The new transfer fee system in professional soccer: An interdisciplinary study

First paragraph: As the new millennium starts to unfold few would dispute the proposition that professional sport in general and soccer in particular is experiencing a rapid process of commercialisation which is so profound that the description “ big business” is far from an exaggeration. Sport now accounts for approximately 3 per cent of global trade and, of more direct relevance for the purposes of this article, the latest authoritative survey on the finances of English soccer clubs reveals that in season 1999-2000 they collectively generated in excess of £1billion in total revenues with a confident projection that the top 20 Premiership clubs may well, largely on the back of a lucrative new TV rights deal, generate total revenues of around £1.5 billion by season 2002-2003. While it will almost certainly be the case that an increasing proportion of these revenues will be accounted for by TV revenues, merchandising and sponsorship, transfer fee income and spending will doubtless continue to figure prominently in the world of soccer finance. First, despite Bosman and the further liberalisation of the transfer fee system which the ruling triggered, transfer fee spending spirals inexorably upwards: a total of £340 million during season 1999-2000 . Secondly, for the smaller clubs transfer fee receipts from Premier League clubs can be vital for financial survival in the context of a business environment where profits are rare and the bleak reality for many clubs is continual struggle to limit losses to tolerable levels

Anatomy of a Vulnerable Fitness Tracking System: Dissecting the Fitbit Cloud, App, and Firmware

Funding: This work has been co-funded by the DFG as part of projects S1 within the CRC 1119 CROSSING and C.1 within the RTG 2050 ”Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users”, and by the BMBF within CRISP. Paul Patras has been partially supported by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) through a PECE grant.Fitbit fitness trackers record sensitive personal information, including daily step counts, heart rate profiles, and locations visited. By design, these devices gather and upload activity data to a cloud service, which provides aggregate statistics to mobile app users. The same principles govern numerous other Internet-of-Things (IoT) services that target different applications. As a market leader, Fitbit has developed perhaps the most secure wearables architecture that guards communication with end-to-end encryption. In this paper, we analyze the complete Fitbit ecosystem and, despite the brand's continuous efforts to harden its products, we demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities with potentially severe implications to user privacy and device security. We employ a repertoire of techniques encompassing protocol analysis, software decompiling, and both static and dynamic embedded code analysis, to reverse engineer previously undocumented communication semantics, the official smartphone app, and the tracker firmware. Through this interplay and in-depth analysis, we reveal how attackers can exploit the Fitbit protocol to extract private information from victims without leaving a trace, and wirelessly flash malware without user consent. We demonstrate that users can tamper with both the app and firmware to selfishly manipulate records or circumvent Fitbit's walled garden business model, making the case for an independent, user-controlled, and more secure ecosystem. Finally, based on the insights gained, we make specific design recommendations that not only can mitigate the identified vulnerabilities, but are also broadly applicable to securing future wearable system architectures.PostprintPeer reviewe

Point-Focus Concentration Compact Telescoping Array: EESP Option 1 Phase Final Report for Public Release

Orbital ATK, in partnership with Mark ONeill LLC (MOLLC) and SolAero Technologies Corp., has developed a novel solar array platform, PFC-CTA, which provides a significant advance in performance and cost reduction compared to all currently available space solar systems. PFC refers to the Point Focus Concentration of light provided by MOLLCs thin, flat Fresnel optics. These lenses focus light to a point of approximately 100 times the intensity of the ambient light, onto a solar cell of approximately 1/25th the size of the lens. CTA stands for Compact Telescoping Array1, which is the solar array blanket structural platform originally devised by NASA and currently being advanced by Orbital ATK and partners under NASA and AFRL funding to a projected TRL 5+ by late-2018. The NASA Game Changing Development Extreme Environment Solar Power (EESP) Option 1 Phase study has enabled Orbital ATK to generate and refine component designs, perform component level and system performance analyses, and test prototype hardware of the key elements of PFC-CTA, and increased the TRL of PFC-specific technology elements to TRL ~5. Key performance metrics currently projected are as follows: Scalability from 300 kW per wing (AM0); Specific Power > 250 W/kg (BoL, AM0); Stowage Efficiency > 60 kW/m3; 5:1 margin on pointing tolerance vs. capability; >50% launched cost savings; Wide range of operability between Venus and Saturn by active and/or passive thermal management

Uncovering Security Vulnerabilities in the Belkin WeMo Home Automation Ecosystem

The popularity of smart home devices is growing as consumers begin to recognize their potential to improve the quality of domestic life. At the same time, serious vulnerabilities have been revealed over recent years, which threaten user privacy and can cause financial losses. The lack of appropriate security protections in these devices is thus of increasing concern for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry, yet manufacturers’ ongoing efforts remain superficial. Hence, users continue to be exposed to serious weaknesses. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is also the case of home automation applications, as we uncover a set of previously undocumented security issues in the Belkin WeMo ecosystems. In particular, we first reverse engineer both the mobile app that enables users to control smart appliances and the communication logic implemented by WeMo devices. This enables us to compromise the passphrase guarding the communication over the local wireless network, opening the possibility of eavesdropping on user traffic. We further reveal how an attacker can present a fake device to a WeMo user, through which cross-site scripting can be exploited in order to mislead the user into disclosing private information. Lastly, we provide a set of security guidelines that can be followed to remedy the vulnerabilities identified.Postprin

