The Impact of Aggregated Leaks on Privacy (BA)

Privacy is in a constant battle with economic, scientific and security interests. In our modern world enormous amounts of personal and identifying information about us is collected and analyzed. While significant resources are allocated to regulate this industry, criminals are not bound by such limitations. The exploitation of illegally obtained information is already estimated to be a billion dollar industry and its growth has not plateaued yet. In order to be ready for the ever increasing capabilities of cyber criminals it is crucial to examine the challenges that await. This paper studies network effects emerging from the aggregation and linkage of illegally obtainable personally identifiable information. We achieve this by analyzing a synthetic dataset which represents over 600 distinct data leaks that resulted in the exposure of over 12 billion records. We show the effectiveness of mitigation strategies such as using different email addresses and introduce User-Initiated Differential Privacy as an effective defense, reducing the risk of link discovery by up to 50%

Comparative Analysis of Dengue and Zika Outbreaks Reveals Differences by Setting and Virus.

The pacific islands of Micronesia have experienced several outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases over the past decade. In outbreaks on small islands, the susceptible population is usually well defined, and there is no co-circulation of pathogens. Because of this, analysing such outbreaks can be useful for understanding the transmission dynamics of the pathogens involved, and particularly so for yet understudied pathogens such as Zika virus. Here, we compared three outbreaks of dengue and Zika virus in two different island settings in Micronesia, the Yap Main Islands and Fais, using a mathematical model of transmission dynamics and making full use of commonalities in disease and setting between the outbreaks. We found that the estimated reproduction numbers for Zika and dengue were similar when considered in the same setting, but that, conversely, reproduction number for the same disease can vary considerably by setting. On the Yap Main Islands, we estimated a reproduction number of 8.0-16 (95% Credible Interval (CI)) for the dengue outbreak and 4.8-14 (95% CI) for the Zika outbreak, whereas for the dengue outbreak on Fais our estimate was 28-102 (95% CI). We further found that the proportion of cases of Zika reported was smaller (95% CI 1.4%-1.9%) than that of dengue (95% CI: 47%-61%). We confirmed these results in extensive sensitivity analysis. They suggest that models for dengue transmission can be useful for estimating the predicted dynamics of Zika transmission, but care must be taken when extrapolating findings from one setting to another

Zika Virus: What Have We Learnt Since the Start of the Recent Epidemic?

Zika is a viral disease transmitted mainly by mosquitoes of the genus Aedes. In recent years, it has expanded geographically, changing from an endemic mosquito-borne disease across equatorial Asia and Africa, to an epidemic disease causing large outbreaks in several areas of the world. With the recent Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreaks in the Americas, the disease has become a focus of attention of public health agencies and of the international research community, especially due to an association with neurological disorders in adults and to the severe neurological and ophthalmological abnormalities found in fetuses and newborns of mothers exposed to ZIKV during pregnancy. A large number of studies have been published in the last 3 years, revealing the structure of the virus, how it is transmitted and how it affects human cells. Many different animal models have been developed, which recapitulate several features of ZIKV disease and its neurological consequences. Moreover, several vaccine candidates are now in active preclinical development, and three of them have already entered phase I clinical trials. Likewise, many different compounds targeting viral and cellular components are being tested in in vitro and in experimental animal models. This review aims to discuss the current state of this rapidly growing literature from a multidisciplinary perspective, as well as to present an overview of the public health response to Zika and of the perspectives for the prevention and treatment of this disease

Acerca del concepto jurídico penal de acción

Para el autor la noción de la conducta humana puede verse como un supraconcepto que cobija todas las transformaciones corporales de un ser humano en el espacio y en el tiempo y comprende, al lado de los movimientos activos, también la pasividad; para él la acción es un constructo interpretativo dependiente de una descipción. A pártir de ello, despúes de hacer una crítica de las tradicionales formulaciones en esta materia, ensaya su propia elaboración en el ámbito del Derecho Penal gracias a un modelo de imputación de dos niveles

Black Fennec

Introduction: Black Fennec is a simple and easy-to-use application for viewing and editing semi-structured data like JSON in a visually interpreted form. The target audience is people who come in contact with such data regularly and want to collect and manage it in an accessible way. It is positioned between Microsoft Word and Access and can be understood as a data editor. It was originally developed by Lara Gubler, Leonie Däullary, Simon Kindhauser, and Caspar Martens as an engineering project with Thomas Kälin as Supervisor. Building on the previous work, the goal of this project was to release Black Fennec as a stable and mature product with major quality-of-life improvements that potential users are keen to use. Approach / Technology: Improving the stability of the application included major refactorings to many components of the application. Architecture-wise, some of the most significant changes were made to the document subsystem, extension handling, and the type system. This was made possible by an extensive and largely pre-existing automated test suite. The test suite itself also received a significant overhaul. The pre-existing suite, which was using the python unittest package, was largely extended and simplified through the use of pytest. To acquire the necessary skills the developers took part in a multi-day workshop organized by members of the pytest community. Currently, a thousand tests cover around 98% of the code base (branch coverage). Thanks to the migration to GTK 4 and the use of libadwaita, the application integrates seamlessly into the GNOME desktop environment. It also improves Maintainability by providing a large set of components that are responsive and user-friendly by design. We leveraged these technologies in an effort to improve the user experience of the application. Amongst other things, this included the addition of application feedback and better error handling. With the introduction of actions to the extension ecosystem, we have also created a new way of interacting with the application. Actions allow the execution of previously defined operations that operates on a selected data structure. Overall, the extension API has matured and now offers a smorgasbord of extension points including actions, mime types, and more. As a means of distribution, the application is now available as a flatpak package on Flathub. This allows for integrated installation and updates on all major Linux distributions through their native software center. Another advantage of flatpak is that it provides a sandboxed environment that adds another layer of security and protects our users from malicious intent. Result: We are happy to announce that Black Fennec is now available as a stable and mature product. The application can be downloaded from Flathub and installed on virtually any Linux distribution. Complementary to the release of the application, we also published a simplistic website with all relevant information including a short description, a screenshot, and links to other relevant resources. The website is available at https://blackfennec.or