Dealing with rogue virtual machines in a cloud services environment

In current cloud services hosting solutions, various mechanisms have been developed to minimize the possibility of hosting staff from breaching security. However, while functions such as replicating and moving machines are legitimate actions in clouds, we show that there are risks in administrators being able to perform them. We describe three threat scenarios related to hosting staff on the cloud architecture and indicate how an appropriate accountability architecture can mitigate these risks in the sense that the attacks can be detected and the perpetrators identified. We identify requirements and future research and development needed to protect cloud service environments from these attacks.

Electronic markets and service delivery: requisite competencies for virtual environments

Electronic markets have a short but dynamic history. How an electronic market can be successfully developed remains in dispute. There is a clear need to better understand the nature of electronic markets themselves and, in particular, to review important developments in their conceptualisation. To enable a deeper understanding of these issues, we decided to restrict our investigation to electronic markets in the agricultural export sector. Agribusiness is a natural early adopter of digital marketplaces because of the industry’s traditional reliance on markets and current take-up of global supply chain management (Wilkins, Swatman and Castleman, 2002). We review two portals from this sector that aimed to simplify access to regulatory documentation. The earlier implementation had its funding withdrawn after one year, whilst the more recently established portal is rapidly becoming a showcase project for the stakeholders. We use a composite theory based on Bijker (1995) and Nowotny et al (2001) to establish a framework for analysing our data. We also refer to a body of literature characterising intangible services and their design and its implications for emarket implementations. Our findings indicate that governance style is in fact closely related to the success or failure of specific sites. We also found support for earlier research indicating that expectations and understanding of electronic markets are still evolving.

The ethical dilemmas of social networking services in classroom contexts

This chapter explores five ethical dilemmas associated with using Social Networking Sites (SNS) in classrooms. First, do we have the right to colonize or marginalize students’ out of school social networking practices in the classroom? Second, should we access students’ out of classroom virtual identities from their SNS in a classroom context? Third, should we be engaging students’ social networking in public performances of the curriculum? Fourth, are we prepared for recognising and responding to illicit activity in SNS? Fifth, do teachers understand the implications of exposing their out of school identities to their students who inhabit the same social network? The authors do not dispute that SNS in the classroom can be a rich site for learning, but they argue that the concept of ethics as a process of analyzing and respecting the other is essential if we are to responsibly engage with SNS in the classroom.

Anxiety online - a virtual clinic : preliminary outcomes following completion of five fully automated treatment programs for anxiety disorders and symptoms

Background : The development of e-mental health interventions to treat or prevent mental illness and to enhance wellbeing has risen rapidly over the past decade. This development assists the public in sidestepping some of the obstacles that are often encountered when trying to access traditional face-to-face mental health care services. Objective : The objective of our study was to investigate the posttreatment effectiveness of five fully automated self-help cognitive behavior e-therapy programs for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder with or without agoraphobia (PD/A), obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and social anxiety disorder (SAD) offered to the international public via Anxiety Online, an open-access full-service virtual psychology clinic for anxiety disorders. Methods : We used a naturalistic participant choice, quasi-experimental design to evaluate each of the five Anxiety Online fully automated self-help e-therapy programs. Participants were required to have at least subclinical levels of one of the anxiety disorders to be offered the associated disorder-specific fully automated self-help e-therapy program. These programs are offered free of charge via Anxiety Online. Results : A total of 225 people self-selected one of the five e-therapy programs (GAD, n = 88; SAD, n = 50; PD/A, n = 40; PTSD, n = 30; OCD, n = 17) and completed their 12-week posttreatment assessment. Significant improvements were found on 21/25 measures across the five fully automated self-help programs. At postassessment we observed significant reductions on all five anxiety disorder clinical disorder severity ratings (Cohen d range 0.72–1.22), increased confidence in managing one’s own mental health care (Cohen d range 0.70–1.17), and decreases in the total number of clinical diagnoses (except for the PD/A program, where a positive trend was found) (Cohen d range 0.45–1.08). In addition, we found significant improvements in quality of life for the GAD, OCD, PTSD, and SAD e-therapy programs (Cohen d range 0.11–0.96) and significant reductions relating to general psychological distress levels for the GAD, PD/A, and PTSD e-therapy programs (Cohen d range 0.23–1.16). Overall, treatment satisfaction was good across all five e-therapy programs, and posttreatment assessment completers reported using their e-therapy program an average of 395.60 (SD 272.2) minutes over the 12-week treatment period. Conclusions : Overall, all five fully automated self-help e-therapy programs appear to be delivering promising high-quality outcomes; however, the results require replication.

