Crowdfunding for Entrepreneurs

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Butticè ◽  
Massimo G. Colombo
Keyword(s):  
Social Stigma ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Entrepreneurial Finance ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Product Counterfeiting ◽  
Innovative Products ◽  
Sustainable Projects

Fundraising has proved difficult for many entrepreneurs and ventures in the early stages of their businesses because of significant information asymmetries with investors and a lack of collateral. In an attempt to overcome such difficulties, since the early 2010s, some entrepreneurs have come to rely on the Internet in order to directly seek funding from the general public, or the “crowd.” The practice of collecting small amounts of capital from the “crowd” of Internet users is called crowdfunding. Crowdfunding research is a relative newcomer to the discipline of entrepreneurial finance. However, the availability of easy-to-access data, the diffusion of this funding channel among entrepreneurs, and increasing policy attention have made crowdfunding one of the most investigated areas of research in entrepreneurial finance. The literature has discussed crowdfunding as more than a simple mean of financing. Crowdfunding also allows entrepreneurs to develop a virtual community of followers, which provides a valuable source of information with which to test and improve early versions of innovative products. Moreover, crowdfunding represents a method of gaining information about market response to a given product and the size of demand for that product, and is a powerful marketing instrument that can be used to increase brand awareness and to promote the arts, social initiatives, and financial inclusion. However, crowdfunding also entails a number of pitfalls for entrepreneurs. In order to collect financial resources from the crowd, entrepreneurs are required to share sensitive information online. This includes information about the entrepreneurial initiative, the team, and the business model they are using. The provision of this information may facilitate product counterfeiting, or the appropriation of the value of the idea by other firms or entrepreneurs. Moreover, crowdfunding entails the risk of social stigma if the funding campaign results in a failure, because information about the performance of the crowdfunding campaign usually remains accessible online. Finally, crowdfunding entails additional challenges related to the management of the crowd of backers after the campaign, since several backers will be active providers of feedback and will interact with the entrepreneurs through direct communication. Despite these disadvantages crowdfunding has become a widely used funding source for entrepreneurs looking for financing for sustainable projects, creative initiatives, and innovative ideas.

scholarly journals A Comparative Analysis of Arabic Text Steganography

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 6851
Author(s):  
Reema Thabit ◽  
Nur Izura Udzir ◽  
Sharifah Md Yasin ◽  
Aziah Asmawi ◽  
Nuur Alifah Roslan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
Secret Message ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Arabic Text ◽  
Ideal Object ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Text Steganography ◽  
Text Content

Protecting sensitive information transmitted via public channels is a significant issue faced by governments, militaries, organizations, and individuals. Steganography protects the secret information by concealing it in a transferred object such as video, audio, image, text, network, or DNA. As text uses low bandwidth, it is commonly used by Internet users in their daily activities, resulting a vast amount of text messages sent daily as social media posts and documents. Accordingly, text is the ideal object to be used in steganography, since hiding a secret message in a text makes it difficult for the attacker to detect the hidden message among the massive text content on the Internet. Language’s characteristics are utilized in text steganography. Despite the richness of the Arabic language in linguistic characteristics, only a few studies have been conducted in Arabic text steganography. To draw further attention to Arabic text steganography prospects, this paper reviews the classifications of these methods from its inception. For analysis, this paper presents a comprehensive study based on the key evaluation criteria (i.e., capacity, invisibility, robustness, and security). It opens new areas for further research based on the trends in this field.

scholarly journals Data & Civil Rights: Health Primer

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Rosenblat ◽  
Kate Wikelius ◽  
danah boyd ◽  
Seeta Peña Gangadharan ◽  
Corrine Yu
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Social Stigma ◽  
Phone Call ◽  
Insurance Companies ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Health Habits ◽  
Fitness Tracking ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Personalize Medicine

Data plays a central role in both medicine and insurance, enabling advances and creating new challenges. Although legislative efforts have attempted to protect the privacy of people’s health data, many other kinds of data can reveal sensitive health information about an individual. People’s medical conditions or health habits can be inferred from many sources, including their purchases, phone call patterns, fitness tracking apps, posts on social media, and browsing histories. Sometimes, medical information that reveals sensitive information about an individual can be linked to the medical state of a relative. However, accuracy of these inferences may be a problem, and inaccurate inference can result in social stigma and harmful reputational effects on the wrongly categorized individual. In addition, the kinds of inferences generated and used by marketers and insurance companies may not be useful when applied to the context of patient care. Not only does misuse of data have consequences for individuals seeking fair access to healthcare, but inappropriate practices also erode productive efforts to use data to empower people, personalize medicine, and develop innovations that can advance healthcare.

