Digital Sovereignty Strategies for Every Nation

Digital Sovereignty must be on the agenda of every modern nation. Digital technology is becoming part of our life details, from the vital essentials, like food and water management, to transcendence in the Metaverse and Space. Protecting these digital assets will, therefore, be inevitable for a modern country to live, excel and lead. Digital Sovereignty is a strategic necessity to protect these digital assets from the monopoly of friendly rational states, and the threats of unfriendly Malicious states and behaviors. In this work, we revisit the definition and scope of digital sovereignty through extending it to cover the entire value chain of using, owning, and producing digital assets. We emphasize the importance of protecting the operational resources, both raw materials and human expertise, in addition to research and innovation necessary to achieve sustainable sovereignty. We also show that digital sovereignty by autonomy is often impossible, and by mutual cooperation is not always sustainable. To this end, we propose implementing digital sovereignty using Nash Equilibrium, often studied in Game Theory, to govern the relation with Rational states. Finally, we propose a digital sovereignty agenda for different country's digital profiles, based on their status quo, priorities, and capabilities. We survey state-of-the-art digital technology that is useful to make the current digital assets sovereign. Additionally, we propose a roadmap that aims to develop a sovereign digital nation, as close as possible to autonomy. Finally, we draw attention to the need of more research to better understand and implement digital sovereignty from different perspectives: technological, economic, and geopolitical

Diaspora, Identity and Return: The Kurdish Diaspora in Devon

This research argues for a more nuanced understanding of the diverse motivations for diaspora movement and return. The study develops contemporary diaspora literature by critiquing the way that concepts of home and homeland are used, underscoring the overlooked importance of community engagement, and emphasising the role of racism and gender in return migration. Empirically, the argument draws on semi-structured interviews with 84 male and female participants from the county of Devon, located within the southwest of England, in the United Kingdom, and 32 male and female participants who have returned to south Kurdistan. Alongside contributions to extant literature about migration and diaspora, the thesis also contributes to the fields of diaspora and migration studies by shedding light on the current state of the Kurdish diaspora in particular. Since Kurds have experienced increased autonomy in recent years, the thesis takes the opportunity to reflect on the familiar themes of home, community, identity and belonging in research on diaspora when long-held dreams of autonomy are finally realised. The thesis also makes suggestions for working alongside marginalized and disadvantaged people and supporting their struggle for equal citizenship

Males and Females in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: Why They Joined

Both males and females were actively involved in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE.) The thesis analyses whether males and females joined the LTTE for different reasons. The methodology used examines statements from interviews conducted by various journalists and academics that contain references to security and identity, themes central to the conflict, to determine its conclusions. In addition, this thesis uses reports conducted by NGOs, interviews with the civilian population, and academic research. The thesis finds that males and females had different reasons for joining the organization. However, these motivations are surprising and call into question some traditional assumptions of how men and women (should) behave. When females joined after the 1983 Black July riots, a massacre that left approximately 400-3000 Tamils dead, they did so at a time of heightened physical risk for the Tamil minority. Female LTTE members joined because of increased risks to bodily integrity, the experience of being displaced due to war, and after witnessing the effects of violence on their communities. Unlike men, however, women were less likely to speak of their own encounters with the Sri Lankan Defence Forces. Instead, females cited the experiences of their families and ethno-cultural community. Female recruits believed in the LTTE’s definition of gender equality, one which constructed female emancipation as the right to engage in combat. Many recruits felt stifled by Tamil society, but they also needed an avenue to defend their people once non-violent protest became ineffective and their ethno-cultural identity became targeted for oppression. When males first joined the LTTE in 1972-1976, they did so because their access to education and employment was compromised. Until 1983 the LTTE violently protested against what they viewed as unjust educational and language policies directed towards Tamils. These educational and language policies prevented males from securing stable employment and post-secondary education. In the beginning, men conceptualized security as the ability to secure a livelihood, but in response to male militancy the Sri Lankan government responded with military force. As the conflict grew the number of male casualties increased. In an attempt to seek protection from physical harm, males joined the LTTE, an organization they believed would grant them physical security. They relayed to interviewers stories of personal injustices committed by government security forces. Instead of describing the conflict using a gendered framework, male LTTE members believed that the lack of economic opportunity and the increased risk of bodily harm, which included death, detention, and torture, were the consequences of their marginalized ethno-cultural identity. Though males and females joined the LTTE for different reasons, with females believing that gender equality and physical safety were paramount (freedom from fear) and males first joining because they needed access to education and employment to survive (freedom from want), both sexes were led to the LTTE because of Sri Lanka’s institutional decay. LTTE members believed that the Sri Lankan government protected the Sinhalese at the expense of the Tamil population

