This thesis presents a study of how identification, according to Kenneth Burke's theory, can be observed in the media-related practices promoted by the cyber-activist collective Anonymous. Identification is the capacity of community-building through the use of shared interests. Burke affirms that, as human beings are essentially social, identification is the very aim of any human interaction. Cyber-activism deeply relies on this capacity to promote and legitimise its campaigns. In the case of Anonymous, the collective became extremely popular and is now a frequent presence even in street protests, usually organised online, around the world. Here, I argue that this power was possible through the use of identification, which helped attract a large number of individuals to the collective. Anonymous was particularly skilled in its capacity to create an ideology for each campaign, which worked well to set up a perfect enemy who should be fought against by any people, despite their demographic or social status. Other forms of identification were also present and important. Although it is impossible to measure how many people or what kind of people Anonymous has been attracting, the presence of identification as a strong phenomenon is undeniable, since the collective is now one of the most famous cyber-activist organisations.

This study attempts to explore how schools’ handles and prevents cyber-bullying among pupils. The purpose in this study was to investigate how the school staffs work in secondary schools with grades sixth to ninth. How do the schools discover, prevent and stop cyber-bullying? Do the schools’ have any experiences of cyber-bullying? How do the schools work with anti-bullying concepts – have the new phenomenon cyber-bullying affected and changed the schools´ anti-bullying work in connection with the guidelines and in relation to the "new technology"? This study attempts to examine how this is handled within several secondary schools with three different municipalities. The theoretical starting-points have been an inductive theory which later has resulted in four other theoretical models, Meyrowitz two media-models which are describing social environments and several knowledge theories with a sociology perspective. In this study, the methods have been: conversational interviews with school staff –teachers and counselors. The analysis of the empirical material has been primarily content analysis with categorization of sentences which was mainly guided by empirics. The results shows that the schools does not have much experiences of cyber-bullying, they discovers, prevents and stops the phenomenon with same guidelines like the "regular" bullying. The major obstacle in the study showed a lack of resources, mainly among the teachers, such as time pressure and insufficient education on the subject. There also seems to be a lack of collaboration with agents outside the schools, primarily the social services, because the school does not feel that this type of cooperation works. The study provides several issues and several perspectives as a starting point for further research, such as experiences of cyber-bullying at school among pupils and parents.

Do children, who are supporter of comradeship, think that working to prevent cyber bullying may be a task for them? This study describes, from a child’s perspective, how a supporter of comradeship can be supportive in the preventive work against cyber bullying. This study will also define the phenomena bulling and cyber bullying, the difference between them and where they can be seen. I will also describe the supporters of comradeship are elected, the information they get from school and how adults at school help them to plan their work. The schoolconsider, of course, the Swedish school law towards (against) bulling and insulting behavior and the school is also visited by inspectors from the Swedish National Agency for Education. The idea to do this study came arise, from a lesson when we discussed, with the pupils, a problem that had happened the day before, after school. It was a problem that was difficult to solve and it was an interesting problem to discuss. I have been interviewing the supporters in group and in pairs. The supporters at the school think that cyber bullying might be a task for them to work with in a preventive way as well as the work to prevent bulling at the schoolyard still is important.

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships among adolescents¡¦ online misrepresentation, self-disclosure, cyber-relationship motivation and loneliness. Survey study was conducted on sample consisted of 612 Taiwanese adolescents, 13-18 years of age with instruments including scales of online misrepresentation, self-disclosure, cyber-relationship motivation and of loneliness. Findings indicated that 45.9% of the respondents admit to having online deception experience while 4.4% report prevalent online misrepresentation, with those who live in Pintung, study in specific grade orwith exposure to cyber-relationship having much more online misrepresentation. In addition, not all constructs of self-disclosure, cyber-relationship motivation and loneliness are associated with online misrepresentation. Only accuracy and valence of self-disclosure, easier communication, emotional support, away from the real world and sexual partners of cyber-relationship motivation and loneliness are associated with specific constructs of online misrepresentation. Regression analyses suggested all constructs of self-disclosure in real-life as well as anonymity and emotional support of cyber-relationship motivation have moderate explanatory power for online self-disclosure, whereas accuracy and valence of self-disclosure in real-life as well as depth of control and accuracy of online self-disclosure have low explanatory power for cyber-relationship motivation, indicating that there are factors needed to be explored.

The World Wide Web provides a new communicated environment for learning. In this research, we developed the ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ to improve students¡¦ learning with the functionality of user profiles¡¦ tracking, recording, analysis and feedback. To solve students¡¦ problems in system adaptability and learning progress control, we provided necessary messages for user and real-time feedback according to their profiles. We have developed a novel learning environment for different students according to their demands. To assist student and teacher for completing their works, our research implemented ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ in e-learning system. For students, ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ supports group corporations, learning guideline and learning activities. Our ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ provided the effective learning environment to save time for students. For teachers, ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ can assist teacher to control schedule and students¡¦ learning activities as well as term project progress. The ¡§online tutoring agents¡¨ we proposed can provide good and customized environment for both teachers and students.

