Cross-sector collaborations in the form of self-organized interorganizational networks are key mechanisms to address complex social sustainability problems in a systematic manner with accelerated and effective results. Self-organized interorganizational networks allow for collaborations through low degrees of hierarchy and bureaucracy while achieving high levels of ownership and commitment among member organizations. These type of networks have proven useful to achieve policy reforms to tackle societal problems related to rapid evolving and internet related crimes affecting children. This study analyses the initial conditions and emergence of self-organized interorganizational networks, as well as the structuralarrangements and governance structures that facilitate the network organization. To do so, the authors used as case study the criminalization of online sexual grooming in Malaysia that resulted in the Sexual Offences Against Children Act 2017. The analysis of the case was conducted through a qualitative thematic analysis based on semi-structured interviews to 11 leaders of some of the organizations that collaborated by producing public awareness, educating about the implications of this type of crime, and simultaneously, drafting and passing the new law. The results of the study showed that the network in Malaysia was formed and organized organically through a combination of informal and formal methods and structures guided by a high sense of shared purpose and shared leadership.

Grooming is an internet based crime that affects children over the world, and during the covid-19 pandemic, children have been disproportionately affected and in specific risk for becoming targeted. While Sweden's covid-19 strategy differs from other countries in Europe and the rest of the world, since there has not been a national “lock-down”, however, schools have temporarily implemented distance. This study uses a qualitative approach to examine the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on grooming, where semi-structured interviews were conducted with people working as police officers and social services workers. The material collected from the interviews was analyzed using the routine activity theory and the cyber-lifestyle routine activity theory. The study found that grooming did not appear to increase in Sweden due to the covid-19 pandemic, although there was a concern about it when the pandemic began. It also found that digital resilience is required to protect vulnerable children when societal crises arise. / <p>2021-01-14</p>

Data Centers (DCs) have become an intrinsic element of emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud services; all of which entails interconnected and sophisticated computing and storage resources. Recent studies of conventional data center networks (DCNs) revealed two key challenges: a biased distribution of inter-rack traffic and unidentified flow classes: delay sensitive mice flows (MFs) and throughput-hungry elephant flows (EFs). Unfortunately, existing DCN topologies support only uniform distribution of capacities, provide limited bandwidth flexibilities and lacks of efficient flow classification mechanism. Fortunately, wireless DCs can leverage wireless communication emerging technologies, such as multi-terabit free-space optic (FSO), to provide flexible and reconfigurable DCN topologies. It is worth noting that indoor FSO links are less vulnerable to outdoor FSO channel impairments. Consequently, indoor FSO links are more robust and can offer high bandwidths with long stability, which can further be enhanced with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) methods. In this thesis, we alleviate the bandwidth inefficiency by FSO links that have the desired agility by allocating the transmission powers to adapt link capacity for dynamically changing traffic conditions, and to reduce the maintenance costs and overhead. While routing the two classes along the same path causes unpleasant consequences, the DC researchers proposed traffic management solutions to treat them separately. However, the solutions either suffer from packet reordering and high queuing delay, or lack of accurate visibility and estimation on end-to-end path status. Alternatively, we leverage WDM to design elastic network topologies (i.e., part of the wavelengths are assigned to route MFs and the remaining for EFs). Since bandwidth demands can be lower than available capacity of WDM channels, we use traffic grooming to aggregate multiple flows into a larger flow and to enhance the link utilization. On the other hand, to reap the benefits of the proposed WDM isolated topology, an accurate and fast EF detection mechanism is necessary. Accordingly, we propose a scheme that uses TCP communication behavior and collect indicative packets for its flow classification algorithm, it demonstrates perfect flow classification accuracy, and is in order of magnitudes faster than existing solutions with low communication and computation overhead.

