LL.M. / Despite payment cards being of a fairly recent origin,1 these instruments of payment play an increasingly significant role in commerce. With reference to credit cards, Cornelius already in 2003 stated: “They fulfil various functions that are increasingly important at a time that ecommerce is taking off at a tremendous pace.”2 Similarly criminals continuously use more inventive and technologically advanced methods to commit fraud, including counterfeit card fraud. Is the South African criminal law, however, keeping up? The aim of this study is to investigate whether the various activities which form part of the criminal business value chain relating to counterfeit card fraud, with specific reference to bank payment cards, are sufficiently criminalised in South Africa or whether the inability of our criminal law to address the challenges posed by this crime type necessitates the introduction of further legislation. In the first part of the dissertation the South African common and statutory criminal law is investigated in some depth to establish the applicability thereof on the activities forming part of the criminal business value chain relevant to counterfeit card fraud. The appropriateness of certain statutory provisions is questioned and recommendations are made to amend current legislation. An argument is also advanced for further development of the common-law offence of theft to include identity theft and the unlawful copying and subsequent use of data. Brief reference is made to the international situation. Chapter 2 is an introduction to bank payment card fraud in South Africa focusing on the most prevalent forms thereof being card-not-present fraud and counterfeit card fraud. Reference is made to the manner in which offences related to counterfeit card fraud are currently approached in our criminal courts and the limited impact prosecutions has on the prevalence of this fraud type.

The content of this study is the issue of labor force immigration and employment of immigrants in Czech Republic. Thesis is based on economic theory and description of current legislation including the expected development, which are supported by analyses based on data from the Czech statistic agency and respective ministries. The main goal of the thesis is to refute the prejudices of negative consequences of immigration, especially economic migration, and to assess the situation of employment of immigrants in terms of all stakeholders, ie state as the creator of the legislative environment within which labor contract can be concluded, employers, both in terms of legal obligations concerning employment of immigrants as well as possibilities of employment of such group and at last, but not least, the thesis focuses on immigrants themselves, who are undoubtedly the most vulnerable group.

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This master thesis deals with an implementation of Diffie-Hellman protocol on smart card which is based on MULTOS OS. Defines the smart cards based on MULTOS OS and their usage. Output of this thesis are applications for a smart card and for a client using Diffie-Hellman protocol for establishing of a secret key between two communication sides through unsecured communication channel.

Massively Parallel Processors provide significantly higher peak performance figures than other forms of general purpose processors. However, this comes at a cost to the developer, who needs to deal with an increasingly complicated piece of hardware, for which applications need to be tweaked and optimised to achieve high performance. Domain-specific languages have been proposed as a potential solution to this complexity problem: generating GPU applications from high-level, declarative specifications. This thesis explores two related ideas: firstly, is it practical to synthesise DSLs from high-level languages, and secondly, how can we simplify the creation of such DSLs? This thesis proposes a novel approach whereby rather than considering single domains, we consider collections of collaborative domains in order to share common features and thus reduce the cost of development. We achieve this using a DSLs-within-a-DSL approach: a custom designed host language, into which extensions may be embedded. In order to ground our approach in a real case-study, we propose, design and develop a DSLs-within-a-DSL framework for bioinformatics. We use a restricted recursive functional language as the host language, and embed new DSLs into this language. Importantly, we describe how we can use a combination of novel and adopted automatic parallelisation techniques to synthesise a massively-parallel program for a GPU. This automatic parallelisation, achieved through the discovery of a schedule, and program synthesis techniques using the polyhedral model, interacts productively with our embedded extensions. To further simplify development, we provide a series of customisable heuristics for defining GPU parameters such as the block size (number of threads), grid size and location in the memory hierarchy of data-structures. This encapsulates GPU expertise within the compiler itself. We finally demonstrate that the total combination of these techniques results in applications with competitive performance, at much lower development cost and greater flexibility than comparable hand-coded applications.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africans have over the past few years called for more affordable banking. Some retailers have looked at the opportunities and entered into the financial services space. The question remains as to why consumers would want to pay bank charges to have a bankcard when the card is actually used to pay for goods at retailers who can deliver the service themselves at a saving to both the customer and the retailer? The aim of this study was to determine customer expectations for a bankcard service offering in the South African food and retail industry with the emphasis on consumer behaviour and expectations, bankcards, services and SERVQUAL. This is a SERVQUAL application and a comprehensive literature of this topic is followed with a questionnaire outlining the expectations for such a service. SERVQUAL measures the gap between expectations and perceptions. In this study only expectations are measured as one of South Africa’s major food retailers was used and they do not offer this service at present. Various hypotheses were constructed to measure the expectations for attributes around this service. The attributes were trust, safety, cost, loyalty, open-loop versus closed-loop and mobile. Customer preference on payment methods was also determined when paying for different basket sizes. The results showed overwhelming evidence in favour of expectations for a bankcard service offering by retailers. This research can be used to address the major challenge South Africans and retailers face with high banking charges and address the challenge everyone has with regards to the risk associated with cash handling. Education on this topic is paramount and this could further pave the way for mobile phones replacing bankcards in the future which have also been researched as part of this topic. Further research is necessary to determine the characteristics of a bankcard product in a retail environment.

published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

published_or_final_version / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

The demand for performance and resources that is placed on the system is dictated by the application alone in non-interactive environments, and by a combination of application and user interactions in interactive environments. Understanding user interaction can provide valuable information about which resources will be needed ahead of time. This leads to performance optimizations such as better resource allocations for applications that can utilize a given resource more productively, and transitioning devices to a more appropriate energy performance state before the demand arrives. The challenge is to provide a performance/energy schedule that best matches the task at hand, since keeping the device in one performance level is not energy efficient due to the continually changing demand placed on the device. This dissertation addresses the challenge of designing energy efficient systems by examining the role of user interaction in energy consumption and in providing an energy-performance schedule that adequately accommodates user demand. It is shown that system performance can be tailored to a user's pattern of interaction and it's energy-performance schedule optimized.First, a detailed design of context capture systems in Linux's X-Window System is presented with an evaluation of the associated storage and computation overheads. Due to the overall low complexity of the application window representations, the overheads of computing interaction identifiers and storing a secondary representation of the application interface within the context capture system are likewise low. Additionally, a Microsoft Windows-based context capture system leveraging the Active Accessibility framework is discussed and applied to improving the navigation of cascading pull-down menus.Secondly, this dissertation addresses the application of interaction capture in energy and delay management of Wireless Network Interface Controllers/Cards (WNICs) and hard drives. The Interaction Aware Prediction (IAP) system for WNICs is evaluated showing that the available power modes can be effectively managed to provide energy efficiency while maintaining performance. Similarly, the Interaction Aware Spin-up Prediction (IASP) uses interaction awareness to reduce or eliminate the interactive delays associated with aggressive hard disk energy management.