Computer Science

Professional organizations and employers continue to recommend the use of team based pro- jects for undergraduate and graduate degree programs in Information Systems and Technol- ogy. The delivery model of in-ground and on-line degree programs are different in terms of physical versus virtual space. Yet, the use of group projects reveals similarities in challenges in both paradigms. Effective teamwork requires

This paper provides an overview and comparison of a one-year capstone experience using a two-semester software engineering project-based model, offered by two small, liberal- arts colleges, Lenoir-Rhyne College and Edgewood College. The capstone experience has been offered at both colleges for the past 15 years. The paper details the structure of the capstone project experience, concentrating on the integration of

Holocracy is the name given to the system of having no bosses and managers in an organization but where “authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy” (Rud, 2009). This is a fairly new concept in organization management but that is quickly gaining traction and adoption by major companies around the world, albeit some in experimental terms while others as a full-scale organization management practice. The practice of however organizations feeling the need to do away with managers are not new, various organizations, mostly tech companies, notably Google, have tried similar approaches with mixed results and we shall explore some of this in the sections to follow To analyse the merits and de-merits of this structure, let us explore 2 cases that have adopted this style of management and explore their results

Geographic information is increasingly becoming an integral part of our lives. Sourcing and making a reliable geographical directory and database of the places we love, let alone one online, is a very expensive undertaking. However, with Google Map Maker, you don’t have to worry about the cost. Google provides a platform where individuals and communities can collaborate to put the places they love and know on the map for everyone to see and use across the world online, all for free.

"Instant Google Map Maker Starter" offers a simple approach to getting started with Google Map Maker with clear and uncomplicated examples and diagrams to take you through the process of creating and sharing your first map. This is meant to help you realize the full potential of this free web mapping platform for both your community and your business.

This book will help you out with discovering what Google Map Maker actually is, what you can do with it, and why it’s so great for you, your business, and your community.

You will find out more on Google Map Maker such as the countries supported, the system requirements including supported browsers, and some known issues. You will also be able to create point, polygon, and linear features and to create maps of places you know and love. You will also be able to understand how to review and moderate edits made by other mappers in Google Map Maker, and share edits , maps, and directions.

"Instant Google Map Maker Starter" is a simplified guide that will help you quickly create online maps of the places you know and love, to be shared by everyone in the world on Google platforms.

Kenya has been a vibrant ICT hub in the region and for this reason; it is natural that the country enacts laws geared towards legislating and protecting the ICT industry and users. One such first attempt is in the form of the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998. This Act was enacted primarily to set up an independent Kenya government agency, Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK), to “facilitate the development of the information and communications sector and electronic commerce” (Kenya Law, 2012). The primary objectives of this act were thus to legislate and set out frameworks for the functioning and operations in the ICT industry in matters.