BFT Selection

International audienceOne-size-fits-all protocols are hard to achieve in Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). As an alternative, BFT users, e.g., enterprises, need an easy and efficient method to choose the most convenient protocol that matches their preferences best. The various BFT protocols that have been proposed so far differ significantly in their characteristics and performance which makes choosing the `preferred' protocol hard. In addition, if the state of the deployed system is too fluctuating, then perhaps using multiple protocols at once is needed; this requires a dynamic selection mechanism to move from one protocol to another. In this paper, we present the first BFT selection model and algorithm that can be used to choose the most convenient protocol according to user preferences. The selection algorithm applies some mathematical formulas to make the selection process easy and automatic. The algorithm operates in three modes: Static, Dynamic, and Heuristic. The Static mode addresses the cases where a single protocol is needed; the Dynamic mode assumes that the system conditions are quite fluctuating and thus requires runtime decisions, and the Heuristic mode is similar to the Dynamic mode but it uses additional heuristics to improve user choices. We give some examples to describe how selection occurs. We show that our approach is automated, easy, and yields reasonable results that match reality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses selection in BFT

As secure as possible eventual consistency: Work in progress

Eventual consistency (EC) is a relaxed data consistency model that, driven by the CAP theorem, trades prompt consistency for high availability. Although, this model has shown to be promising and greatly adopted by industry, the state of the art only assumes that replicas can crash and recover. However, a Byzantine replica (i.e., arbitrary or malicious) can hamper the eventual convergence of replicas to a global consistent state, thus compromising the entire service. Classical BFT state machine replication protocols cannot solve this problem due to the blocking nature of consensus, something at odd with the availability via replica divergence in the EC model. In this work in progress paper, we introduce a new secure highly available protocol for the EC model that assumes a fraction of replicas and any client can be Byzantine. To respect the essence of EC, the protocol gives priority to high availability, and thus Byzantine detection is performed off the critical path on a consistent data offset. The paper concisely explains the protocol and discusses its feasibility. We aim at presenting a more comprehensive and empirical study in the future.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 - The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014-2020, under Grant agreement No. 732505, Light Kone project.Project “TEC4 Growth- Pervasive Intelligence, Enhancers and Proofs of Concept with Industrial Impact / NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000020” is financed by the NorthPortugal Regional Operational Programme(NORTE2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Challenges and Advances in Hemodialysis Membranes

Hemodialysis (HD) is a filtration vital process through which the bloods’ toxins and contaminations are removed. However, several immune system activations occur during dialysis, which can result in morbidity and mortality. The efficiency of the currently available blood purification process is hindered, on one hand, by the deficient toxins and middle molecule removal, and on the other hand, with the loss of valuable blood components (such as plasma and its constituents). This chapter offers an overview of the challenges and advances in HD membranes. It includes an introduction of the end stage renal disease, concepts of dialysis, its historical background, and the path through which the configurations and materials evolved. The interactions between membrane polymeric materials with human blood is also discussed. The aspect of material modification is one of the critical areas in HD technology as it targets to solve the most immediate and prevalent HD issue of membrane bioincompatibility. High flux dialysis (HFD) and hemofiltration (HF) are introduced and discussed. This class of membranes was introduced to solve middle molecule (such as β2- microglobulin) related challenges. This chapter highlights the question of why the issue of incompatible materials still exists along with current membrane modifications

