EU Policy-Making: Reform of the CAP and EU Trade in Beef & Dairy with Developing Countries

The present study is part of the PPLPI effort to identify significant political and institutional factors and processes that currently hinder or prevent the poor in developing countries from taking greater advantage of opportunities to benefit from livestock. The study examines the political economy of policy-making concerning trade in livestock and livestock products (LLPs) between the European Union (EU) and developing countries (DCs). The main objective is to determine and assess how relevant EU policy is made, including the role of key actors and forces both domestic and international. The political economy of relevant LLP trade-related issues are examined at four levels: (a) the EU member state, (b) the European Union itself, (c) the international trading system, and (d) developing countries. Several issues cross, or are relevant to, the different levels of analysis. A related objective is to identify "entry points" and provide strategic recommendations aimed at achieving positive change. Two livestock commodities, beef and dairy, were selected as central to the study. The EU is a prodigious producer of livestock and livestock products, and it plays a major role in international trade in LLPs. EU subsidies and trade barriers have been the subject of intense criticism by some European Union member states, developed and developing country trading partners, international organizations, academics, advocacy NGOs and others.European Union, Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Policy Making, Trade, Developing Countries, Livestock, Beef, Dairy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Livestock Production/Industries,

TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201

Comparing "challenge-based" and "code-based" internet voting verification implementations

Internet-enabled voting introduces an element of invisibility and unfamiliarity into the voting process, which makes it very different from traditional voting. Voters might be concerned about their vote being recorded correctly and included in the final tally. To mitigate mistrust, many Internet-enabled voting systems build verifiability into their systems. This allows voters to verify that their votes have been cast as intended, stored as cast and tallied as stored at the conclusion of the voting period. Verification implementations have not been universally successful, mostly due to voter difficulties using them. Here, we evaluate two cast as intended verification approaches in a lab study: (1) "Challenge-Based" and (2) "Code-Based". We assessed cast-as-intended vote verification efficacy, and identified usability issues related to verifying and/or vote casting. We also explored acceptance issues post-verification, to see whether our participants were willing to engage with Internet voting in a real election. Our study revealed the superiority of the code-based approach, in terms of ability to verify effectively. In terms of real-life Internet voting acceptance, convenience encourages acceptance, while security concerns and complexity might lead to rejection

Efficient Passive ICS Device Discovery and Identification by MAC Address Correlation

Owing to a growing number of attacks, the assessment of Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) has gained in importance. An integral part of an assessment is the creation of a detailed inventory of all connected devices, enabling vulnerability evaluations. For this purpose, scans of networks are crucial. Active scanning, which generates irregular traffic, is a method to get an overview of connected and active devices. Since such additional traffic may lead to an unexpected behavior of devices, active scanning methods should be avoided in critical infrastructure networks. In such cases, passive network monitoring offers an alternative, which is often used in conjunction with complex deep-packet inspection techniques. There are very few publications on lightweight passive scanning methodologies for industrial networks. In this paper, we propose a lightweight passive network monitoring technique using an efficient Media Access Control (MAC) address-based identification of industrial devices. Based on an incomplete set of known MAC address to device associations, the presented method can guess correct device and vendor information. Proving the feasibility of the method, an implementation is also introduced and evaluated regarding its efficiency. The feasibility of predicting a specific device/vendor combination is demonstrated by having similar devices in the database. In our ICS testbed, we reached a host discovery rate of 100% at an identification rate of more than 66%, outperforming the results of existing tools.Comment: http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/ICS2018.

The militarization of the Puget Sound A gateway to the Pacific, 1880-1900

This thesis examines the militarization of the Puget Sound during the nineteenth-century and its connection with an increasingly imperialistic-minded United States. With the construction of the Puget Sound Naval Station beginning in 1891 and the subsequent installation of fortifications guarding the entrance and thereby protecting the naval station and cities of Seattle, Tacoma, and the newly established town of Bremerton, the Puget Sound became a highly valuable asset to the United States. The militarization of this area stemmed from the United States increased "imperial" interest in accessing the Pacific Ocean, and a military complex located in the Pacific Northwest offered the country a location that was closer to Japan and China than any other current naval base. With the Pacific Northwest secured, the United States had facilities along the Pacific coastline which could harbor a modern naval fleet, which was essential to power projection during this time. Initial explorations were conducted by various surveying teams in the first half of the nineteenth-century, and this was coupled with growing interest towards expansion into the Pacific Ocean. The strategic value of the area was well known by 1880, however, due to the massive decline in military spending following the Civil War, implementation of these plans was quite slow. Due to increasing expansionist rhetoric, the need for a modern navy capable of challenging powers such as Great Britain began to take shape by the early 1880's. To go along with a modern navy, the realization of the strategic value of the Puget Sound intensified due to the Endicott Board of 1886 which analyzed the poor state of American coast defenses and the 1888 naval commission tasked with selecting a site in the Pacific Northwest for a new naval station. The location ultimately chosen was Port Orchard, which encompasses modern day Bremerton. With the construction of a modern navy and the Puget Sound's strategic value secured, the region grew into a formidable military complex by 1900. This complex formed a key component of the United States ability to expand into the Pacific Ocean. This complex also allowed for the region to prosper

Blanche Armwood of Tampa and the Strategy of Interracial Cooperation

Blanche Armwood was born in Tampa on January 3, 1890, into a well-established middle-class black family. Her maternal grandfather, Adam Holloman, had been appointed in 1875 to the Hillsborough County Commission by then-Governor Marcellus L. Stearns. That same year he purchased four parcels of land which totalled 123 acres. Her great uncle, John Armwood, had been a negotiator between the Seminoles and white settlers on the southern Florida frontier. He also became an early landowner when he successfully homesteaded 159 acres in Hillsborough County. Her father, Levin Armwood, was Tampa’s first black policeman and subsequently served as county deputy sheriff. He and Blanche’s brother, Walter, jointly owned and operated the Gem, which was for many years Tampa’s only black drugstore. Walter Armwood also held positions as professor at Bethune-Cookman College and, during World War I, as Florida state supervisor for the U.S. Bureau of Negro Economics. One of her sisters, Idela Street, became a licensed businesswoman in Tampa in 1910. Blanche matriculated from St. Peter Claver Catholic School, Tampa’s best school for blacks at the time, at the age of twelve. She then passed the Florida State Uniform Teachers Examination that same year. Enrolling immediately at Spelman Institute in Atlanta, she graduated at age 16 with a degree in English and Latin.1 During the next seven years she taught in the Tampa public schools. During those early years she developed a deep and lasting concern for the social questions which her education and experiences raised in her