jp