USBcat - Towards an Intrusion Surveillance Toolset

This paper identifies an intrusion surveillance framework which provides an analyst with the ability to investigate and monitor cyber-attacks in a covert manner. Where cyber-attacks are perpetrated for the purposes of espionage the ability to understand an adversary's techniques and objectives are an important element in network and computer security. With the appropriate toolset, security investigators would be permitted to perform both live and stealthy counter-intelligence operations by observing the behaviour and communications of the intruder. Subsequently a more complete picture of the attacker's identity, objectives, capabilities, and infiltration could be formulated than is possible with present technologies. This research focused on developing an extensible framework to permit the covert investigation of malware. Additionally, a Universal Serial Bus (USB) Mass Storage Device (MSD) based covert channel was designed to enable remote command and control of the framework. The work was validated through the design, implementation and testing of a toolset.Comment: In Proceedings AIDP 2014, arXiv:1410.322

Fixing the Pole in the Pyramid

We revisit the problem of the hidden sector Landau pole in the Pyramid Scheme. There is a fixed line in the plane of hidden sector gauge coupling and a Yukawa coupling between the trianon fields. We postulate that the couplings flow to this line, at a point where the hidden sector gauge coupling is close to the strong coupling edge of its perturbative regime. Below the masses of the heavier trianons, the model quickly flows to a confining N_F=N_C=3 supersymmetric gauge theory, as required by phenomenological considerations. We study possible discrete R-symmetries, which guarantee, among other things, that the basin of attraction of the fixed line has full co-dimension in the space of R-allowed couplings. The Yukawa couplings required to get the fixed line violate the pyrma-baryon symmetries we invoked in previous work to find a dark matter candidate. Omitting one of them, we have a dark matter candidate, and an acceptable RG flow down from the unification scale, if the confinement scale of the hidden sector group is lowered from 5 to 2 TeV.Comment: 14 pages, 3 table

How government policies affect the relationship between Polish and world wheat prices

Cash prices for wheat in Poland are not closely related to futures prices in Chicago and London, for several reasons: differences in seasonality, fluctuations in exchange rate, poor dissemination of information in Poland, and most important the Polish government's intervention in wheat markets. Polish wheat prices generally move to expected intervention prices and then stay there until the next intervention level becomes known. The exception was in 1994-95, when sharply higher world prices raised prices in Poland. A wheat futures exchange in Poland could give the private sector a tool for hedging against price risk, improving efficiency and price discovery in Poland. It would be difficult to develop, however, under present interventionist policies. This situation could be improved by reducing the protection of prices and by making any intervention rules-based (reducing uncertainty about policies). Should intervention be reduced or rationalized, the next question is whether Poland needs its own wheat futures exchange or whether Poland's private sector can use futures exchanges in London and Chicago to hedge against risk. The answer to that question is not an easy one.Markets and Market Access,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Environmental Economics&Policies,Insurance&Risk Mitigation,Financial Intermediation

Willian Dunbar: a critical exposition of the poems

There are many books to be written on Dunbar, and this one neither seeks to compete with those already - written nor to discourage future work; on the contrary, this is merely one contribution - the one most immediately necessary, and which I am most able to do. But there is room for a small work reviewing Dunbar studies up to date, as a guide to and clearing-house for, future work. I have tried here to do a sketch of such a work in my bibliography: this is only an outline, but space forbade any more exhaustive approach. Another great need is for book-length studies of Dunbar's language (long-overdue), his metric (still premature, pending more evidence from phonetic studies), and of his imagery - the last tracing its sources in the common stock of medieval culture, rather along the lines of Isabel Hyde's valuable but too brief study (see Bibliographical Review, Section E). These books should, properly, have been written before the present one; but what is desirable is not always practicable. Another work of criticism can follow them, when the time is rip