Reforming the United Nations

The thesis deals with the financial crisis that the United Nations faced starting in 1985 when the US Congress decided to withhold a significant part of the US contribution to the UN regular budget in order to force a greater say for the major contributors on budgetary issues, budgetary restraint and greater efficiency. The UN responded by the adoption of resolution 41/213 of 19 December 1986 that was based on the recommendations of a Group of High-level Intergovernmental Experts ("G-18") set up a year earlier. A new system was introduced regarding the formulation of the regular budget of the United Nations Organisation and a broader process of reform was initiated including a restructuring of the Secretariat and of the intergovernmental machinery in the economic and social fields. After an introductory chapter (Chapter I), the thesis examines the UN problems at the budgetary/financial and administrative/structural levels, the solutions proposed from within and without the United Nations established framework and the actual attempts at reform (Chapters II and ifi). The realisation that the implementation of reforms is rather disjointed and often unsuccessful (e.g. the failure to restructure the intergovernmental machi.neiy) prompts a search for the deeper causes of the UN problems at the political level and the attitudes of the main actors, namely the USA, the USSR, some up-and-coming states, notably Japan, the Third World states and, finally, of the UN Secretary-General and the Secretariat (Chapter 1V). Although the financial crisis may have subsided since 1988 and the USA seem committed to paying up their dues, the deeper UN crisis of identity has not been resolved and is expected to resurface if no bold steps are taken. In that direction, some possible alternative courses for the UN in the future are discussed drawing upon theory and practice (Chapte

GPT-2C:a parser for honeypot logs using large pre-trained language models

Abstract Deception technologies like honeypots generate large volumes of log data, which include illegal Unix shell commands used by latent intruders. Several prior works have reported promising results in overcoming the weaknesses of network-level and program-level Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) by fussing network traffic with data from honeypots. However, because honeypots lack the plug-in infrastructure to enable real-time parsing of log outputs, it remains technically challenging to feed illegal Unix commands into downstream predictive analytics. As a result, advances on honeypot-based user-level IDSs remain greatly hindered. This article presents a run-time system (GPT-2C) that leverages a large pre-trained language model (GPT-2) to parse dynamic logs generated by a live Cowrie SSH honeypot instance. After fine-tuning the GPT-2 model on an existing corpus of illegal Unix commands, the model achieved 89% inference accuracy in parsing Unix commands with acceptable execution latency

From Rome to Paris: a Call for Strong and Urgent Climate Action

A high-level, international Symposium was held in Rome on 27-29 May to review the realities and risks of climate change, to identify weaknesses in the current negotiating process, to propose policies and measures for rapid and effective climate action and to underline the risks and costs of further delay. The intent is to broaden support for a strong international agreement at the crucial UN Conference on climate, COP 21, which takes place in Paris in November. The Symposium was held on the initiative of President Mikhail Gorbachev, with support of the Italiani Foundation, the European Space Agency and the New Policy Forum. A representative of the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace attended