On-line dating; is a digital kiss and virtual wink the new way of finding love?

In 2007, I asked for a show of hands of people who ‘might consider online dating as a way of finding a partner’. Not a single hand went up and the lecture theatre was stony silent. The same question, some five years later resulted in a significant show of hands and a buzz of chatter. Something had changed and perceptions around online dating had shifted. Nielsen Research last year found most Australians (51 per cent) had either tried online dating or would consider doing so. RSVP and eHarmony claim to have 2 million members and more than 4 million people have apparently joined RSVP since it was launched 17 years ago. Online dating is experiencing significant growth in Asia as well, with the number of new web services (some, like ‘Muslima’, are tightly focused) growing exponentially. Online dating is a global phenomenon. This paper will use current media studies research literature and data from conversations with university students in Australia and Indonesia to explore how the changing world of online dating is helping/hindering young people as they shape and develop identity, represent themselves in the virtual world and ultimately, how they find love on line.

Maximizing real-time streaming services based on a multi-servers networking framework

In recent years, we have witnessed substantial exploitation of real-time streaming applications, such as video surveillance system on road crosses of a city. So far, real world applications mainly rely on the traditional well-known client-server and peer-to-peer schemes as the fundamental mechanism for communication. However, due to the limited resources on each terminal device in the applications, these two schemes cannot well leverage the processing capability between the source and destination of the video traffic, which leads to limited streaming services. For this reason, many QoS sensitive application cannot be supported in the real world. In this paper, we are motivated to address this problem by proposing a novel multi-server based framework. In this framework, multiple servers collaborate with each other to form a virtual server (also called cloud-server), and provide high-quality services such as real-time streams delivery and storage. Based on this framework, we further introduce a (1-?) approximation algorithm to solve the NP-complete "maximum services"(MS) problem with the intention of handling large number of streaming flows originated by networks and maximizing the total number of services. Moreover, in order to backup the streaming data for later retrieval, based on the framework, an algorithm is proposed to implement backups and maximize streaming flows simultaneously. We conduct a series of experiments based on simulations to evaluate the performance of the newly proposed framework. We also compare our scheme to several traditional solutions. The results suggest that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms the traditional solutions.

An energy-aware virtual machine scheduling method for service QoS enhancement in clouds over big data

Because of the strong demands of physical resources of big data, it is an effective and efficient way to store and process big data in clouds, as cloud computing allows on-demand resource provisioning. With the increasing requirements for the resources provisioned by cloud platforms, the Quality of Service (QoS) of cloud services for big data management is becoming significantly important. Big data has the character of sparseness, which leads to frequent data accessing and processing, and thereby causes huge amount of energy consumption. Energy cost plays a key role in determining the price of a service and should be treated as a first-class citizen as other QoS metrics, because energy saving services can achieve cheaper service prices and environmentally friendly solutions. However, it is still a challenge to efficiently schedule Virtual Machines (VMs) for service QoS enhancement in an energy-aware manner. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware dynamic VM scheduling method for QoS enhancement in clouds over big data to address the above challenge. Specifically, the method consists of two main VM migration phases where computation tasks are migrated to servers with lower energy consumption or higher performance to reduce service prices and execution time. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.