Too Close for Comfort: Morasses of (Anti-) Censorship in the Era of CDNs

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Devashish Gosain ◽  
Mayank Mohindra ◽  
Sambuddho Chakravarty

Abstract Recent research claims that “powerful” nation-states may be hegemonic over significant web traffic of “underserved” nations (e.g., Brazil and India). Such traffic may be surveilled when transiting (or ending in) these powerful nations. On the other hand, content distribution networks (CDNs) are designed to bring web content closer to end-users. Thus it is natural to ask whether CDNs have led to the localization of Internet traffic within the country’s boundary, challenging the notion of nation-state hegemony. Further, such traffic localization may inadvertently enhance a country’s ability to coerce content providers to censor (or monitor) access within its boundary. On top of that, the obvious solution, i.e., anti-censorship approaches, may sadly face a new dilemma. Traditional ones, relying on proxies, are easily discoverable. Whereas newer ones (e.g., Decoy Routing, Cache-Browser, Domain Fronting and CovertCast etc.) might not work as they require accessing web content hosted outside the censors’ boundary. We thus quantitatively analyzed the impact of web content localization on various anti-censorship systems. Such analysis requires geolocating the websites. Thus we adapted a multilateration method, Constraint Based Geolocation (CBG), with additional heuristics. We call it as Region Specific CBG (R-CBG). In more than 89% cases, R-CBG correctly classifies hosts as inside (or outside) w.r.t. a nation. Our empirical study, involving five countries, shows that the majority (61%−92%) of popular country-specific websites are hosted within a client’s own country. Further, additional heuristics classify the majority of them to be on CDNs.

Author(s):  
Robert Walters

Most people across the world automatically assume citizenship at birth or acquire citizenship by descent or naturalisation. Since the growth of the concept of citizenship from the French and American Revolutions, it has become an important principle to the nation state and individual. Citizenship is the right to have rights. However, the right to citizenship is limited. In some cases when territorial rule changes the citizenship laws may exclude individuals resident in the territory. This article compares the development of the first citizenship laws in Australia and Slovenia, and the impact that these new laws had on the residents of both states. The first citizenship laws established by Australia were in 1948. More than forty years later in 1990, when Slovenia finally obtained independence from the former Yugoslavia, the new country was able to establish their own citizenship laws. The result of the Slovenian citizenship laws saw many former Yugoslav citizens who were resident in Slovenia being without citizenship of any state. Subsequently, these people were declared stateless. On the other hand, for Australia, the outcome was relatively smooth with the transition from British subjects to Australian citizenship.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
LO Ying Tuan ◽  
Huam Hon Tat ◽  
Ahmad Sharifuddin Shamsuddin ◽  
Amran Md Rasli ◽  
Ahmad Jusoh

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of consumer’s attachment styles as a moderator in the impact of brand personality on its brand attachment. This research investigated the preferred brand personality of anxious and avoidant attachment consumer, their likelihood to be attached to that brand and how they respond to any changes in brand personality. A total of 300 students were surveyed. Their attachment style and their response towards sincere and exciting personality and its brand attachment were assessed. Empirical study shows that anxious attachment style consumer preferred sincere brand personality, tends to be attached with it and did not respond to any changes in brand personality.  Avoidant attachment style people on the other hand have a stronger relationship with the exciting brand personality, are not likely to be attached to it and will respond to changes in brand personality. This study implies that marketers should get to know their targeted market’s attachment style prior coming out with the suitable brand personality.


2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (4) ◽  
pp. 1310-1342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Esteban ◽  
Laura Mayoral ◽  
Debraj Ray

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce country-specific measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory. (JEL D63, D74, J15, O15, O17)


Author(s):  
Hisashi Masuda ◽  
Kengo Matsumura

AbstractTasting events are a typical example of a tourism experience that utilizes alcohol. However, it has not been sufficiently demonstrated how the prior information given to customers at tasting events affects their perception of the tasting and its marketing effects. In this study, we conducted a tasting experiment of a new Japanese sake product in California, the USA to clarify how information given to participants in advance can affect their perception of the tasting, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth intention related to the new sake product, and compared the effects of the following types of prior information: 1) no information, 2) written information, 3) video explained by a man, and 4) video explained by a woman. The results show that presenting information makes a difference in its impact as opposed to providing no information. When prior information was presented in written form, various perspectives significantly influenced the satisfaction and recommended intention more than in the cases of video. On the other hand, in the cases of video, the number of significant paths was reduced, but the influence on word-of-mouth intention was greater than in the case of written information. This study contributes to the development of a theory and empirical evidence that takes into account prior information in tasting marketing in tourism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 2980-2999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fikret SÖZBİLİR

