Low-resource eclipse attacks on Ethereum’s peer-to-peer network

We present eclipse attacks on Ethereum nodes that exploit the peer-to-peer network used for neighbor discovery. Our attacks can be launched using only two hosts, each with a single IP address. Our eclipse attacker monopolizes all of the victim’s incoming and outgoing connections, thus isolating the victim from the rest of its peers in the network. The attacker can then filter the victim’s view of the blockchain, or co-opt the victim’s computing power as part of more sophisticated attacks. We argue that these eclipse-attack vulnerabilities result from Ethereum’s adoption of the Kademlia peer-to-peer protocol, and present countermeasures that both harden the network against eclipse attacks and cause it to behave differently from the traditional Kademlia protocol. Several of our countermeasures have been incorporated in the Ethereum geth 1.8 client released on February 14, 2018.First author draf

Contracting Female Marriage in Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?

This essay demonstrates that Anthony Trollope was one of several Victorians aware of "female marriage," a term that Elizabeth Barrett Browning used to describe committed unions between women. After establishing that Trollope knew women in female marriages at the time that he was composing his novel Can You Forgive Her? (1864-65), the essay analyzes how female marriage inscribes itself within the form of the marriage plot. Trollope's novel aligns female marriage with contractual marriage, associated with feminist demands to make unions between men and women more egalitarian as well as dissoluble. The novel works to discredit contractual forms of marriage and to celebrate indissoluble hierarchical marriage by associating the first with primitive savagery, the second with an ideal of civilization that can accommodate male violence

Comparative Sapphism

Comparative studies of British and French literature have paid little attention to sapphism even though critics have long defined the difference between the two national literatures as sexual, particularly with respect to the novel. For most comparatists the sexual difference between nineteenth-century British and French literature is exclusively heterosexual: against the staid British novel of courtship throbs the French novel of adultery. But the lack of any British counterpart to the sapphism that thrived in France shows that the difference between the two literatures is also homosexual. With respect to heterosexuality, nineteenth-century French and British novels offer a contrast between two kinds of presence; with respect to sapphism, the contrast is between presence and absence. It would thus seem that the critic who compares nineteenth-century French and British sapphism is in the paradoxical position of comparing something to nothing

Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay

Library shelves tell interesting stories. Thirty or forty years ago, it took almost no time to get from feminism to homosexuality—in the stacks. Neither category took up much space, and few books stood between them, since the Library of Congress system classifies feminism and homosexuality together in Subclass HQ, “The Family. Marriage. Women.” That subclass has filled out rapidly in the past forty years, and in the past two decades much of the growth has been in HQ 74‐77—“Bisexuality. Homosexuality. Lesbianism. Transvestism. Transexualism.” Books that once huddled together for warmth on a few shelves now proudly occupy many linear feet in most major research collections. Paralleling the growth of gay studies has been the even more substantial increase within HQ 1101‐2030.7: “Women. Feminism.

Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention

In this essay I propose that we understand rape as a language and use this insight to imagine women as neither already raped nor inherently rapable. I will argue against the political efficacy of seeing rape as the fixed reality of women's lives, against an identity politics which defines women by our violability, and for a shift of scene from rape and its aftermath to rape situations themselves and to rape prevention. Many current theories of rape present rape as an inevitable material fact of life and assume that a rapist's ability to physically overcome his target is the foundation of rape. Such a view takes violence as a self-explanatory first cause and endows it with an invulnerable and terrifying facticity which stymies our ability to challenge and demystify rape

Have a nice day!: A Cidade como Anedota

Este ensaio explora algumas respostas críticas ao desenvolvimento da cidade capitalista nos últimos tempos, e o modo como tais críticas se encontram circunscritas precisamente pela ideologia a que se opõem. Concentro - me em três livros identificados nas recensões como representativos da mais provocativa escrita que recentemente se tem feito sobre a cidade de Nova Iorque: No Lease on Life, de Lynne Tillman (1998); Sidewalk, de Mitchell Duneier (1999); e Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, de Samuel Delany (1999). Cada um destes textos desenvolve uma visão utópica da cidade e cada um identifica o capitalismo como o grande obstáculo a essa visão; porém, ao mesmo tempo que gesticulam pela reivindicação de uma cidade melhor, cada um acaba por reproduzir a ideologia capitalista. Dado o livre curso que o capitalismo tem tomado nas últimas décadas, e dado que as cidades são expressões e máquinas do capitalismo, os escritores devem analisar os efeitos do capitalismo de forma a perceberem o que são as cidades. O meu interesse neste artigo está em demonstrar como os escritores falham na análise do capitalismo, ao permitirem que este delimite as suas ideias sobre aquilo que poderiam ser as cidades. Enquanto lugares que fazem confluir um largo número de gente muito diversa para uma proximidade relativamente estreita, as cidades poderiam, mais plausivelmente do que os subúrbios ou as áreas rurais, dar azo a experiências sociais radicais. As cidades poderiam encorajar a formação de alianças entre classes e outras divisões sociais que, em contrapartida, poderiam desafiar as próprias bases para uma distribuição de recursos e de poder

Gen/Ten: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men at 30

This is the slightly modified text of a talk delivered at a conference held on October 23rd, 2015, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's foundational book Between Men. The talk argues that Sedgwick's book embraces generalizations as strongly as it alerts us to the need to keep them flexible

The Profession of the Author: Abstraction, Advertising, and Jane Eyre

Since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has been read by its detractors and admirers as the portrayal of a willful female subject who claims her own identity. Readers have failed to note, however, that the most basic and encompassing marker of that identity, her name, tends to emerge when her will is most in abeyance. In this essay, I analyze abstraction through close readings of scenes of speech, writing, and advertising in Jane Eyre and through a consideration of Charlotte Bronte's dealings in the Victorian literary market. The concept of abstraction is crucial to understanding the relation of writing to female subjectivity in Jane Eyre and in Bronte's literary career because it mediates between apparently contradictory categories: embodiment and invisibility, self-effacement and self-advertisement, femininity and professional identity, fragmentation and wholeness, and profit and loss

Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention

In this essay I propose that we understand rape as a language and use this insight to imagine women as neither already raped nor inherently rapable. I will argue against the political efficacy of seeing rape as the fixed reality of women's lives, against an identity politics which defines women by our violability, and for a shift of scene from rape and its aftermath to rape situations themselves and to rape prevention. Many current theories of rape present rape as an inevitable material fact of life and assume that a rapist's ability to physically overcome his target is the foundation of rape. Such a view takes violence as a self-explanatory first cause and endows it with an invulnerable and terrifying facticity which stymies our ability to challenge and demystify rape

The Theatrical Scrapbook

This essay provides a road map for theatre historians, archivists, and librarians interested in understanding theatrical scrapbooks as a genre. It argues for the importance of the ordinary theatrical scrapbook as both archive and medium. As an archive, the theatrical scrapbook is a repository for performance ephemera. As a medium, scrapbooks record how past theatre aficionados merged the stage and the page, image and print, live performances and representations of them. Taking the scrapbook holdings of Ohio State’s Theatre Research Institute, the essay offers a brief history of theatrical scrapbooks; a taxonomy to help scholars navigate and interpret albums; and a sampling of the historical and theoretical questions that scrapbooks inspire and help answer