The growing connectivity of cyber-physical systems (CPSes) has led to an increased concern over the ability of cyber-attacks to inflict physical damage. Current cybersecurity measures focus on preventing attacks from penetrating control supervisory networks. These reactive techniques, however, are often plagued with vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits. Embedded processors in CPS field devices often possess little security of their own, and are easily exploited once the network is penetrated. In response, researchers at Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech have proposed a Trustworthy Autonomic Interface Guardian Architecture (TAIGA), which monitors communication between the embedded controller and physical process. This autonomic architecture provides the physical process with a last line of defense against cyber-attacks by switching process control to a trusted backup controller if an attack causes a system specification violation. This thesis focuses on classifying the effects of cyberattacks on embedded controllers, evaluating TAIGA’s resilience against these attacks, and determining the applicability of TAIGA to other CPSes. This thesis identifies four possible outcomes of a cyber-attack on a CPS embedded processor. We then evaluate TAIGA’s mechanisms to defend against those attack outcomes, and verify TAIGA satisfies the listed trust requirements. Next, we discuss an implementation and the experimental results of TAIGA on a hazardous cargo transportation robot. Then, by making various modifications to the setup configuration, we are able to explore TAIGA’s ability to provide security and process protection to other CPSes with varying levels of autonomy or distributed components.

How do organizations rapidly assess command-level effects of cyber attacks? Leaders need a way of assuring themselves that their organization, people, and information technology can continue their missions in a contested cyber environment. To do this, leaders should: 1) require assessments be more than analogical, anecdotal or simplistic snapshots in time; 2) demand the ability to rapidly model their organizations; 3) identify their organization’s structural vulnerabilities; and 4) have the ability to forecast mission assurance scenarios. Using text mining to build agent based dynamic network models of information processing organizations, I examine impacts of contested cyber environments on three common focus areas of information assurance—confidentiality, integrity, and availability. I find that assessing impacts of cyber attacks is a nuanced affair dependent on the nature of the attack, the nature of the organization and its missions, and the nature of the measurements. For well-manned information processing organizations, many attacks are in the nuisance range and that only multipronged or severe attacks cause meaningful failure. I also find that such organizations can design for resiliency and provide guidelines in how to do so.

This thesis presents a study of how identification, according to Kenneth Burke's theory, can be observed in the media-related practices promoted by the cyber-activist collective Anonymous. Identification is the capacity of community-building through the use of shared interests. Burke affirms that, as human beings are essentially social, identification is the very aim of any human interaction. Cyber-activism deeply relies on this capacity to promote and legitimise its campaigns. In the case of Anonymous, the collective became extremely popular and is now a frequent presence even in street protests, usually organised online, around the world. Here, I argue that this power was possible through the use of identification, which helped attract a large number of individuals to the collective. Anonymous was particularly skilled in its capacity to create an ideology for each campaign, which worked well to set up a perfect enemy who should be fought against by any people, despite their demographic or social status. Other forms of identification were also present and important. Although it is impossible to measure how many people or what kind of people Anonymous has been attracting, the presence of identification as a strong phenomenon is undeniable, since the collective is now one of the most famous cyber-activist organisations.

Many real-world relations are networks that can be modelled with a kind of directed hypergraph named a forward hypergraph (F-graph). F-graphs capture the semantics of both conjunctive and disjunctive dependency relations. Logic statements are sometimes represented using AND/OR directed graphs and they directly correspond with F-graphs; we provide algorithms to convert between the two types of graph. One problem of interest in networks is determining the degree to which the network, with a priority on certain elements, depends upon individual nodes. We address this problem by providing an algorithm, AssetRank, which computes vertex ranks and takes into account network priorities, preferential dependencies, and extra-network influences. A second problem of interest in networks is optimizing the removal of nodes to separate two subcommunities (source and target) to the greatest practical degree, even when a complete disconnection is impractical. The problem is complicated by the need to consider the cost of removing nodes, a budget that constrains the degree to which separation is possible, cascading effects of removing a node, non-linear effects of removing nodes in combination, and removing nodes with the greatest impact on the subcommunities. To this end, we use F-graphs and introduce the concepts of vertex closures and closure-relation graphs. We created two partial-cut algorithms: the first one computes an optimal solution to this NP-hard optimization problem, and the second one estimates an optimization by exploring the closure-relation graph in a best-first search manner. Computer network defence provides a ready application area. Network defenders wish to understand which services and hosts are defence priorities (defence goals), and then, which configurations and vulnerabilities are the most useful to attackers in reaching the defence goals. The defenders' resources are constrained in terms of available person-hours, finances, and acceptable impacts to operations. The work in this thesis supports network defenders by providing actionable information that efficiently removes attack enablers and ensures defence priorities. We present an integration of our algorithms with commercial and open-source network security software. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-04-30 22:17:52.062

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