Entrepreneurs are similar to leaders in terms of individual characteristics. At the same time, entrepreneurs who have high creative performance are considered as successful. This study aims to determine the impact of leadership styles (LS); democratic, managerial, and charismatic leadership on individual entrepreneurship perception’s (IEP) dimensions; planning, self-confidence, communication, motivation, and self-discipline, and impact of IEP’s dimensions on creativity performance (CP). In this empirical study, the data were collected from 286 entrepreneurs in Turkey. Data were analyzed using SmartPLS software and presented in tables. Internal consistency, composite reliability and convergent validity analyses results are sufficient. The findings showed that most of the LS’s dimensions have positive and significant impact on IEP’s dimensions. However, LS-Managerial hasn’t got a significant impact on Self-discipline dimension of IEP. LS’s all dimensions, except Charismatic, also have impact on CP. The other hand IEP’s dimensions have positive and significant impact on CP except Self-discipline.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannick Fischer

AbstractThis research uses a normative approach to examine the relationship between basic income and migration. The decisive variable is the effect of labour automation, which increases economic insecurities globally, leaving some nation states in a position to cope with this and others not. The insecurities will increase migratory pressures on one hand but also justify the introduction of basic income on a nation state level on the other.The normative guideline is the republican conception of freedom as non-domination. This is used to justify a basic income, analyse how labour automation creates dominating structures and how borders dominate migrants seeking to move to countries which introduce a basic income.The result is that nation states that introduce a basic income to counter internal domination through labour automation, also have to look outside of their nation state. The imposition of borders in order to keep a basic income sustainable as well as labour automation itself, establish a form of domination over less developed countries and thus demand international regulation.


Author(s):  
Tomas Borovinsky

In the present paper we intend to rethink the “Jewish question”, in the context of religion’s secularization and the modern nation-state crisis, in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. She writes, on the other hand, in and over the decline of modern nation-states that expel and denationalize both foreign citizens and their own depending on the case. She also thinks as a Jew from birth who suffers persecutions and particularly theorizes on her Jew condition and the future of Judaism before and after the creation of the State of Israel. As we will see during this paper we can identify these three issues all together, particularly in the Zionist experience: modern secularization, decline of the nation-state and the “Jewish question”. And it is from these intertwined elements that we can draw a critical thinking for a politics of pluralism.


ETIKONOMI ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Andri Yudhi Supriadi ◽  
Mohamad Ikhsan ◽  
Benedictus Raksaka Mahi ◽  
Montty Girianna

The subsidized electricity tariff enjoyed by households in Indonesia with an installed capacity of 450 VA and 900 VA has not changed since mid-2003. This subsidy creates an increasing economic burden on the state budget. This study examines the impact of a subsidized electricity tariff increase on subsidized household welfare and the redistribution of subsidy allocation. The analysis divided into two stages: first, estimating household electricity demand for each household group when prices fixed; and second, measuring changes in welfare, inefficiency and the redistribution of subsidy allocations. This empirical study shows that an increase in tariffs causes the welfare of subsidized households to decline. It also demonstrates inefficiency in the allocation of subsidies to the top 20% group with an installed capacity of 450 VA. Besides, subsidized households in the lowest 40% group, which initially only enjoyed 26.26% increased to 34.16% after the tariff increase. On the other hand, the top 20% group, which initially enjoyed the electricity subsidy allocation of 28.74%, decreased to 20.40% after the tariff increase.JEL Classification: D1, D3, D6, I3


Author(s):  
Guohua Shen ◽  
Haijuan Wang ◽  
Zhiqiu Huang ◽  
YaoShen Yu ◽  
Kai Chen

Requirements-to-code tracing is an important and costly task that creates trace links from requirements to source code. These trace links help engineers reduce the time and complexity of software maintenance. Code comments play an important role in software maintenance tasks. However, few studies have focused intensively on the impact of code comments on requirements-to-code trace links creation. Different types of comments have different purposes, so how different types of code comments provide different improvements for requirements-to-code trace links creation? We focus on learning whether code comments and different types of comments can improve the quality of trace links creation. This paper presents a study to evaluate the contribution of code comments and different types of code comments to the creation of trace links. More specifically, this paper first experimentally evaluates the impact of code comments on requirements-to-code trace links creation, and then divides code comments into six categories to evaluate its impact on trace links creation. The results show that the precision increases by an average of 15% (based on the same recall) after adding code comments (even for different trace links creation techniques), and the type of Purpose comments contributes more to the tracing task than the other five. This empirical study provides evidence that code comments are effective in tracing links creation, and different types of code comments contribute differently. Purpose comments can be used to improve the accuracy of requirements-to-code trace links creation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 623 ◽  
pp. 305-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guo Zhen Wang ◽  
Zi Yue Wang ◽  
Yuan Jie Li

This paper studied the impact of free cash flow and capital structure on the performance of the company. It is based on the theories of the free cash flow and the capital structure, combined with the actual situation of China, using different property listed corporations’ sample, makes an empirical study on the impact of free cash flow and capital structure on the performance of the company. The result shows that on the one hand, having more free cash flow will cause negative effects on the performance of corporation, on the other hand, with the increase in liabilities financing, the listed corporation's performance fall.


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