Have You Updated Your Toaster? Transatlantic Approaches to Governing the Internet of Everything

As Internet-connected devices become ubiquitous, it remains an open question whether security— or privacy—can or will scale, or whether a combination of perverse incentives, new problems, and new impacts of old problems like “technical debt” amassing from products being rushed to market before being fully vetted, will derail progress and exacerbate cyber insecurity. This Article investigates contemporary approaches to Internet of Things (IoT) governance through an in- depth comparative case study focusing on the European Union (EU) and the United States. Particular attention is paid to the impact on IoT security of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Network Information Security (NIS) Directive in the EU, and the influence of the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF), with a focus on mitigating the risk of politically motivated attacks on civilians. We analyze reform proposals and apply lessons from major prior Internet governance debates to argue for a polycentric approach to improving IoT security and privacy in the transatlantic context

Perspective Access Networks

Perspective Access Networks provide an infrastructure from which users can specify the location from which they wish to view the Internet. The ability to specify location has become necessary as the Internet has become increasingly inconsistent. An increasing preponderance of middleboxes, location-dependent services, and large-scale content filtering have contributed to this situation. Our work offers the following contributions. First, we propose an infrastructure that routes traffic to a location from which a given resource can be viewed, taking instructions from user-specified attributes describing the desired location. Second, we analyze the tradeoff between the expressivity of user requests and the finite resources available within the network for propagating metadata about available perspectives. Third, we stipulate a set of real scenarios that fall within the limits of what can reasonably be handled by a system appropriately tuned to manage the tradeoff, and we argue that the specific algorithm we propose can handle the scenarios effectively.Engineering and Applied Science

Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors in recent clinical trials for cancer therapy

Heritable changes in gene expression that are not based upon alterations in the DNA sequence are defined as epigenetics. The most common mechanisms of epigenetic regulation are the methylation of CpG islands within the DNA and the modification of amino acids in the N-terminal histone tails. In the last years, it became evident that the onset of cancer and its progression may not occur only due to genetic mutations but also because of changes in the patterns of epigenetic modifications. In contrast to genetic mutations, which are almost impossible to reverse, epigenetic changes are potentially reversible. This implies that they are amenable to pharmacological interventions. Therefore, a lot of work in recent years has focussed on the development of small molecule enzyme inhibitors like DNA-methyltransferase inhibitors or inhibitors of histone-modifying enzymes. These may reverse misregulated epigenetic states and be implemented in the treatment of cancer or other diseases, e.g., neurological disorders. Today, several epigenetic drugs are already approved by the FDA and the EMEA for cancer treatment and around ten histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors are in clinical development. This review will give an update on recent clinical trials of the HDAC inhibitors used systemically that were reported in 2009 and 2010 and will present an overview of different biomarkers to monitor the biological effects

Blossom: A Decentralized Approach to Overcoming Systemic Internet Fragmentation

The Internet is systemically fragmented. We consider the causes of fragmentation, including both technical concerns, such as middleboxes and routing failure, as well as political concerns, such as incomplete peering and the structure of Internet governance. While fragmentation may be desirable in certain circumstances and for various reasons, it can also be problematic, violating central Internet design principles and rendering routine tasks difficult. We motivate the need for a system designed to facilitate connectivity throughout the Internet, providing the benefits of locality, universal access, and distributed management, while interoperating with the existing infrastructure. Finally, we describe our prototype implementation that enables overcoming fragmentation in our network testbed.Engineering and Applied Science

A Directory Service for Perspective Access Networks

Network fragmentation occurs when the accessibility of a network-based resource to an observer is a function of how the observer is connected to the network. In the context of the Internet, network fragmentation is well-known and occurs in many situations, including an increasing preponderance of network address translation, firewalls, and virtual private networks. Recently, however, new threats to Internet consistency have received media attention. Alternative namespaces have emerged as the result of formal objections to the process by which Internet names and addresses are provisioned. In addition, various governments and service providers around the world have deployed network technology that (accidentally or intentionally) restricts access to certain Internet content. Combined with the aforementioned sources of fragmentation, these new concerns provide ample motivation for a network that allows users the ability to specify not only the network location of Internet resources they want to view but also the perspectives from which they want to view them. Our vision of a Perspective Access Network is a peer-to-peer overlay network that incorporates routing and directory services that allow non-hierarchical organization. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a directory service for such networks. We demonstrate its feasibility and efficacy using measurements from a test deployment using PlanetLab.Engineering and Applied Science