Diversification for sustainable development in rural and regional Australia : how local community leaders conceptualise the impacts and opportunities from agriculture, tourism and mining

Although the multiple economic, environmental and social challenges threatening the viability of rural and regional communities in Australia are well-known, little research has explored how community leaders conceptualise the impact and opportunities associated with economic diversification from agriculture into alternative industries, such as tourism and mining. This qualitative research, utilising the Darling Downs in Queensland as a case study, documents how 28 local community leaders have experienced this economic diversification process. The findings reveal that local community leaders have a deep understanding about the opportunities and challenges presented by diversification, articulating a clear vision about how to achieve the best possible future for their region. Despite excitement about growth, there were concerns about preserving heritage, the increased pressure on local infrastructure and an ageing population. By documenting local leader’s insights, these findings may help inform planning for rural and regional communities and facilitate management of the exciting yet challenging process of growth and diversification

‘I always look under the bed for a man’. Needs and barriers to the expression of sexuality in residential aged care: the views of residents with and without dementia

Objectives: This qualitative study canvassed residents' perceptions of the needs and barriers to the expression of sexuality in long-term care. Methods: Sixteen residents, including five with dementia, from six aged care facilities in two Australian states were interviewed. Data were analysed using a constant comparative method. Results: Four categories describe residents' views about sexuality, their needs and barriers to its expression: ‘It still matters’; ‘Reminiscence and resignation’, ‘It's personal’, and ‘It's an unconducive environment’. Discussion: Residents, including those with dementia, saw themselves as sexual beings and with a continuing need and desire to express their sexuality. The manner in which it was expressed varied. Many barriers to sexual expression were noted, including negative attitudes of staff, lack of privacy and limited opportunities for the establishment of new relationships or the continuation of old ones. Interviewees agreed that how a resident expressed their sexuality was their business and no one else's.

Children's Literature Digital Resource (CLDR)

Children’s Literature Digital Resources incorporates primary texts published from white settlement to 1945, including children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, short stories, and picture books. This collection is supported by selected secondary material. The objective is to provide a centralised access point for information about Australian children's literature and writers and a growing body of full-text primary resources. Four key aims are: * To establish an important digital facility for research, teaching, and information provision around Australian children’s literature; * To provide access to a wide range of high-quality full-text data, both primary and secondary resources; * To provide access to essential library and research information infrastructure and facilities for established and emerging researchers in the fields of Humanities and Education; To enable research while preserving important heritage material. The collection contains texts digitised for AustLit through cooperation with various Australian libraries. The collection includes children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, picture books, short stories, and critical articles relating to relevant primary texts. Authors of primary sources include Irene Cheyne, E. W. Cole, Richard Rowe, Lillian M. Pyke, and Dorothy Wall. Secondary sources include critical works by Clare Bradford, Heather Scutter, Kerry White, Sharyn Pearce, and Marcie Muir. These full-text materials are keyword searchable (both within individual texts and across the CLDR corpus) and can be downloaded for research purposes. As well as digitising primary and secondary material, the project locates and provides pathways to existing online resources or internet publications to enhance AustLit's Children's Literature subset. These resources include both primary and secondary texts.

Attitudes and expectations of technologies to manage high risk wandering and elopement in persons with dementia : an Australian perspective

Wandering is aimless and repetitive locomotion that may expose persons with dementia (PWD) to elopement, getting lost and death. This study is an Australian replication of a US study. Cross-disciplinary consensus- based analysis was applied to data from five focus groups (N =47: cognitively intact LTC residents (5), carers of PWD (11), home care workers (13) allied health professionals and health-focused engineers (7) and RNs (11). Groups received briefing about wandering monitoring and elopement management systems. Consistent with US attitudes, participants in all groups agreed on what a wandering technology should do, how it should do it, and necessary technical specifications. Within each group participants raised the need for a continuum of care for PWD and the imperative for early recognition of potentially dangerous wandering and getting lost when they occur. Global Positioning System elopement management was the preferred option. Interestingly, the prospective value of GPS to recover a lost or eloped wanderer far outweighed privacy concerns, as in the US. A pervasive theme was that technologies need to augment, but cannot replace, attentive, compassionate caregiver presence. A significant theme raised only by Australian carers of PWD was the potential for development of implantable GPS technologies and the need for public debate about attendant ethical issues. Given that 60% or more of over 200,000 Australians and 4.5 million Americans with dementia will develop wandering, there is a pressing need to develop effective locator systems that may delay institutionalization, help allay carer concern and enhance PWD safety.

Gated and Guarded Community (GACOS) in Malaysia : worth or not?

