Global Climate Justice Activism: “The New Protagonists” and their Projects for a Just Transition

The contributors to this volume have provided ample evidence to support calls for fundamental, transformative change in the world-system. If there remained any doubts, their analyses show that the capitalist world-system threatens not only the well-being of a majority of the world’s people, but also the very survival of our planet. Indeed, the urgency of the ecological and economic conditions that many people now face and the immense inequalities that have become more entrenched require that scholars become more consciously engaged in the work of advancing social transformation. Revolutionary change is emergent in movement spaces where people have long been working to develop shared analyses and cultivate collective power and agency by building unity among a diverse array of activists, organizations, and movements. We discuss three examples of transformative projects that are gaining increased visibility and attention: food sovereignty, solidarity economies, and Human Rights Communities. If widely adopted, these projects would undermine the basic processes necessary for the capitalist world-system to function. With these projects, defenders of environmental and social justice not only work to prevent their own (further) dispossession by denying capital its ability to continue appropriating labor and resources from working people and communities, but they also help deepen the existing systemic crisis while sowing the seeds of a new social order

A hardware-based surveillance video camera watermark

This paper arose out of a need for marking surveillance video in a simple manner that would allow the integrity of that video against later manipulation to be assured from the camera to the court room. We present a novel use of a video watermarking system. The system is based on an array construction method using seed sequences that allows a simple hardware-generated watermark to be inserted into a surveillance camera video stream in realtime within the camera itself. The watermark changes every frame, and it is possible to infer lost frames

Adapting law enforcement frameworks to address the ethical problems of CCTV product propagation

The development of video sharing and analytic capabilities is outpacing ethical debate and governance policy. To mitigate privacy abuse and prevent unauthorized data sharing, an inter-entity audit framework, based on a law enforcement methodology, documents video-sharing activity without duplicating existing access control mechanisms

Adapting law enforcement frameworks to address the ethical problems of CCTV product propagation

The development of video sharing and analytic capabilities is outpacing ethical debate and governance policy. To mitigate privacy abuse and prevent unauthorized data sharing, an inter-entity audit framework, based on a law enforcement methodology, documents video-sharing activity without duplicating existing access control mechanisms

A lightweight high capacity ECG watermark with protection against data loss

Wireless Body Sensor Networks are used for pervasive health monitoring and often composed of a large number of sensors communicating over wireless connections. The wireless nature of WBSN poses challenges in terms of security and reliability since sensory data are vulnerable to interception, intrusion and modifications. Moreover, there are ergonomic limitations such as size and weight on wearable sensors that restrict their computational power. In this paper, we propose a variation of the Wong algorithm used in digital watermarking that is suitable for implementation on simple devices with limited processing capabilities and protects data from tampering between point of origin, which could be a wearable sensor, and the point of distribution which might be a Smartphone. At the same time, the watermark has the advantage to detect and accurately localize degraded data and could rapidly recover after data loss

Accurate positioning based on a combination of power control and signal strength indicator using active RFID system

The aim of this paper is to develop a new positioning technique to assist the blind and people with low vision to indicate their locations and reach their destinations. The presented technique is based on a combination of power level and Signal Strength Indicator (SSI) using active Radio Frequency Identification RFID technology. The system uses a mobile reader with power attenuation feature. SSI is used as a distance estimator for short range and in combination with one of eight receiver attenuation level sittings for a wider range of up to 70 meters. Global Positioning System (GPS) works efficiently in a similar environment but is only accurate to around ten to twenty meters and it does not work efficiently at indoor environments. This research has produced an identification localization system which identifies various locations such as offices, labs, theaters and so on to assist users reach their destination of interest. Then it has been conducted as a real empirical case study to identify labs base on a combined technique with a successful identification rate of around 98%. The reader has eight attenuation settings, and the geographic range of each level using various tags has been calculated. Then, to evaluate reliability 108 experiments were conducted using three tags with distances from 1 metre to 25 metres using power settings 1 to 6. A successful detection rate of 93.5% was achieved, as well as a false positive rate of 1%

Blind user perspectives on a navigational autonomy aid

In previous papers, a navigational system was presented (NAAB), which was built upon two technologies: RFID tags and QR-codes. It was tested by sighted people and reached a high level of satisfactory results identifying the current position of the user with an accuracy of less than 2 m in most cases, and guiding users safely to a desired destination. The new positioning technique is based on line-of-sight QR-code detection, and non-line-of-sight signal attenuation of active RFID tags using a wearable reader. The aim of this chapter is to present some user feedback from the perspectives of blind people. A significant outcome of the usability test on blind participants presented herein is that the system has to work in an integrated manner in order to achieve the aspirations of users

Fingerprint image protection protection using two watermarks without corrupting minutiae

This paper proposes an approach for embedding two watermarks into fingerprint images using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) algorithm. The main aim of the proposed algorithm is to add more authentication factors based on the watermark messages and to protect the ownership of the fingerprint image. Since the information used for identification or verification of a fingerprint image mainly lies in its minutiae, the introduced watermarking algorithm does not affect fingerprint features. First, the watermark is embedded into the fingerprint image to avoid the minutiae location. It is constructed based on a unique identification number that can identify the user. The hash function (SHA2) is applied to generate the hash value of the watermark information to encode the watermark pattern. The second watermark is a gray image that is inserted over the first watermark. The extraction stage does not require the original fingerprint image. We measure the influence of the watermarks on the fingerprint features based on the comparison between the total number of extracted minutiae points before and after embedding the watermark. The presented schema shows a high PSNR value. The robustness of the introduced technique has been tested against Gaussian and Salt & Pepper attacks