Sexualbrott mot barn på internet har blivit ett världsproblem som ständigt växer. Med den nya teknologin som konstant utvecklas bildas även nya möjligheter för förövare att utnyttja barn på internet. Syftet med denna litteraturstudie var att få en ökad förståelse för hur förövare går tillväga för att utnyttja barn på internet samt vilka typer av sexualbrott mot barn som förekommer på internet. Studien inkluderade femton vetenskapliga artiklar som analyserats med en kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Analysen resulterade i fyra huvudkategorier; offentliga chattrum, strategi, fysiska möten, och typer av sexualbrott mot barn på internet samt åtta underkategorier; relation, utpressning, gromning, manipulation, undvika upptäckt barnpornografi, sexhandel och digitala mötesforum. Genom att skapa trovärdiga relationer, gromning, utpressning och manipulation utnyttjas barn till att begå sexuella aktiviteter som kan inkludera sex. Brottet börjar oftast med kommunikation genom offentliga chattrum som tillåter användare att kommunicera via direkta meddelande, ljud och videochatt. Samtalen utvecklas sedan till mer sexuella ämnen där förövaren använder olika strategier för att bland annat träffa barnet i verkligheten, få nakenbilder eller på andra sätt utnyttja barnet. Genom att försäkra sig om att barnet inte talat om för någon om deras relation säkrar de sin möjlighet att inte åka fast. Brottet kan ske på olika sätt dels genom våldtäkt, sexhandel och barnpornografi. Studien diskuterar de juridiska problem som kan uppstå med mätning av barnpornografi och definitionen av ett barn. Vidare bör framtida forskning fokusera på möjligheter att begränsa åtkomsten till exponerande material och webbsidor som tillåter vuxna individer att kommunicera med barn på ett sexuellt sätt. / Sexual crimes against children on the internet are recognized as a serious and growing problem world-wide. With the new technology that is constantly evolving, new opportunities are being created for perpetrators to exploit children on the internet. The purpose with this systematic literature review was to gain an increased understanding of how perpetrators approach and abuse children on the internet and what types of sexual offenses against children that occur on the internet. The review included fifteen scientific papers analyzed with a qualitative content analysis. The analysis resulted in four main categories; public chat rooms, strategy, physical meetings, and types of sexual offenses against children on the internet, and eight subcategories; relationship, extortion, grooming, manipulation, avoid being discovered child pornography, sex trade and digital meeting forums. By creating credible relationships, grooming, extortion and manipulation, children are exploited to commit sexual activities that may include sex. The crime usually starts with communication through public chat rooms that allow users to communicate via direct message, audio and video chat. The conversation is then developed into more sexual subjects where the perpetrator uses different strategies to meet the child in reality, get nude pictures or in other ways utilize the child. By ensuring that the child has not spoken to someone about their relationship, they secure their opportunity not to get caught. The crime can be done in various ways, partly through rape, sex trafficking and child pornography. The study discusses the juridical problems that can occur with instruments measuring child pornography and the definition of a child. Future research should focus on opportunities to limit access to exposure materials and web pages that allow adult individuals to communicate with children with purpose of sexual interactions.

Optical networks employing wavelength division multiplexing technology have been well recognized as the core networks for the next generation Internet. In such networks, any fiber cut or node failure may lead to huge data loss. Thus, reliability is of great importance in the design of modern high-speed networks. At the same time, traffic grooming is another important design objective since it addresses multi-granularity traffic. The traditional routing approaches with differentiated services do not consider the traffic grooming case or reconfiguration method. Therefore, they are not resource-efficient for the next generation Internet. In this dissertation, an effective reconfigurable traffic grooming with differentiated reliability scheme is proposed to efficiently use network resources. Compared with the conventional rerouting method, the proposed scheme makes the network more robust and immune from service interruptions. An integer linear programming (ILP) formulation is presented first. By solving the ILP formulation, an optimal solution is obtained for each incoming connection request. However, the solution is so time consuming, a heuristic algorithm is introduced to get an approximate optimal solution. The performance evaluation indicates that the connection blocking probability can be decreased greatly by the proposed scheme.

