eConsumer

eCommerce and eConsumer, privacy and securit

Privacy in the Age Of Information (and algorithms)

This paper raises the privacy issues related to information that is accessible about indi- viduals from their mobile devices and that which is collected when they interact with and use so called ”free” services provided on the web. The importance of privacy has been ignored by most legislation and any laws passed have no teeth. The only exception is the privacy protection that is embedded in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR). GDPR gives control to individuals over their personal data and requires any organization which collects and controls personal information to have in place appropriate measures both technical and logistic, to implement the data protection principles. In this paper, we propose a technical solution to provide a personal email and web server with complete control of all correspondence and contents. This would liberate users from fake free services and provide privacy and security

The Web of Betrayals

The web was ushered in with great expectations, formally in May 1994, in a conference called World Wide Web I, This event, in hindsight, is sometimes referred to as the Woodstock of the web. The web and Mosaic, the graphical browser, which was announced soon after has revolutionized the internet. For most people, the internet is the web, while one of the monopolist tech-corporations wants the world to view their platforms to be not only the web but the Internet! The web has given rise to a number of rich powerful corporations which did not exist before its advent. The easy to use graphical interface and the cell phone with its tiny screen have become the de-facto interface to all kinds of applications and have provided new methods of communication and connections. The control of all this by a small number of monopolistic corporations, who have amassed last quantities of data on people, has created a situation which has become a web of betrayal of the promise of sharing and providing information, freely. We also consider the remote possibility of a new freer web without monopolies

C3S2E-2008-2016-FinalPrograms

This document records the final programs for each of the 9 meetings of the C* Conference on Computer Science & Software Engineering, C 3S2E which were organized in various locations on three continents. The papers published during these years are accessible from the digital librariy of ACM(2008-2016

Report of the Metadata Workshop Dublin, OH (1995)

Access to relevant information is one of the most important requirements of all human activities. This need has been recognized and has resulted in the continuing effort to describe and organize information so as to facilitate it's expected discovery and access. With the recent surge in the use of the Internet as a conduit for information dissemination, there is an urgent need to meet the needs of an unprecedented number of information users. Since there would be a significant number of "naive" users amongst them, the need for organizing information and its subsequent discovery must be done with improved functionality and efficiency in terms of 'ease of search', 'time to search' and 'cost to search'. These tasks require the bringing together of professionals from many disciplines of knowledge. The Metadata Workshop was held between March 1 and March 3, 1995 in Dublin, OH

Close vs Open Systems

The marketing of computing systems in the early days included the bundling of basic software support. This included the operating system, the compilers and libraries as well as training manuals. What has happened now is that closed systems a re marketed today that have the software, including privacy compromising bugs and tracking sub-systems, built into them. All the software applications created by independent software houses are installed via the operating system of the close d system and the device maker imposes a percent charge. There is no move anywhere to un-bundle software, including the applications and the hardware. In this talk, we will examine the philosophy of moving away from such closed systems to improve innovation and hence create better systems

IDEAS-1997-2021-Final-Programs

This document records the final program for each of the 26 meetings of the International Database and Engineering Application Symposium from 1997 through 2021. These meetings were organized in various locations on three continents. Most of the papers published during these years are in the digital libraries of IEEE(1997-2007) or ACM(2008-2021)

Test: Internet Indexing Systems vs List of Known URLs: Revisited

This is a compilation of the tests done in Sept./Oct. 1997 by the author on the hen existing search engines. It was published on the web on the authors home page . As the web pages changed, this was pushed of into the old site and forgotten. The original HTML pages were converted into PDF using LibreOffice in Aug 2022 and is placed in the Spectrum repository for the record

CINDI System

He advent of the Web has highlighted the importance of information discovery and retrieval as it has become a daily task for most users of the Internet. Search engines have made information search tasks much easier, however they retrieve links to documents based on term frequency, location of terms, link analysis, popularity, date of publication, length of the document, and proximity of query terms. The CINDI System is a digital library(repository) for research papers in domain of computer science. The CINDI project is to improve discovery and search experience by targeting information to that required by academics and professionals in field of Computer Science. This paper describes the CINDI system and its components and our experience with both the push mechanism and the pull mechanism available in CINDI