The Vulnerabilities of Trusted Notifier-Models in Russia: The Case of Netoscope

Current digital ecosystems are shaped by platformisation, algorithmic recommender systems, and news personalisation. These (algorithmic) infrastructures influence online news dissemination and therefore necessitate a reconceptualisation of how online media control is or may be exercised in states with restricted media freedom. Indeed, the degree of media plurality and journalistic independence becomes irrelevant when reporting is available but difficult to access; for example, if the websites of media outlets are not indexed or recommended by the search engines, news aggregators, or social media platforms that function as algorithmic gatekeepers. Research approaches to media control need to be broadened because authoritarian governments are increasingly adopting policies that govern the internet <em>through</em> its infrastructure; the power they leverage against private infrastructure owners yields more effective—and less easily perceptible—control over online content dissemination. Zooming in on the use of trusted notifier-models to counter online harms in Russia, we examine the Netoscope project (a database of Russian domain names suspected of malware, botnet, or phishing activities) in which federal censor Roskomnadzor cooperates with, e.g., Yandex (that downranks listed domains in search results), Kaspersky, and foreign partners. Based<strong> </strong>on publicly available reports, media coverage, and semi-structured interviews, the article analyses the degree of influence, control, and oversight of Netoscope’s participating partners over the database and its applications. We argue that, in the absence of effective legal safeguards and transparency requirements, the politicised nature of internet infrastructure makes the trusted notifier-model vulnerable to abuse in authoritarian states.

The Fission of the Forbidden: The Popularity of Video Content in an Online Right-Wing Extremist Environment

Video platforms such as YouTube provide an environment where the blurred duality between content dissemination and creation facilitates the generation of social networks. Research into online violent extremist environments has often noted the prominence of video-sharing platforms as a means of distributing propaganda and cultivating social networks for purposes of recruitment. This paper draws from the study of emotion to examine three videos and associated comments that had high engagement, understood as the frequency of interactions, likes/upvotes and reposts in a given social network, in a right-wing extremist online milieu. This analysis highlights the important role emotions play in generating social connectedness and ultimately engagement and recruitment into online right-wing extremist milieus. Understanding the significance of emotions in online violent extremist video content can help to identify opportunities for moderation and/or the construction of alternative narratives.

Títulos jornalísticos para redes sociais

PT. A mudança nos modos de acesso aos conteúdos noticiosos nos espaços online leva a alterações na forma como se produz e se publica as notícias e outros materiais informativos. No Facebook é possível identificar essas novas características, especialmente porque é preciso disputar a atenção dos leitores e fazer com que as postagens sirvam de ponte para o acesso aos sites e portais de conteúdo. Com o jornalismo online, os títulos amplificaram seu prestígio como um possível diferencial mercadológico de atração e, mais uma vez, influenciados pela concorrência e pelas possibilidades do suporte, sofreram mudanças. Desse modo, este artigo tem a finalidade de identificar como os veículos brasileiros que migraram de plataformas tradicionais para o espaço digital têm feito uso de distintos elementos na construção das postagens quando se trata de publicações no Facebook. A proposta é entender como se configuram as estratégias narrativas e caça-cliques nos títulos produzidos nessa rede social, considerando para análise o conteúdo disponível na postagem realizada pelas empresas jornalísticas. Selecionou-se o conjunto que configura sua estrutura semântica –– frase, links, texto de apresentação, entre outros recursos encontrados – já que é a chamada total, e não apenas a frase textual do compartilhamento, que serve de isca naquele espaço. Para tanto, são analisados os posts no Facebook dos seguintes jornais: O Globo, Estadão, Gazeta do Povo, Diário Online, Diário de Pernambuco. Os dados foram coletados durante uma semana e totalizaram 1.745 textos, os quais foram analisados a partir do tema, do formato e da estrutura textual. Sobre a abordagem metodológica, a pesquisa fez uso da Análise de Conteúdo quantitativa. Pretende-se com o estudo contribuir para a discussão sobre estratégias de titulação associadas aos novos espaços de circulação de conteúdo e aprofundar o questionamento sobre as particularidades que definem os títulos nas redes sociais. *** EN. Changes in the way news content is accessed online leads to changes in the way news and other information are produced and published. These changes are readily identifiable on Facebook, both in response to the stiff competition for readers' attention, and because posts must serve as bridges to websites and content portals. This results in an increase in the importance of online headlines as vectors of attraction, and constant adaptation given the extreme competition and support opportunities. This study sets out to identify how Brazilian media enterprises that migrated from traditional to online platforms have made use of different elements in the construction of Facebook posts. The goal of this paper is to understand how narrative and click baiting strategies are configured into FB headlines and the content available in the posts. The overall configuration of the post's semantic structure is taken into consideration – phrasing, links, presentation text, where among other resources it is found – since it is the total appeal, and not just the textual phrasing, which serves as bait in that space. To this end, the FB posts of the following newspapers are analyzed: O Globo, Estadão, Gazeta do Povo, Diário Online, Diário de Pernambuco. Data were collected over a one week period (1745 texts) and an analysis conducted based on theme, format and textual structure. With respect to research methodology, the study made use of quantitative content analysis. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the discussion of headline strategies associated with new content dissemination platforms and to further analyze the particularities that define headlines on social networks. *** FR. Les changements dans la façon d'accéder au contenu des actualités en ligne ont entraîné des changements dans la façon dont les actualités et autres informations sont produites et publiées. Ces changements sont facilement identifiables sur Facebook, à la fois en réponse à la forte concurrence pour attirer l'attention des lecteurs et parce que les messages doivent servir de passerelle vers les sites web et les portails de contenu. Il en résulte une augmentation de l'importance des titres en ligne comme vecteurs d'attraction, et une adaptation constante compte tenu de la concurrence extrême et des possibilités de soutien. Cette étude vise à identifier comment les entreprises médiatiques brésiliennes qui ont migré des plateformes traditionnelles vers les plateformes en ligne ont utilisé différents éléments dans la construction des posts sur Facebook. L'objectif de cet article est de comprendre comment les stratégies de narration et de clickbait sont configurées dans les titres sur Facebook et dans contenu disponible dans les posts. La configuration globale de la structure sémantique du post est prise en considération - formulation, liens, texte de présentation, où entre autres ressources il se trouve - puisque c'est l'attrait total, et pas seulement la formulation textuelle, qui sert d'appât dans cet espace. À cette fin, les posts Facebook des journaux suivants ont été analysés : O Globo, Estadão, Gazeta do Povo, Diário Online, Diário de Pernambuco. Les données ont été collectées sur une semaine (1745 textes) et une analyse a été réalisée sur la base de la thématique, du format et de la structure textuelle. En ce qui concerne la méthodologie de recherche, l'étude a eu recours à une analyse quantitative du contenu. L'objectif est de contribuer à la discussion des stratégies de titres associées aux nouvelles plateformes de diffusion de contenu et d'analyser plus en profondeur les particularités qui définissent les titres sur les réseaux sociaux. ***

Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks

As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols is becoming ever more important. With useful work consensus protocols, users get rewards after they have carried out some specific tasks useful for the network. While in some cases the proof of some utility or service can be provided, the majority of tasks are impossible to verify reliably. To deal with such cases, we design “Proof-of-Prestige” (PoP)—a reward system that can run directly on Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains or as a smart contract on top of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. PoP introduces “prestige,” which is a volatile resource that, in contrast to coins, regenerates over time. Prestige can be gained by performing useful work, spent when benefiting from services, and directly translates to users minting power. Our scheme allows us to reliably reward decentralized workers while keeping the system free for the end-users. PoP is resistant against Sybil and collusion attacks and can be used with a vast range of unverifiable tasks. We build a simulator to assess the cryptoeconomic behavior of the system and deploy a full prototype of a content dissemination platform rewarding its participants. We implement the blockchain component on both Ethereum (PoW) and Cosmos (PoS), provide a mobile application, and connect it with our scheme with a negligible memory footprint. Finally, we adapt a fair exchange protocol allowing us to atomically exchange files for rewards also in scenarios where not all the parties have Internet connectivity. Our evaluation shows that even for large Ethereum traces, PoP introduces sub-millisecond computational overhead for miners in Cosmos and less than 0.013$ smart contract invocation cost for users in Ethereum.

A Hierarchical Cache Size Allocation Scheme Based on Content Dissemination in Information-Centric Networks

With the rapid growth of mass content retrieval on the Internet, Information-Centric Network (ICN) has become one of the hotspots in the field of future network architectures. The in-network cache is an important feature of ICN. For better network performance in ICN, the cache size on each node should be allocated in proportion to its importance. However, in some current studies, the importance of cache nodes is usually determined by their location in the network topology, ignoring their roles in the actual content transmission process. In this paper, we focus on the allocation of cache size for each node within a given total cache space budget. We explore the impact of heterogeneous cache allocation on content dissemination under the same ICN infrastructure and we quantify the importance of nodes from content dissemination and network topology. To this purpose, we implement a hierarchy partitioning method based on content dissemination, then we formulate a set of weight calculation methods for these hierarchies and to provide a per-node cache space allocation to allocate the total cache space budget to each node in the network. The performance of the scheme is evaluated on the Garr topology, and the average hit ratio, latency, and load are compared to show that the proposed scheme has better performance in these aspects than other schemes.

The Use of Digital Solutions in Museums Today and in the Future

In this paper we look at digital solutions in museums today and with a view to the future. We believe that they have a potential to innovate museum practices and reach audiences with relevant content. We have found the Norwegian Government’s Museum Framework (Kulturdepartementet 2009) a useful starting point to consider ‘digital’ through the lens of the areas of collection care, research, content dissemination, innovation and business development. In this paper, our focus is on smaller museums and heritage organisations. We contribute our thoughts, experiences and give some practical ideas how small museums can better utilise digital media and digital solutions. This paper was written by staff members of Museum Nord who are part of the Research and Development Team. Museum Nord was lead partner in the CINE project, 2017-2020 (CINE project 2017) which enabled the team to gain valuable insights into this area of knowledge and practice.

Data Replication Using Data Mining Techniques

Database Replication is the successive electronic duplicating of information from a database in one PC or server to a database in another with the goal that all clients share a similar dimension of data. The outcome is a conveyed database in which clients can get to information significant to their assignments without meddling with crafted by others. Anyway information replication is an entrancing theme for both hypothesis and practice. On the hypothetical side, numerous solid outcomes requirement what should be possible as far as consistency: e.g., the difficulty of achieving agreement in offbeat frameworks the blocking idea of CAP hypothesis, and the requirement for picking an appropriate rightness foundation among the numerous conceivable. On the pragmatic side, information replication assumes a key job in a wide scope of settings like storing, back-up, high accessibility, wide territory content dissemination, expanding versatility, parallel preparing, and so forth. Finding a replication arrangement that is reasonable in whatever number such settings as could reasonably be expected remains an open test.