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The continuous advancement of new technology, specifically in the area of internet technology, has led to an increase in concerns surrounding children and young people’s safety when online. The following thesis describes a study of protection and security on the internet from the perspective of children and young people and contributes and expands on the findings of my Masters Dissertation which examined parents’ perceptions of children at risk on the internet. The research focuses on young people’s perspectives about what risks they face and what would keep them safe and is set within literature on child sex abusers and internet grooming. The thesis is based on an online survey which gathered information about the behaviour and opinions of 859 children and young people living in Scotland. Findings were separated into four main topics: children and young people’s behaviour on the internet, children and young people’s perception of strangers both online and offline, children and young people’s opinion of education on internet safety and children and young people’s opinion of the government’s role in relation to their safety online. Respondents’ stated that they wanted to be protected when on the internet (whilst acknowledging their own responsibility when online), either by the government or through those responsible for the content of the internet. They also provided several suggestions on how schools and the government can do more to listen to their voices and improve internet safety education. There were a number of children and young people who reported that they disclosed personal information over the internet (their own and that of their friends and family) and that they were willing to meet people in the real environment whom they had been communicating with online: many respondents’ viewed internet ‘strangers’ as different from ‘strangers’ in the real environment. Vygotsky’s (1978) theory of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and Wood et al.’s (1976) development of the concept of scaffolding, which has been developed in an educational rather than criminological context, were identified as offering some promise for explaining the behaviour of both the victims and the offender as other theories of sexual offending (either specific theories or explanations developed from general theories) are incapable of fully providing an explanation that will encompass grooming in general and online grooming in particular. It is argued that if these theories are applied to internet safety education they have the potential to empower children and young people and make grooming tactics and approaches less effective. The findings also indicated that more child and young people-oriented protection measures may be needed. Perceptions of protection and security on the internet were wide ranging but respondents were keen to provide possible solutions and examples of how to improve their safety when online. This would suggest that communicating with children and young people when developing policy, legislation, research and educational materials is the way forward if we wish to improve their safety and eliminate or reduce the dangers they face when using the internet.

Grooming, sexuella övergrepp onlina, ökar och enligt forskning tillskrevs dess offer mer negativa attityder i kontrast till offer som utsatts för sexualbrott som skett i verkligheten. Studiens syfte var att undersöka skillnader i studenters attityder gällande en flicka som utsatts för grooming kontra sexuella övergrepp utan initerad kontakt online. Även könsskillnader i negativa attityder undersöktes. Fyra enkäter med olika scenarion besvarades av 290 studenter mellan 17-59 år. Resultatet visade att mer negativa attityder tillskrevs offret som utsatts online i jämförelse med offret som utsatts för övergrepp utan initierad kontakt online. Män påvisade mer negativa attityder än kvinnor i samtliga scenarion. Resultaten överensstämmer med tidigare forskning. Att bemötas av negativa och skuldbeläggande attityder från omgivningen kan utöver de personliga konsekvenserna leda till att färre anmälningar görs, vilket följdaktligen bidrar till att fler gärningsmän går fria.

1 Thesis title, keywords and abstract Thesis title: Sexually motivated cybercrime Keywords: cybercrime, virtual child pornography, sexting, pornographic performances, cyber grooming, sexual solicitation of children This master thesis deals with the issue of cybercrime against persons more specifically with sexually motivated crimes. The thesis is divided into five separate chapters. The first chapter deals with cybercrime in general, its taxonomy and the necessary terminology, it also describes some of the criminogenic factors of cybercrime relevant for the issue. The second chapter presents the most important applicable international legal instruments. The third chapter describes the issue of illicit pornography especially child pornography. For the subsequent chapters the author's own taxonomy was used and they overlap in part. The fourth chapter explores the phenomenon of sexting and the use of web cameras for sexual purposes as a consensual activity. In the fifth chapter the misuse of these activities for the purposes of child grooming, extortion and commercial sexual exploitation of children is examined. The chapters three to fine represent the core of the thesis and are outlined as follows: First, the criminological aspects are analyzed. Then some general thoughts on legal regulation of the given...

