Biohackers explores fundamental changes occuring in the circulation and ownership of scientific information. Alessandro Delfanti argues that the combination of the ethos of 20th century science, the hacker movement and the free software movement is producing an open science culture which redefines the relationship between researchers, scientific institutions and commercial companies.

Biohackers looks at the emergence of the citizen biology community ‘DIYbio’, the shift to open access by the American biologist Craig Venter and the rebellion of the Italian virologist Ilaria Capua against WHO data-sharing policies.

Delfanti argues that these biologists and many others are involved in a transformation of both life sciences and information systems, using open access tools and claiming independence from both academic and corporate institutions.

This Code of Practice explains why and how cyber security should be considered throughout a building's lifecycle and explains good practice, focusing on building-related systems and all connections to the wider cyber environment.

People are inventing new ways of working together on the internet. Decentralised production thrives on weblogs, wikis and free software projects. In Cyberchiefs, Mathieu O’Neil focuses on the regulations of these working relationships. He examines the transformation of leadership and expertise in online networks, and the emergence of innovative forms of participatory politics.

What are the costs and benefits of alternatives to hierarchical organisation? Using case studies of online projects or ‘tribes’ such as the radical Primitivism archive, the Daily Kos political weblog, the Debian free software project, and Wikipedia, O’Neil shows that leaders must support maximum autonomy for participants, and he analyses the tensions generated by this distribution of authority.

There has been unprecedented development in data communications and services since the first edition of this book was published in 1986. In less than a decade the technology has advanced beyond all recognition and the first edition is now really no more than an interesting historical record. The second edition, published in 1989, reflected some of these developments and introduced the then emerging proposals for an integrated services digital network (ISDN). Since that date ISDN has become a fact and has already begun to be superseded by proposals and standards for a broadband ISDN (B-ISDN), offering greatly enhanced and flexible data rates over a public network based mainly on optical fibre transmission. Optical fibre technology is also being used in wide-area private digital networks and for high-capacity internetworking operations.

Signed into law in 2014, the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) appeared to offer pioneering legislation for a digital bill of rights that addressed issues like network neutrality and privacy. Guy T. Hoskins chronicles the Marco Civil’s development and its failure to confront the greatest concentration of power in the digital age: informational capitalism. Combining interviews with discourse and political-economic analysis, Hoskins reveals why the legislation fell short while examining the implications of its emergence in Brazil, which remains on the margins of the global system of informational capitalism. Hoskins places collectivist and public service principles at the core of any framework’s effectiveness. He also shows why we must create systems sensitive to the sociocultural and political-economic contexts that will shape digital rights and their usefulness.

Compelling and contrarian, Digital Rights at the Periphery looks at communications policy and internet governance in the Global South and the lessons they provide for the rest of the world.

One of the most far-reaching transformations in our era is the wave of digital technologies rolling over—and upending—nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship have all been modified by now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory looks closely at one significant facet of our rapidly evolving digital lives: how technology is radically changing our lives as citizens and participants in democratic governments.
To understand these transformations, this book brings together contributions by scholars from multiple disciplines to wrestle with the question of how digital technologies shape, reshape, and affect fundamental questions about democracy and democratic theory. As expectations have whiplashed—from Twitter optimism in the wake of the Arab Spring to Facebook pessimism in the wake of the 2016 US election—the time is ripe for a more sober and long-term assessment. How should we take stock of digital technologies and their promise and peril for reshaping democratic societies and institutions? To answer, this volume broaches the most pressing technological changes and issues facing democracy as a philosophy and an institution.
 

Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. 

This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function?

Advocates a cybersecurity “social contract” between government and business in seven key economic sectors

Cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the United States are extensive, affecting everything from national security and democratic elections to critical infrastructure and economy. In the past decade, the number of cyberattacks against American targets has increased exponentially, and their impact has been more costly than ever before. A successful cyber-defense can only be mounted with the cooperation of both the government and the private sector, and only when individual corporate leaders integrate cybersecurity strategy throughout their organizations.

A collaborative effort of the Board of Directors of the Internet Security Alliance, Fixing American Cybersecurity is divided into two parts. Part One analyzes why the US approach to cybersecurity has been inadequate and ineffective for decades and shows how it must be transformed to counter the heightened systemic risks that the nation faces today. Part Two explains in detail the cybersecurity strategies that should be pursued by each major sector of the American economy: health, defense, financial services, utilities and energy, retail, telecommunications, and information technology.