Breaking Fitness Records without Moving: Reverse Engineering and Spoofing Fitbit

Tens of millions of wearable fitness trackers are shipped yearly to consumers who routinely collect information about their exercising patterns. Smartphones push this health-related data to vendors' cloud platforms, enabling users to analyze summary statistics on-line and adjust their habits. Third-parties including health insurance providers now offer discounts and financial rewards in exchange for such private information and evidence of healthy lifestyles. Given the associated monetary value, the authenticity and correctness of the activity data collected becomes imperative. In this paper, we provide an in-depth security analysis of the operation of fitness trackers commercialized by Fitbit, the wearables market leader. We reveal an intricate security through obscurity approach implemented by the user activity synchronization protocol running on the devices we analyze. Although non-trivial to interpret, we reverse engineer the message semantics, demonstrate how falsified user activity reports can be injected, and argue that based on our discoveries, such attacks can be performed at scale to obtain financial gains. We further document a hardware attack vector that enables circumvention of the end-to-end protocol encryption present in the latest Fitbit firmware, leading to the spoofing of valid encrypted fitness data. Finally, we give guidelines for avoiding similar vulnerabilities in future system designs

An Analysis of Abatement Potential of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Irish Agriculture 2021-2030

Teagasc SubmissionThis report has been prepared by the Teagasc Working Group on GHG Emissions, which brings together and integrates the extensive and diverse range of organisational expertise on agricultural greenhouse gases. The previous Teagasc GHG MACC was published in 2012 in response to both the EU Climate and Energy Package and related Effort Sharing Decision and in the context of the establishment of the Food Harvest 2020 production targets

3D Correlative Cryo-Structured Illumination Fluorescence and Soft X-ray Microscopy Elucidates Reovirus Intracellular Release Pathway

Imaging of biological matter across resolution scales entails the challenge of preserving the direct and unambiguous correlation of subject features from the macroscopic to the microscopic level. Here, we present a correlative imaging platform developed specifically for imaging cells in 3D under cryogenic conditions by using X-rays and visible light. Rapid cryo-preservation of biological specimens is the current gold standard in sample preparation for ultrastructural analysis in X-ray imaging. However, cryogenic fluorescence localization methods are, in their majority, diffraction-limited and fail to deliver matching resolution. We addressed this technological gap by developing an integrated, user-friendly platform for 3D correlative imaging of cells in vitreous ice by using super-resolution structured illumination microscopy in conjunction with soft X-ray tomography. The power of this approach is demonstrated by studying the process of reovirus release from intracellular vesicles during the early stages of infection and identifying intracellular virus-induced structures

3D correlative cryo-structured illumination fluorescence and soft X-ray microscopy elucidates reovirus intracellular release pathway

Summary. Imaging of biological matter across resolution scales entails the challenge of preserving the direct and unambiguous correlation of subject features from the macroscopic to the microscopic level. Here, we present a correlative imaging platform developed specifically for imaging cells in 3D under cryogenic conditions by using X-rays and visible light. Rapid cryo-preservation of biological specimens is the current gold standard in sample preparation for ultrastructural analysis in X-ray imaging. However, cryogenic fluorescence localization methods are, in their majority, diffraction-limited and fail to deliver matching resolution. We addressed this technological gap by developing an integrated, user-friendly platform for 3D correlative imaging of cells in vitreous ice by using super-resolution structured illumination microscopy in conjunction with soft X-ray tomography. The power of this approach is demonstrated by studying the process of reovirus release from intracellular vesicles during the early stages of infection and identifying intracellular virus-induced structures

Unexpected origins of the enhanced pairing affinity of 2′-fluoro-modified RNA

Various chemical modifications are currently being evaluated for improving the efficacy of short interfering RNA (siRNA) duplexes as antisense agents for gene silencing in vivo. Among the 2′-ribose modifications assessed to date, 2′deoxy-2′-fluoro-RNA (2′-F-RNA) has unique properties for RNA interference (RNAi) applications. Thus, 2′-F-modified nucleotides are well tolerated in the guide (antisense) and passenger (sense) siRNA strands and the corresponding duplexes lack immunostimulatory effects, enhance nuclease resistance and display improved efficacy in vitro and in vivo compared with unmodified siRNAs. To identify potential origins of the distinct behaviors of RNA and 2′-F-RNA we carried out thermodynamic and X-ray crystallographic analyses of fully and partially 2′-F-modified RNAs. Surprisingly, we found that the increased pairing affinity of 2′-F-RNA relative to RNA is not, as commonly assumed, the result of a favorable entropic contribution (‘conformational preorganization’), but instead primarily based on enthalpy. Crystal structures at high resolution and osmotic stress demonstrate that the 2′-F-RNA duplex is less hydrated than the RNA duplex. The enthalpy-driven, higher stability of the former hints at the possibility that the 2′-substituent, in addition to its important function in sculpting RNA conformation, plays an underappreciated role in modulating Watson–Crick base pairing strength and potentially π–π stacking interactions