The threats of social networking : old wine in new bottles?

Despite the many potential benefits to its users, social networking appears to provide a rich setting for criminal activities and other misdeeds. In this paper we consider whether the risks of social networking are unique and novel to this context. Having considered the nature and range of applications to which social networks may be applied, we conclude that there are no exploits or fundamental threats inherent to the social networking setting. Rather, the risks and associated threats treat this communicative and social context as an enabler for existing, long established and well-recognised exploits and activities

MiPOS - the Mote Indoor Positioning System

In the past few years, there have been huge research efforts into ubiquitous and context aware platforms that offer a user a custom level of service based on some known local parameters. The utility of such systems is greatly enhanced if a physical locational area can be determined. Recently, hybrid devices have been developed combining low power micro controllers with short range FM radio transceivers. Some location identification work has been carried out with these systems such as the Matrix Pencil approximation technique[8],however most of these all provide information for an ideal square area with no RF obstructions.Here we present MiPOS, a scalable locationing system based on the MICA mote[11] family of devices.The design goal of MiPOS is to provide a low-power, scalable, distributed locationing system suited to an indoor (office) environment.During the presentation of this paper we will highlight solutions in the areas of security, radio and network management and power awareness for a hybrid context aware wearable locationing device

New class of high speed LAN access protocols based on the principle of timed packet release

This paper describes a class of protocols, based on the principle of Timed Packet Release - or TPR, which provide access to high speed local area network bus structures The principle behind TPR is a system of time delays in the nodes, reckoned from a common timing reference signal generated at a suitable point on the bus structure. By arranging for the delays in each node to increase according to its physical location on the bus nodes always detect packets from "upstream" nodes before their time delay expires. The TPR protocols described in this paper operate on linear bidirectional and unidirectional buses - although the TPR principle can be realised in a number of versions to provide collision free, prioritised, deterministic access to various bus topologies including hub/star. A comparative evaluation of their performance with established methods of bidirectional bus access such as token passing and the reservation protocols is obtained using discrete event simulation. Performance is measured in terms of the average delay-throughput characteristics of the protocols at data rates extending into the Gigabits/sec. region

Performance assessment of a deterministic access protocol for high performance bus topology LANs

This paper describes the operation of a proposed method of access to bidirectional local area network buses - called Timed Packet Release or TPR. The method is based on a system of time delays in the nodes, reckoned from a timing reference signal and provides collision free deterministic access for queued packets. A comparative evaluation of the performance of TPR with other methods of bi-directional bus access such as token passing and the reservation protocols is provided. Results, obtained using discrete event simulation models, are presented for the various access protocols. Performance is measured in terms of the average delay-throughput characteristics of the networks. The implementation aspects of TPR are reviewed briefly