Aspectos do repertório comportamental e de estruturas resultantes de comportamento foram levantados para aranhas da infraordem Mygalomorphae. Os principais objetivos são buscar subsídios em informações provindas de caracteres comportamentais para auxiliar a elucidação da história evolutiva do grupo e entender como estes evoluíram dentro do grupo. Foi realizado um levantamento de informações sobre refúgios nas migalomorfas, a partir das quais foram delimitados 8 caracteres. Os caracteres foram incorporados a uma matriz de dados morfológicos provinda do trabalho de Goloboff e foi realizada uma análise de evidência total. A árvore resultante do consenso estrito da análise de evidência total mostrou-se melhor resolvida do que a árvore obtida apenas com os dados morfológicos. Foi realizada a otimização para a verificação da evolução dos padrões de teias dentro do grupo. Nossa análise mostra a existência de um padrão geral na evolução destes caracteres, com muitos deles apresentando fortes correlações. A construção de buracos está presente no ancestral comum entre migalomorfas e Mesothelae e aparece correlacionada com refúgios de alta conexão com o substrato. A hipótese de Coyle de que as tiras de seda teriam originado os lençóis de captura não é corroborada por nosso estudo. Ao contrário do que sugerem alguns autores, as estruturas finais resultantes de comportamentos podem ser uma fonte confiável de caracteres para o estudo da filogenia dos indivíduos que as produzem, além de possibilitar um melhor entendimento da evolução dos comportamentos que as originam. Também foi realizada uma análise comparativa do comportamento de autolimpeza em dois gêneros da família Theraphosidae. Observações deste comportamento resultaram na elaboração de um catálogo comportamental composto por 11 categorias. Análise das sequências comportamentais demonstra que este é um comportamento bastante fixo, com realização repetitiva de algumas sequências por longos períodos de tempo, não existindo um padrão geral que permita detectar início, meio e fim de uma sequência. São sugeridas algumas funções para este comportamento nas caranguejeiras, como a limpeza de estruturas sensoriais e/ou a proteção contra parasitas. A autolimpeza observada em indivíduos de outras famílias de Mygalomorphae mostrou a realização das mesmas categorias de modo semelhante. A manutenção destas categorias em famílias que divergiram há milhões de anos pode indicar um alto valor adaptativo das mesmas. A partir destes resultados, sugerimos que o tanto o comportamento quanto as estruturas finais são boas fontes de dados para análises filogenéticas. / Aspects of behavior and end-products of behavior were studied on Mygalomorph spiders. The main goal is to understand the evolution of these behavioral characters and to discover the evolutionary history of the group. As a result of an extensive review of the literature, 8 web characters were delimited in mygalomorphs. The characters were incorporated to a morphological matrix used by Goloboff and a total evidence analysis was performed. The resulting tree was better resolved than the strictly morphological one. Web related characters show a clear evolutionary signal, and some of them evolve in a correlated fashion. Burrow construction is an ancestral feature of spiders and appears correlated with silk-lining behavior. Coyles hypothesis that sheetwebs derive from silk lines is not supported by our analysis. Contrarily to some authorss suggestions, in our study the end-products proved to be a reliable source of characters for phylogenetic reconstructions, besides making possible a better understanding of the evolution of the behaviors that give rise to them. We performed a comparative analysis of grooming behavior in two genera of the family Theraphosidae. A behavioral catalog including 11 categories was concluded. Analysis of the behavioral sequences shows that grooming behavior is stereotyped, with some sequences being repeated for long periods of time, without a general pattern that let us detect the beginning, the middle or the end of a sequence. Spiders from distant Mygalomorph families perform the same repertoire of grooming behaviors, performed in similar ways. The maintenance of this ancestral repertoire in families that are separated for millions of years points to its strong adaptive value. Grooming could be used to clean some sensorial structures and/or to protect the spiders against parasites. From these results, we suggest that not only behavior, but also the structures resulting from it, are a good source of data for phylogenetic analysis.