Eksistensi Media Sosial,Youtube, Instagram dan Whatsapp Ditengah Pandemi Covid-19 Dikalangan Masyarakat Virtual Indonesia

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-57
Author(s):  
Hendra Junawan ◽  
Nurdin Laugu
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Data Collection ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Collection Method ◽  
Data Collection Method ◽  
Corona Virus ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
The World

Introduction. This article discusses the existence of social media YouTube, Instagram and Watsapp in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic among virtual communities in Indonesia. The development of social media is increasing every year, especially in the conditions of the corona virus outbreak. The development of social media in Indonesia has experienced a very significant increase, it can be seen that Indonesia is in the 3rd position of social media users in the world. Data Collection Method. The method used in this article is by using the literature method by reading literature related to discussion and it can be analyzed that the existence of social media such as YouTube in the midst of the Covid pandemic has experienced a surge in users of around 88% and is then followed by Whatsapp social media with the number of accesses of 84% and Instagram with 79%. Results and Discussions. Based on the data above, we can see the development and level of existence of several social media which is frequently accessed by the world's population during the Covid 19 pandemic. This development has certainly experienced a very clear penetration of internet users among the Indonesian virtual community. Conclusions. the development of social media in Indonesia and globally has increased very significantly. The existence of social media which was popular during the Covid-19 pandemic, which placed YouTube as the first media that was very popular with the highest number of users in the world.

Virtual Community and Online Game Players

2011 ◽  
pp. 1757-1763
Author(s):  
Jengchung V. Chen ◽  
Yu-Hsiang Wang
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Online Games ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Online Game ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Game Players

Since the Internet and other IT technologies have become more popular than ever before, the amount of time people spend with computers and IT products, such as Internet and online games, has increased tremendously. The continuing boom of information and communication technology is causing the Internet to become a part of everyone’s life. People use the Internet not only as a tool for their jobs, but also to participate in virtual communities. Even if the rate of Internet uptake slows considerably (Weisenbacher, 2002), the trend still remains growing. There were 275.5 million people using the Internet in February 2000. That number had changed to 605.60 million in September 2002 (Nua Ltd., 2002). According to Horrigan’s study (2001), 84 percent of Internet users in America have participated in a virtual community. Moreover, apart from the number of people using Internet, the average time spent doing any activity online is increasing.

Virtual Community as New Marketing Channel

2011 ◽  
pp. 524-526
Author(s):  
Chingning Wang ◽  
Kangning Wei ◽  
Michelle L. Kaarst-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Online Communities ◽  
Virtual Communities ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Marketing Channel ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Bulletin Boards ◽  
Promotional Messages ◽  
Business Structure

Virtual community is a virtual meeting place where individuals with common areas of interests share information, ideas, experiences, and feelings (Rheingold, 1993) by using information and communication technology (ICT), especially the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). It has been taken for granted that people with shared interests would aggregate together. This assumption is equally applicable to the virtual world. As such, a wide variety of discussion topics bring different Internet users together online across time and space. Virtual community has been a pervasive concept emphasizing social aggregation and social events in the computer-mediated environment. This concept has been extended to the horizon of commerce. Hagel and Armstrong (1997) contend in their book, Net Gain, that virtual community could be an important element of a successful Web-based business structure and that community-based business structure helps expand markets for businesses. Businesses have increasingly begun to recognize that they can build their brand images, deliver promotional messages, and retain consumers’ loyalty through online communities. As such, more and more businesses include bulletin boards, discussion groups, and e-mail functions in their business Web sites with the aim to creating a community atmosphere among their customers (Maclaran & Catterall, 2002). This strategy not only helps attract consumers but also helps increase return rate (Hagel, 1999). In the long run, it could promote favorable attitude toward the brand and increase purchasing behavior (Subramaniam, Shaw, & Gardner, 2000). Indeed, virtual communities have opened up new opportunities and established new models for business to reach out and communicate with their consumers. Although the market has become more and more fragmented with the globalization of commerce, virtual communities provide businesses with access to targeted consumers in that various aggregations of Internet users are like different segments of markets. Virtual community indeed has become a new marketing channel for business. Many online communities are business oriented in nature with business participating as organizers, sponsors, or advertisers.

Network Intrusion Tracking for DoS Attacks

2011 ◽  
pp. 748-755
Author(s):  
Mahbubur R. Syed ◽  
Mohammad M. Nur ◽  
Robert J. Bignall
Keyword(s):  
Networked Systems ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Dos Attacks ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
Network Intrusion ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Network Intrusions ◽  
Wide Availability ◽  
Information Interchange

In recent years the Internet has become the most popular and useful medium for information interchange due to its wide availability, flexibility, universal standards, and distributed architecture. As an outcome of increased dependency on the Internet and networked systems, intrusions have become a major threat to Internet users. Network intrusions may be categorized into the following major types: • Stealing valuable and sensitive information • Destroying or altering information • Obstructing the availability of information by destroying the service-providing ability of a victim’s server

scholarly journals Detection of Phishing Websites using an Efficient Feature-Based Machine Learning Framework

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 2857-2862
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Cyber Attack ◽  
Learning Framework ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
User Data ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Classification Prediction

