The State-of-the-Art Technology of Currency Identification

The security issue of currency has attracted awareness from the public. De-spite the development of applying various anti-counterfeit methods on currency notes, cheaters are able to produce illegal copies and circulate them in market without being detected. By reviewing related work in currency security, the focus of this paper is on conducting a comparative study of feature extraction and classification algorithms of currency notes authentication. We extract various computational features from the dataset consisting of US dollar (USD), Chinese Yuan (CNY) and New Zealand Dollar (NZD) and apply the classification algorithms to currency identification. Our contributions are to find and implement various algorithms from the existing literatures and choose the best approaches for use.

#TerroristFinancing

This article describes how the internet has come to play a central role in terrorist financing endeavours. Online channels allow terrorist financiers to network with like-minded individuals, in order to increase support, raise funds, and move wealth across the international system. For instance, the Islamic State, Hezbollah, and other groups have become adept at using these channels to finance their activities. Therefore, increased examination is required of the ways in which terrorists use the internet to raise and move funds. This study assesses some of the current trends and risks associated with online terrorist financing. Some policy options are also outlined, in order to reduce the threat of terrorist financing via the internet moving into the future.

Three New Directions for Time Banking Research

This chapter aims to highlight three viable fields of research within the domain of time banking (TB), a time-currency-based complementary economy system that has been implemented in various frameworks now for more than three decades. The areas of information management (IM), knowledge management (KM), and open source software (OSS) are almost totally unexplored within time banking. In information management, attention has mainly been devoted to IM frameworks. One link (among others) between knowledge management and open source software has been found in a core concept of the time bank called co-production. Finally, all three of these fields can be related directly to time banking and should have a place in further research, the results of which could also have applications in the field of complementary economic systems in general.

A Survey of Research in Real-Money Trading (RMT) in Virtual World

This paper presents a set of data relating to the investigation of RMT in the virtual world (VW) and social capital associated with RMT platforms. The investigation is carried out using five main research databases: Science Direct; Emerald Insight; Springer Link; Proquest Database; and IEEE Xplore; with a total of 161 research papers. The objective of this survey study is to highlight areas of strength and weakness in current RMT research in VW and its social capital. This study also presents the basic RMT classification based on these previous studies.

Social Media and Online Gaming

This article describes how the rise in technological innovation has allowed for transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) to expand their operations using virtual platforms such as social media and online video games. These virtual platforms are utilized by TCOs to conduct some of their traditional forms of crimes, such a money laundering. These criminal practices have found solace in technological innovation, mainly through the exploitation of rising technologies, such as online video games, video game consoles and peripherals, such as Virtual Reality headsets, inconspicuous electronic devices for children, Near-Field Communication (NFC), and finally, social media as tool for recruitment and immediate communication. TCOs have managed to utilize these mediums to conduct their criminal activities in part due to the lack or nonexistence of new or proper legislation that regulates how these new mediums can function without facilitating illicit activities and the germination of illicit markets.

Making Citizens' Activities Flourish Through a Crowdsourcing-Based Social Infrastructure

We now typically live in modern cities, where ubiquitous computing technologies such as advanced sensing enhance various aspects of our everyday lives. For example, smart phones offer necessary information to make our everyday lives convenient anytime, anywhere in the city; energy management and traffic management have become smarter, making our everyday lives more convenient and efficient. However, from a citizen perspective, the well-being of citizens needs to be more essential than merely achieving efficient and convenient smart city infrastructures. We think that this issue is particularly crucial for establishing the next generation of smart city design. In this chapter, we propose a social infrastructure named flourished crowdsourcing to make our society flourish, so diverse citizens will live comfortably and happily. To achieve a flourishing society, one of the most essential issues is making diverse citizens activists who will participate in socially collective activities. Traditional approaches such as gamification typically make it possible to guide the social activities of the average number of citizens, but it is not easy to maintain activities for diverse citizens. By incorporating fictionality into the real space, our approach is to increase the social awareness of citizens to achieve a flourishing society within each citizen's community so that they see the necessity of their contribution. To design and analyze fictionality, we also propose a gameful digital rhetoric as design abstractions. The design abstractions are extremely different from traditional approaches; designers can explicitly focus on the enhancement of the meaning in the real space from multiple perspectives; thus designers can change the meaning incrementally according to rapidly changing social situations or citizens' diverse preferences.

A Novel Security Framework for Managing Android Permissions Using Blockchain Technology

This article presents a new framework named ANDROSCANREG (Android Permissions Scan Registry) that allows to extract and analyze the requested permissions in an Android application via a decentralized and distributed system. This framework is based on the emerging technology Blockchain whose potential is approved in the matter of transparency, reliability, security and availability without resorting to a central processing unit judged of trust. ANDROSCANREG consists of two Blockchains, the first one (PERMBC) will handle analysis, validation and preparation of the raw results so that they will persist in the second Blockchain of Bitcoin already existing (BTCBC), which will assume the role of a Registry of recovered permissions and will save the permissions history of each version of the applications being scanned via financial transactions, whose wallet source, recipient wallet and transaction value have a precise meaning. An example of a simulation will be presented to describe the different steps, actors, interactions and messages generated by the different entity of ANDROSCANREG.

Ransomware

Compared to the last five to six years, the massive scale by which innocent users are being subjected to a new age threat in form of digital extortion has never been seen before. With the rise of Internet, use of personal computers and devices has mushroomed to immense scale, with cyber criminals subjecting innocent users to extortion using malware. The primary victim to be hit the most has been online banking, impacting the security and reputation of banking and financial transactions along with social interactions. Online security revolves around three critical aspects – starting with the use of digital data and files, next with the use of computer systems and finally the internet as an unsecure medium. This is where Ransomware has become one of the most malicious form of malware for digital extortion threats to home and corporate user alike.

Electronic Payment Systems and Their Security

Electronic commerce (or e-commerce) can be defined as any transaction involving some exchange of value over a communication network. This broad definition includes: Business-to-business transactions, such as EDI (electronic data interchange); Customer-to-business transactions, such as online shops on the Web; Customer-to-customer transactions, such as transfer of value between electronic wallets; Customers/businesses-to-public administration transactions, such as filing of electronic tax returns. Business-to-business transactions are usually referred to as e-business, customer-to-bank transactions as e-banking, and transactions involving public administration as e-government. A communication network for e-commerce can be a private network (such as an interbank clearing network), an intranet, the Internet, or even a mobile telephone network. In this chapter, the focus is on customer-to-business transactions over the Internet and on the electronic payment systems that provide a secure way to exchange value between customers and businesses.