Internet fragmentation, political structuring, and organizational concentration in transnational engineering networks

Is the internet at risk of fragmentation? Whereas the literature has examined this question with a focus on domestic policies, communication standards, and internet governance institutions, we analyze fragmentation and alternative outcomes in transnational engineering networks. These networks constitute the social foundations of the unified or ‘global’internet. Our contributions include (1) broadening the debate beyond fragmentation-related network outcomes to include political structuring and organizational concentration, and (2) new evidence from an important engineering network around the Internet Engineering Task Force comprising thousands of participants and over four decades. Our analyses reveal fast and continuous network growth as well as clear signs of growing concentration of the network around a few major companies. A key implication is that, at the level of engineering networks, concerns about internet fragmentation might be unfounded and might distract from more salient developments such as organizational concentration

Public perceptions of demand side management and a smarter energy future

Demand side management (DSM) is a key aspect of many future energy system scenarios1,2. DSM refers to a range of technologies and interventions designed to create greater efficiency and flexibility on the demand side of the energy system3. Examples include the provision of more information to users to support efficient behaviour and new ‘smart’ technologies that can be automatically controlled. Key stated outcomes of implementing DSM are benefits for consumers, such as cost savings3, 4 and greater control over energy use. Here, we use results from an online survey to examine public perceptions and acceptability of a range of current DSM possibilities in a representative sample of the British population (N = 2441). We show that, whilst cost is likely to be a significant reason for many people to uptake DSM measures, those concerned about energy costs are actually less likely to accept DSM. Notably, individuals concerned about climate change are more likely to be accepting. A significant proportion of people, particularly those concerned about affordability, indicated unwillingness or concerns about sharing energy data, a necessity for many forms of DSM. We conclude substantial public engagement and further policy development is required for widespread DSM implementation

Strategic Learning for Active, Adaptive, and Autonomous Cyber Defense

The increasing instances of advanced attacks call for a new defense paradigm that is active, autonomous, and adaptive, named as the \texttt{`3A'} defense paradigm. This chapter introduces three defense schemes that actively interact with attackers to increase the attack cost and gather threat information, i.e., defensive deception for detection and counter-deception, feedback-driven Moving Target Defense (MTD), and adaptive honeypot engagement. Due to the cyber deception, external noise, and the absent knowledge of the other players' behaviors and goals, these schemes possess three progressive levels of information restrictions, i.e., from the parameter uncertainty, the payoff uncertainty, to the environmental uncertainty. To estimate the unknown and reduce uncertainty, we adopt three different strategic learning schemes that fit the associated information restrictions. All three learning schemes share the same feedback structure of sensation, estimation, and actions so that the most rewarding policies get reinforced and converge to the optimal ones in autonomous and adaptive fashions. This work aims to shed lights on proactive defense strategies, lay a solid foundation for strategic learning under incomplete information, and quantify the tradeoff between the security and costs.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.1218

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