Fixing American Cybersecurity will benefit industry leaders, policymakers, and business students. This book is essential reading to prepare for the future of American cybersecurity.

Many organisations are transforming their businesses through the development of information and communications technologies. The security of this e-commerce is now a key enabler for businesses, and this book presents an overview of current and future infrastructures for e-business security.

Broadband networks, such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), frame relay, and leased lines, allow us to easily access multimedia services (data, voice, and video) in one package. Exploring why broadband networks are important in modern-day telecommunications, Introduction to Broadband Communication Systems covers the concepts and components of both standard and emerging broadband communication network systems.

Telecommunication and internet services are constantly subject to change, seeking the customer's full satisfaction. Enriching these services with innovative approaches such as contextaware, social, mobile, adaptable and interactive mechanisms, enables users to experience a variety of personalized services seamlessly across different platforms and technologies. In this sense, advertising is no exception, especially if we consider that it will become the business enabler for next generation services. Nevertheless, currently there is no cross-domain solution capable of delivering real-time advertising across heterogeneous environments or domains, and at the same time, address user needs, desires and intentions. This is because most of the products available today are only used within isolated environments / silos. Therefore, managing advertising campaigns across different verticals is still very complex. However, leveraging on the advances provided by Next Generation Networks, together with the design principles inherent to Service Oriented Architectures and capabilities offered by Service Delivery Platforms, this scenario is about to change. Based on key conceptual entities called enablers, this work aims to change the current scenario. More concretely, this book introduces three distinct but complementary enablers. The Human Enabler provides a real-time context brokerage system capable of securely managing different types of user-related data in a standardized way. The Reasoning Enabler is the result of a welldefined methodology that enables new knowledge to be reasoned, based on previously stored data, by aggregating, correlating and inferring new information about people and their contexts. Lastly, the Session Management Enabler is responsible for abstracting the communication layers. It provides a context-aware multimedia delivery system capable of personalizing and adapting multimedia content according to a set of user and system pre-defined context data or rules, respectively. Altogether, they form the Converged User-Centric Advertising System and introduce new features that address the needs of both users and advertisers.

The business of telecommunications is undergoing a period of change driven by changes in regulation, increasing demands for services and the development of new access technologies. The market structure of telecommunications is evolving rapidly as new and existing players strive to compete in an increasingly volatile market, while the advent of new data services is placing greater demands on the network as operators strive to offer new broadband services. Underpinning much of this change is the access technology itself, not only in the transitional form of copper twisted pairs, but also increasingly through the use of new fibre, radio and copper systems. The dominant cost of most telecommunication networks is the access network itself, which typically can demand up to 80% of the total investment required.

With the rapid progress in networking and computing technologies, a wide variety of network-based computing applications have been developed and deployed on the internet. Flexible and effective service provisioning for supporting the diverse applications is a key requirement for the next generation internet. However, the current internet lacks sufficient capability for meeting this requirement, mainly due to the ossification caused by tight coupling between network architecture and infrastructure. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which has been widely adopted in cloud computing via the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigms, may be applied in networking to decouple network architecture and infrastructure; thus offering a promising approach to addressing some fundamental challenges to the next generation Internet. In general, such a service-oriented networking paradigm is referred to as Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). This book presents the state of the art of the NaaS paradigm, including its concepts, architecture, key technologies, applications, and development directions for future network service provisioning. It provides readers with a comprehensive reference that reflects the most current technical developments related to NaaS.

The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.

Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.

Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

As computers are increasingly embedded, ubiquitous and wirelessly connected, security becomes imperative. This has led to the development of the notion of a 'trusted platform', the chief characteristic of which is the possession of a trusted hardware element which is able to check all or part of the software running on this platform. This enables parties to verify the software environment running on a remote trusted platform, and hence to have some trust that the data sent to that machine will be processed in accordance with agreed rules.

Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) are small, inexpensive chips which provide a limited set of security functions. They are most commonly found as a motherboard component on laptops and desktops aimed at the corporate or government markets, but can also be found on many consumer-grade machines and servers, or purchased as independent components. Their role is to serve as a Root of Trust - a highly trusted component from which we can bootstrap trust in other parts of a system. TPMs are most useful for three kinds of tasks: remotely identifying a machine, or machine authentication; providing hardware protection of secrets, or data protection; and providing verifiable evidence about a machine's state, or attestation.