The major social and ethical issues that IT has brought to individuals and society by extension, is the almost luck of personal privacy and space in the face of technology. Innovations in IT have made it possible to develop all kinds of software and hardware products that make it much easier to communicate, share, collaborate, interact and do much more with each other in ways that could not be fathomed 20 years ago (Nissenbaum, 2009). This has led to tremendous advancement in society and consequently improved both social and economic well being. But this has come with a heavy price to bear for individuals, the cost of maintaining and keeping own privacy, private (Langheinrich, n.d.). Although it may seem a non-issue to IT and tech enthusiasts, the issue of being able to maintain and keep ones privacy is just as important, and guaranteed in most of the constitutions of countries around the world. Yet technology almost single handedly disregards' this or poses a big threat to this. Take for instance, current Internet and websites that are commonly used for social and business engagements by users. Most of this websites keep track of each users activity, and even some track a users location and patterns (Vasiu & Vasiu, 2012). In the eyes of the tech enthusiasts, this is with a view of understanding and serving the users better with contextual and relevant content and situations. This same argument raises yet again another ethical issues, since as we know, the service providers track and use his information to serve you ads. So over and beyond your personal privacy and space being intruded, your information is used for business and commercial purposes, at the profit of the service providers and advertisers! Granted, the service providers argue that one accepts the terms of use of the product/service at sign up, but is this sufficient reason to justify intrusion and use of ones private data, pattern's, life history and location for profit? (Royakkers & Lita van Wel, 2004) Even serious ethical issues have risen from the fact that some of the service providers have been able to influence user activities and behaviour while on their platform. This has been equated to almost playing God and supreme with users. Facebook was on the spotlight when it was discovered that it manipulated users interaction and engagement on their social network in an experiment to test users behaviour and reaction to certain mood patterns (McNeal, 2014) (Adam D. I. Kramer et al., 2014). This is the same ethical issue that continues to draw criticism and questions around the globe. Of course the proponents will argue that all this use of individual data is with a view of developing better and targeted services and solutions and totally disregard the " side effects " that will result. Even more dangerous is the threat of user information being stolen and used for malicious and ill purposes by criminal hackers. Another issue has got to do with government surveillance on users. It has been established recently that indeed governments around the world are continually making use of user data to track and spy on their users activities. This again violates users privacy and raises the very ethical question of whether user activity and interaction on the web is really part of the guaranteed users privacy or its not? The Snowden revelations of the fact that the US government spied on its citizens and on others citizens outside of its jurisdiction, with in collaboration with the technology services providers raised uproar globally and even led to Snowden being self exiled for fear of prosecution by the US government (Ewen Macaskil & Gabriel Dance, 2013).

The Hacking Team is an Italian based security company that provided " legal offensive security services, using malware and vulnerabilities to gain access to target's networks " to various " law enforcement and national security organisations " around the world (Hern, 2015). The Hacking Team was hacked by unknown hackers and over 400GB of data made publicly available through torrents, shared through their very own hacked twitter account. The intriguing thing about this event and hack is the fact that the Hacking Team was exploiting vulnerabilities on most used Internet services and tools to create tools to spy and collect data, covertly from users at will., yet the same techniques and tools were used to hack them! Poetic Justice!

A population of northern snakeheads Channa argus was documented in the Potomac River system in 2004. The expansion of this population was monitored from 2004 to 2006. Boat electrofishing mean catch per unit effort increased significantly each year from 0.2 fish/h in 2004 to 6.1 fish/h in 2006 (analysis of variance [ANOVA]: P = 0.01). Reported angler catches (N = 24) during 2006 equaled the combined total of the two previous years. Mean total length (TL) and weight (W) in 2006 were 475 mm (SD = 146) and 1,381 g (SD = 1,009), respectively, and maximum size increased each year. The weight-length relationship for all years combined was log eW = −5.21 + 3.07·log e TL (r 2 = 0.996, n = 348). Natural reproduction was confirmed by the location of a nest, and eight year-classes were estimated based on otolith interpretations. Total annual mortality was estimated to be 38%. Trends in female gonadosomatic index and otolith daily ring counts of age-0 fish suggested protracted or repeat spawning from May to September. Females were fecund, carrying an average of 40,786 eggs. Collection patterns suggested that this population of northern snakeheads originated from Dogue Creek. Seventeen food items, including 15 fish species, were identified from stomach contents. The banded killifish Fundulus diaphanus was the dominant food item. Bluegills Lepomis macrochirus, pumpkinseeds L. gibbosus, and white perch Morone americana were also commonly consumed. Although population size increased, known range did not appear to increase or increased at a slower rate. Increases in angler catch during 2006 at the northern and southern termini of the existing distribution suggest that northern snakehead range expansion is imminent.