Phishing is a cyber-attack which is socially engineered to trick naive online users into revealing sensitive information such as user data, login credentials, social security number, banking information etc. Attackers fool the Internet users by posing as a legitimate webpage to retrieve personal information. This can also be done by sending emails posing as reputable companies or businesses. Phishing exploits several vulnerabilities effectively and there is no one solution which protects users from all vulnerabilities. A classification/prediction model is designed based on heuristic features that are extracted from website domain, URL, web protocol, source code to eliminate the drawbacks of existing anti-phishing techniques. In the model we combine some existing solutions such as blacklisting and whitelisting, heuristics and visual-based similarity which provides higher level security. We use the model with different Machine Learning Algorithms, namely Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbours and Random Forests, and compare the results to find the most efficient machine learning framework.

scholarly journals Inference attacks against differentially private query results from genomic datasets including dependent tuples

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. i136-i145
Author(s):  
Nour Almadhoun ◽  
Erman Ayday ◽  
Özgür Ulusoy
Keyword(s):  
Complex Traits ◽  
Differential Privacy ◽  
Clinical Care ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Ratio Test ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Chi Square ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Inference Attacks ◽  
Inference Attack

Abstract Motivation The rapid decrease in the sequencing technology costs leads to a revolution in medical research and clinical care. Today, researchers have access to large genomic datasets to study associations between variants and complex traits. However, availability of such genomic datasets also results in new privacy concerns about personal information of the participants in genomic studies. Differential privacy (DP) is one of the rigorous privacy concepts, which received widespread interest for sharing summary statistics from genomic datasets while protecting the privacy of participants against inference attacks. However, DP has a known drawback as it does not consider the correlation between dataset tuples. Therefore, privacy guarantees of DP-based mechanisms may degrade if the dataset includes dependent tuples, which is a common situation for genomic datasets due to the inherent correlations between genomes of family members. Results In this article, using two real-life genomic datasets, we show that exploiting the correlation between the dataset participants results in significant information leak from differentially private results of complex queries. We formulate this as an attribute inference attack and show the privacy loss in minor allele frequency (MAF) and chi-square queries. Our results show that using the results of differentially private MAF queries and utilizing the dependency between tuples, an adversary can reveal up to 50% more sensitive information about the genome of a target (compared to original privacy guarantees of standard DP-based mechanisms), while differentially privacy chi-square queries can reveal up to 40% more sensitive information. Furthermore, we show that the adversary can use the inferred genomic data obtained from the attribute inference attack to infer the membership of a target in another genomic dataset (e.g. associated with a sensitive trait). Using a log-likelihood-ratio test, our results also show that the inference power of the adversary can be significantly high in such an attack even using inferred (and hence partially incorrect) genomes. Availability and implementation https://github.com/nourmadhoun/Inference-Attacks-Differential-Privacy

scholarly journals Cache Misses and the Recovery of the Full AES 256 Key

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 944 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samira Briongos ◽  
Pedro Malagón ◽  
Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche ◽  
Jose Moya
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Traditional Approach ◽  
Memory Access ◽  
Side Channel ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Significant Information ◽  
Shared Cache ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Cache Attacks

The CPU cache is a hardware element that leaks significant information about the software running on the CPU. Particularly, any application performing sequences of memory access that depend on sensitive information, such as private keys, is susceptible to suffer a cache attack, which would reveal this information. In most cases, side-channel cache attacks do not require any specific permission and just need access to a shared cache. This fact, combined with the spread of cloud computing, where the infrastructure is shared between different customers, has made these attacks quite popular. Traditionally, cache attacks against AES use the information about the victim to access an address. In contrast, we show that using non-access provides much more information and demonstrate that the power of cache attacks has been underestimated during these last years. This novel approach is applicable to existing attacks: Prime+Probe, Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush and Prime+Abort. In all cases, using cache misses as source of information, we could retrieve the 128-bit AES key with a reduction in the number of samples of between 93% and 98% compared to the traditional approach. Further, this attack was adapted and extended in what we call the encryption-by-decryption cache attack (EBD), to obtain a 256-bit AES key. In the best scenario, our approach obtained the 256 bits of the key of the OpenSSL AES T-table-based implementation using fewer than 10,000 samples, i.e., 135 milliseconds, proving that AES-256 is only about three times more complex to attack than AES-128 via cache attacks. Additionally, the proposed approach was successfully tested in a cross-VM scenario.

Trust in Organizations

2011 ◽  
pp. 293-308
Author(s):  
Muhammad Mohtsham Saeed
Keyword(s):  
Business Environment ◽  
Sensitive Information ◽  
Global Business ◽  
Trust Development ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Internal Customers ◽  
The World ◽  
Innovative Products

Recent changes in the overall global business atmosphere, for example, opening of economies, increase in exchange relations, volatility of the business environment, innovative products and services, rapidly changing markets, and knowledge-based firms and information-based systems all demand quick sharing of quite sensitive information. This swift sharing of sensitive information is a major source of competitive advantage in today’s age and is not possible without trustworthy relationships of top management with external as well as internal customers (employees) of a business. Islam is the second biggest religion in the world with over 1/4th of the world’s population as its followers. Where traditional literature believes that long-term relationships result in trust development, Islam considers that trust development results in building and maintaining long-term relationships. This chapter is specifically meant to highlight the role of trust from an Islamic perspective in a leader-followers relationship as well as a leader-customers relationship.

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