A 'Gated and Guarded Community' has become a popular trend in the recent years, particularly for housing areas. The increasing in population and income has lead to the increase in housing demand. The 1991 Population Census Report showed that Malaysian population has increased with an average yearly rate of 2.7% per year, that is, from 13.74 million people in 1980 to 19.35 million in 1991, followed by 20.69 million in 1995 and increase to 23.27 in year 2000. This is followed by consistent increase in the average population monthly income. Started from 1995 to 1999, the average annual growth rate of mean monthly income in Malaysia is about 5.2 %, from RM2,020.00 in 1995 to RM2,472.00 in 1999 and increasing constantly. This shows that the human growth usually have correlation between demand, income and housing. This paper presents the factors that involved in determined the Gated and Guarded Community Investment in Malaysia either it is worth to invest or otherwise. Hopefully, the results will also indicate that there may be other factors affecting their investment decision besides security and privacy. This paper is actually to draw attention to some practitioner and collect more information in establishing my research analysis.

Standing up and finding my voice through positive digital storytelling

‘Positive Stories’ is a digital storytelling initiative that took place in Adelaide in 2010–2011.1 This article describes participants’ experiences of creative self-representation and the thorny complications of mediating voice, particularly in situations where privacy and publicity are significant issues.

Establishing initial trust in autonomous delay tolerant networks without centralised PKI

A Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) is one where nodes can be highly mobile, with long message delay times forming dynamic and fragmented networks. Traditional centralised network security is difficult to implement in such a network, therefore distributed security solutions are more desirable in DTN implementations. Establishing effective trust in distributed systems with no centralised Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) such as the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) scheme usually requires human intervention. Our aim is to build and compare different de- centralised trust systems for implementation in autonomous DTN systems. In this paper, we utilise a key distribution model based on the Web of Trust principle, and employ a simple leverage of common friends trust system to establish initial trust in autonomous DTN’s. We compare this system with two other methods of autonomously establishing initial trust by introducing a malicious node and measuring the distribution of malicious and fake keys. Our results show that the new trust system not only mitigates the distribution of fake malicious keys by 40% at the end of the simulation, but it also improved key distribution between nodes. This paper contributes a comparison of three de-centralised trust systems that can be employed in autonomous DTN systems.

Slid pairs in the initialisation of the A5/1 stream cipher

A5/1 is a shift register based stream cipher which uses a majority clocking rule to update its registers. It is designed to provide privacy for the GSM system. In this paper, we analyse the initialisation process of A5/1. We demonstrate a sliding property of the A5/1 cipher, where every valid internal state is also a legitimate loaded state and multiple key-IV pairs produce phase shifted keystream sequences. We describe a possible ciphertext only attack based on this property.

Modeling and detection of complex attacks

A complex attack is a sequence of temporally and spatially separated legal and illegal actions each of which can be detected by various IDS but as a whole they constitute a powerful attack. IDS fall short of detecting and modeling complex attacks therefore new methods are required. This paper presents a formal methodology for modeling and detection of complex attacks in three phases: (1) we extend basic attack tree (AT) approach to capture temporal dependencies between components and expiration of an attack, (2) using enhanced AT we build a tree automaton which accepts a sequence of actions from input message streams from various sources if there is a traversal of an AT from leaves to root, and (3) we show how to construct an enhanced parallel automaton that has each tree automaton as a subroutine. We use simulation to test our methods, and provide a case study of representing attacks in WLANs.

Internet and e-commerce law, business and policy

Over the last two decades, the internet and e-commerce have reshaped the way we communicate, interact and transact. In the converged environment enabled by high speed broadband, web 2.0, social media, virtual worlds, user-generated content, cloud computing, VoIP, open source software and open content have rapidly become established features of our online experience. Business and government alike are increasingly using the internet as the preferred platform for delivery of their goods and services and for effective engagement with their clients. New ways of doing things online and challenges to existing business, government and social activities have tested current laws and often demand new policies and laws, adapted to the new realities. The focus of this book is the regulation of social, cultural and commercial activity on the World Wide Web. It considers developments in the law that have been, and continue to be, brought about by the emergence of the internet and e-commerce. It analyses how the law is applied to define rights and obligations in relation to online infrastructure, content and practices.

Towards a secure human-and-computer mutual authentication protocol

We blend research from human-computer interface (HCI) design with computational based crypto- graphic provable security. We explore the notion of practice-oriented provable security (POPS), moving the focus to a higher level of abstraction (POPS+) for use in providing provable security for security ceremonies involving humans. In doing so we high- light some challenges and paradigm shifts required to achieve meaningful provable security for a protocol which includes a human. We move the focus of security ceremonies from being protocols in their context of use, to the protocols being cryptographic building blocks in a higher level protocol (the security cere- mony), which POPS can be applied to. In order to illustrate the need for our approach, we analyse both a protocol proven secure in theory, and a similar proto- col implemented by a �nancial institution, from both HCI and cryptographic perspectives.