ABSTRACT A population of northern snakeheads Channa argus was documented within a 23-km reach of the main-stem tidal freshwater Potomac River and associated tributaries in 2004. Twenty northern snakeheads were collected with a variety of gears, including hook and line and electrofishing. The dominant habitats were shallow waters with floating or emergent vegetation. Natural reproduction had probably occurred, based on identification of five year-classes and the collection of an age-0 fish. The length frequency and age distributions suggested an established population. Many of the fish collected were gravid females. Adult total length (TL) and weight (W) ranges were 305–634 mm (mean = 423 mm; SD = 76 mm) and 348–2,635 g (mean = 831 g; SD = 532 g). The length–weight relationship was logeW = −4.85 + 2.93·logeTL (r = 0.99; n = 20). The collection pattern suggested that the northern snakeheads in the Potomac River originated from Dogue Creek, as 50% of those collected came from this watershed.

This paper proposes a novel Context-Risk-Aware Access Control (CRAAC) model for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) environments. Context-aware access control allows access permissions to be adjusted dynamically in adaptation to the changes in the surrounding context. Though current context-aware access control solutions can, to a certain extent, achieve such context adaptation, there are still limitations in these solutions. One of the limitations is that they make use of an architectural model by which the two major functional blocks, context infrastructure and access control system, are tightly coupled together. As a result, they are not flexible nor generic to accommodate various access control constraints and policy settings. The CRAAC model is designed to overcome this limitation. By introducing the concept of risk aware and authorisation levels of assurance (LoA) into the authorisation decision making, and by maximising the use of a component-based approach in the architectural design, the model has successfully decoupled context infrastructure and access control system making it more extensible in providing the required functionality, and more flexible in accommodating different contextual attributes and their mutual correlation. In addition, it interoperates and is backward compatible with traditional role-based access control solutions.

This paper reports our ongoing work to design a Context-Risk-Aware Access Control (CRAAC) model for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) environments. CRAAC is designed to augment flexibility and generality over the current solutions. Risk assessment and authorization level of assurance play a key role in CRAAC. Through risk assessment, resources are classified into groups according to their sensitivity levels and potential impacts should any unauthorized access occurs. The identified risks are mapped onto their required assurance levels, called Object Level of Assurance (OLoA). Upon receiving an object access request, the requester’s run-time contextual information is assessed to establish a Requester’s Level of Assurance (RLoA) denoting the level of confidence in identifying that requester. The access request is granted if RLoA ≥ OLoA. This paper describes the motivation for, and the design of, the CRAAC model, and reports a case study of further illustrate the model.

Abstract: The Internet has graduated from simple sharing of e-mail to business-critical applications that involve incredible amounts of private information. The need to protect sensitive data over an entrusted medium has led to the creation of Virtual Private Networks (VPN). VPNs allow corporations of all sizes to move away from expensive and static private line facilities to the flexible Internet. A Virtual Private Network is the extension of private network that encompasses links across shared or public networks like the Internet. With VPN data can be sent between two computers across shared or public network that emulates a pointto-point link. Packets that are sent using VPN if intercepted on the shared or public network are indecipherable without the encryption keys. A VPN is a private data network that makes use of public telecommunication infrastructure, maintaining privacy through the use of a tunneling protocol and security procedures. This paper is devoted as an overview of VPNs from the security perspective. The currently used technologies behind securing and maintaining a VPN, benefits and drawbacks are also covered. A proposed technique for remote user authentication and Security Association agreement on the application level. Another proposed technique for session key generation and exchange.

Establishing trust in a subject requesting access to a sensitive resource object is fundamental in history-aware access control models. A subject's past behaviour could be used as an indication about the subject's trustworthiness. In fact, a subject's trust plays a significant role in deciding the associated access rights in, for example, context-aware access control models. Recently, there have been efforts to accommodate the subject's trust level to provide smart security services including access control. Some proposals utilise data mining techniques, whereas some incorporate statistical methods to compute the subject's trust value. Most of the models fail to identify malicious attempts from genuine subjects. In this paper, we propose a new model that bridges the gap by incorporating the concepts of Recency, Frequency and Sensitivity (RFS) in trust computation. The model is formally defined and prototyped in Java using the XACML RBAC profile and its run-time performance is investigated. The results show the model adds a significant overhead on top of the RBAC core model. However, the trust computation process could be done off-line cutting down that overhead dramatically, thus providing an affordable solution.