Therapeutic Potential of 25-Hydroxyvitamin D in Promoting Cardiovascular Health

Introduction: The primary focus on vitamin D therapy was to treat metabolic bone disease. Over the past decade, however, researchers have demonstrated that vitamin D may have a role in other disease processes, particularly cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Review: Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) deficiency is widespread, and is extremely common in kidney transplant recipients. In community surveys, lower levels of 25(OH)D were associated with significantly higher adjusted prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and CVD. CVD patients have lower 25(OH)D levels than controls, which are associated with more severe disease and worse prognosis. 25(OH)D levels are inversely associated with insulin resistance and future risk of hyperglycemia in non-diabetic subjects. Low levels of 25(OH)D were found to be independent predictors of death and end stage renal disease (ESRD) in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients. Supplementation with vitamin D was found to lower parathyroid hormone and increase anti-inflammatory cytokines in congestive heart failure patient. It was found to improve flow mediated vasodilatation of the brachial artery in asymptomatic vitamin D deficient subjects and diabetic patients. Vitamin D supplementation was found to reduce proteinuria, mortality and progression to dialysis in CKD patients and to reduce cardiovascular mortality in hemodialysis patients. Vitamin D and calcium supplementation was also found to reduce cancer risk in community dwelling healthy postmenopausal women. Conclusion: Low levels of vitamin D seem to have undesirable effects on health. Based on the results of recent research, the recommended lower value of serum 25(OH)D is likely to be elevated. Key Words: Vitamin D; Cardiovascular disease ; Chronic kidney diseas

Exactly-once quantity transfer

Strongly consistent systems supporting distributed transactions can be prone to high latency and do not tolerate partitions. The present trend of using weaker forms of consistency, to achieve high availability, poses notable challenges in writing applications due to the lack of linearizability, e.g., to ensure global invariants, or perform mutator operations on a distributed datatype. This paper addresses a specific problem: the exactly-once transfer of a "quantity" from one node to another on an unreliable network (coping with message duplication, loss, or reordering) and without any form of global synchronization. This allows preserving a global property (the sum of quantities remains unchanged) without requiring global linearizability and only through using pairwise interactions between nodes, therefore allowing partitions in the system. We present the novel quantity-transfer algorithm while focusing on a specific use-case: a redistribution protocol to keep the quantities in a set of nodes balanced; in particular, averaging a shared real number across nodes. Since this is a work in progress, we briefly discuss the correctness of the protocol, and we leave potential extensions and empirical evaluations for future work.This work is financed by the FCT Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project UID/EEA/50014/2013; and by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement 609551, SyncFree project.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Exon: An oblivious exactly-once messaging protocol

TCP is typically the default transport protocol of choice for its supposed reliability, even for message-oriented middleware (e.g., ZeroMQ) or inter-actor communication (e.g., distributed Erlang). However, under network issues, TCP con-nections can fail, which requires ensuring both at-least-once and at-most-once delivery at the upper middleware layer. Moreover, the use of TCP at scale, in highly concurrent systems, can lead to drastic performance loss due to the need for TCP connection multiplexing and the resulting head-of-line blocking. This paper introduces Exon, an oblivious exactly-once messaging protocol, and a corresponding lightweight library implementation. Exon uses a novel strategy of a per-message four-way protocol to ensure oblivious exactly-once messaging, with on-demand protocol-level 'soft half-connections' that are established when needed and safely discarded. This achieves correctness, obliviousness, and performance, through merging and pipelining basic protocol mes-sages. The empirical evaluation of Exon demonstrates significant improvements in throughput and latency under packet loss, while maintaining a negligible overhead over TCP in healthy networks.Partially funded by project AIDA – Adaptive, Intelligent and Distributed Assurance Platform (POCI-01-0247-FEDER045907) co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalisation (COMPETE 2020) and by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under CMU Portugal