A lightweight biometric signature scheme for user authentication over networks

We introduce a lightweight biometric solution for user authentication over networks using online handwritten signatures. The algorithm proposed is based on a modified Hausdorff distance and has favorable characteristics such as low computational cost and minimal training requirements. Furthermore, we investigate an information theoretic model for capacity and performance analysis for biometric authentication which brings additional theoretical insights to the problem. A fully functional proof-of-concept prototype that relies on commonly available off-the-shelf hardware is developed as a client-server system that supports Web services. Initial experimental results show that the algorithm performs well despite its low computational requirements and is resilient against over-the-shoulder attacks.

Enhancing security of linux-based android devices

Our daily lives become more and more dependent upon smartphones due to their increased capabilities. Smartphones are used in various ways from payment systems to assisting the lives of elderly or disabled people. Security threats for these devices become increasingly dangerous since there is still a lack of proper security tools for protection. Android emerges as an open smartphone platform which allows modification even on operating system level. Therefore, third-party developers have the opportunity to develop kernel-based low-level security tools which is not normal for smartphone platforms. Android quickly gained its popularity among smartphone developers and even beyond since it bases on Java on top of "open" Linux in comparison to former proprietary platforms which have very restrictive SDKs and corresponding APIs. Symbian OS for example, holding the greatest market share among all smartphone OSs, was closing critical APIs to common developers and introduced application certification. This was done since this OS was the main target for smartphone malwares in the past. In fact, more than 290 malwares designed for Symbian OS appeared from July 2004 to July 2008. Android, in turn, promises to be completely open source. Together with the Linux-based smartphone OS OpenMoko, open smartphone platforms may attract malware writers for creating malicious applications endangering the critical smartphone applications and owners� privacy. In this work, we present our current results in analyzing the security of Android smartphones with a focus on its Linux side. Our results are not limited to Android, they are also applicable to Linux-based smartphones such as OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner. Our contribution in this work is three-fold. First, we analyze android framework and the Linux-kernel to check security functionalities. We survey wellaccepted security mechanisms and tools which can increase device security. We provide descriptions on how to adopt these security tools on Android kernel, and provide their overhead analysis in terms of resource usage. As open smartphones are released and may increase their market share similar to Symbian, they may attract attention of malware writers. Therefore, our second contribution focuses on malware detection techniques at the kernel level. We test applicability of existing signature and intrusion detection methods in Android environment. We focus on monitoring events on the kernel; that is, identifying critical kernel, log file, file system and network activity events, and devising efficient mechanisms to monitor them in a resource limited environment. Our third contribution involves initial results of our malware detection mechanism basing on static function call analysis. We identified approximately 105 Executable and Linking Format (ELF) executables installed to the Linux side of Android. We perform a statistical analysis on the function calls used by these applications. The results of the analysis can be compared to newly installed applications for detecting significant differences. Additionally, certain function calls indicate malicious activity. Therefore, we present a simple decision tree for deciding the suspiciousness of the corresponding application. Our results present a first step towards detecting malicious applications on Android-based devices.

Collaborative intrusion detection framework : characteristics, adversarial opportunities and countermeasures

Complex Internet attacks may come from multiple sources, and target multiple networks and technologies. Nevertheless, Collaborative Intrusion Detection Systems (CIDS) emerges as a promising solution by using information from multiple sources to gain a better understanding of objective and impact of complex Internet attacks. CIDS also help to cope with classical problems of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) such as zero-day attacks, high false alarm rates and architectural challenges, e. g., centralized designs exposing the Single-Point-of-Failure. Improved complexity on the other hand gives raise to new exploitation opportunities for adversaries. The contribution of this paper is twofold. We first investigate related research on CIDS to identify the common building blocks and to understand vulnerabilities of the Collaborative Intrusion Detection Framework (CIDF). Second, we focus on the problem of anonymity preservation in a decentralized intrusion detection related message exchange scheme. We use techniques from design theory to provide multi-path peer-to-peer communication scheme where the adversary can not perform better than guessing randomly the originator of an alert message.

Using static analysis for automatic assessment and mitigation of unwanted and malicious activities within Android applications

In the last decade, smartphones have gained widespread usage. Since the advent of online application stores, hundreds of thousands of applications have become instantly available to millions of smart-phone users. Within the Android ecosystem, application security is governed by digital signatures and a list of coarse-grained permissions. However, this mechanism is not fine-grained enough to provide the user with a sufficient means of control of the applications' activities. Abuse of highly sensible private information such as phone numbers without users' notice is the result. We show that there is a high frequency of privacy leaks even among widely popular applications. Together with the fact that the majority of the users are not proficient in computer security, this presents a challenge to the engineers developing security solutions for the platform. Our contribution is twofold: first, we propose a service which is able to assess Android Market applications via static analysis and provide detailed, but readable reports to the user. Second, we describe a means to mitigate security and privacy threats by automated reverse-engineering and refactoring binary application packages according to the users' security preferences.