Issues Of Anonymity Research Articles

Auctor incertus: Issues of authorship and anonymity around Missa Inviolata (ca. 1520s)

A six-part polyphonic setting of the ordinary of the Mass survives as a unicum in manuscript 1967 of the Biblioteca Central de Barcelona, Spain. Although it is clearly the most significant piece in the manuscript, it has received considerably less attention from specialized ensembles than the rest of the repertoire contained therein. This may be due to several factors, chief among them being that the manuscript provides no indication of the composer’s identity. Such anonymity is quite common when dealing with early repertoires. This research aims to address this situation critically and offer several practical, performer-oriented strategies to overcome it.

익명표현의 자유에 대한 비판적 고찰

With the introduction of the Internet real-name system and the Constitutional Court ruling in the early 2010s, multiple research has been executed on the Constitutional Court’s ruling. And as a result, research on freedom of expression and freedom of anonymous expression was intensively conducted until the mid-2010s. Since then, however, almost no research has been conducted on freedom of anonymous expression. Considering the development and changes in online media and Social Networking Services since 2010, the issue needs to be revisited. The content and scope of freedom of expression in ancient Greece and even in the 17th century were very different from today. Even John Milton, the author of Areopagitica, thought that the freedom of the Catholics did not need to be guaranteed. Even after Areopagitica, freedom of expression was emphasized as a very important element during the French Revolution in the process of America’s separation from Britain. The issue of anonymity in freedom of expression has been a continuous issue since the 14th century. Regarding freedom of anonymous expression, the Constitutional Court ruled that the Internet real-name system was unconstitutional in 2012, and about the real-name Internet bulletin board system during the election campaign, it ruled that it was constitutional in 2010 and 2015, but changed its position and ruled it unconstitutional in 2021. However, the Constitutional Court ruled that the identity verification system on public institution bulletin boards was constitutional in 2022, making it clear that freedom of anonymous expression cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. When considering the fact that public bulletin boards are a channel through which the general public can convey their opinions in the realm of ‘nation vs. individual,’ such a decision does not seem to be desirable. Today's media environment is very different from the past. The biggest change is that, unlike in the past, individuals produce more information than any other information-producers. However, in the process, anonymity serves as one of the main causes of fake news and hate speech. Considering all the circumstances, the anonymity in freedom of expression should be guaranteed to the maximum extent possible in the ‘individual-to-state’ dimension, but it would be desirable to guarantee it to a relatively weak level in the ‘individual-to-individual’ domain.

Digital Diplomacy in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges

Globally, digital diplomacy is taking over as the dominating format. As long as Africa is a part of the globalization era, it must adapt to new technologies. However, there are several obstacles that African digital diplomacy must overcome, such as a lack of infrastructure, a lack of proficiency with new technologies, limiting regulations, the anonymity issue and others. So, with the proliferation of digital technologies, Africa is facing growing cyber security threats. These include hacker attacks, online fraud and disinformation campaigns. Weak cyber security measures and limited capacity to address these challenges make African countries vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Africa should follow the present realities and dynamics in digital diplomacy as the world constantly changes and transitions. In fact, in the diplomatic sphere of Africa, digital diplomacy is being practiced without the concept and practice promoted. However, Africa has many opportunities to embrace digital diplomatic initiatives. The primary ones include; the penetration of the internet, the rise in the public interest, the engagement of the African diaspora, the African Union’s digital strategy, the desire to create an intelligent society, and the revolution of smartphones. Africa also offers much potential for improving the natural and human resources used in digital platform infrastructure. Thus, Africa should assist in developing the information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and encouraging training for these electronic platforms. Therefore, the paper aims to analyze the opportunities, challenges, and potentials of digital diplomacy in the African context. To do so, a qualitative research approach was used collected from secondary sources and document analysis. Finally, the collected data is thematically analyzed.

InTEIrviews: An ODD for Qualitative Interviews in the Humanities

Qualitative interviews are a crucial research method for many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Yet apart from rare initiatives, interview transcriptions are seldom shared with other researchers. Even when they are, annotations are mostly absent, and rarely standardized or designed to be read by anyone but the initial research team. In this paper, we advocate for a more open management of these resources, and present a proposition for an XML-TEI–conformant standard that allows for their accurate transcription and annotation. The ODD we present is aimed at facilitating systematic analyses of corpora of interview transcriptions, as well as ensuring wider dissemination and reusability of these resources. Relying entirely on existing TEI elements to create this ODD, we combine primarily the elements and attributes declared by the modules “Transcription of Speech” and “Language Corpora.” This ODD is designed to help describe the actual development of the interview, transcribe the interpretations made by the researcher(s), and tackle ethical or anonymity issues.

Painful Call About the Under-Reporting of Children's Pain During Humanitarian Crises.

Humanitarian crises often require urgent medical care to people of concern. Such medical aid includes assessing and treating acute medical needs and ongoing chronic health conditions. Among the people of concern there are children, who are often the most vulnerable population in humanitarian contexts because they often lack the experience, independence, and cognitive and verbal skills to deal with the ordeals they are facing. These limitations might prevent identification and diagnosis of pain. The under-diagnosis and under-treated pain by health care providers might be also due to the perceived urgency of more acute or life-threatening medical needs with limited medical equipment and personnel, lack of awareness, or assessment tools in such contexts. Additionally, due to issues of anonymity and lack of formal guidelines, there is a severe lack of standardized registration of children's pain conditions in humanitarian crises. Finally, acute pain is also a predictor of post-traumatic stress disorder, a common outcome in such disasters. We call on health care providers to use standardized scales to assess children's pain intensity, frequency, and duration, and to treat it appropriately. These will not only reduce children's physical suffering but may also prevent subsequent risk of PTSD.

Exploring Digital Communication Needs of Local Communities and Self-organized Collectives

Recent work in HCI has explored the use of ICTs for the mobilisation and organisation of values-led communities and social movements. This paper extends this line of work by exploring the design of a communication system for informal, place-based citizen collectives-also referred to as Social Solidarity Movements. The distinctive characteristics of such collectives, namely their decentralised, bottom-up and self-organised organisation, and their lack of monetary resources, pose interesting challenges for communication technology design. The work reported in this paper sought to explore how the values and practices of such collectives can be embodied in mobile communication tools. A system was designed to mirror on-the-ground informal organisational structures, its primary goal being to serve as a probe for research and discussion. Our findings highlight the diversity of channels and organisational structures prevailing in these contexts, their participatory nature, and issues of temporality, anonymity, privacy, and trust, all of which must be considered when designing technologies to support cooperative work. We contribute methodological insights and design implications for mobile technologies underpinning the work of social collectives and their practices.

Towards Fully Anonymous Integrity Checking and Reliability Authentication for Cloud Data Sharing

Cloud storage services improve the efficiency and popularity of data sharing. These services allow groups of participants to jointly maintain the shared data. As important security properties of cloud data sharing, the integrity and the reliability of the shared data have been studied recently. However, the existing research cannot sufficiently solve the issue of participant identity anonymity in the scenario of data modification. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to achieve fully anonymous integrity checking and reliability authentication for cloud data sharing. We design a predicate for the shared data, and construct the Lagrange interpolation polynomials for all participants to compute the secret keys based on the designed predicate. When modifying the shared data, the participants compute the authenticators of the modified data using the secret key associated with the designed predicate instead of their identities. In this way, the integrity checking and reliability authentication of the shared data modified by different participants can be performed while the identities of the corresponding participants remain fully anonymous. In addition, the traceability and revocation of participant identity are considered. The performance analysis demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach, and the security analysis shows that the proposed approach satisfies the desired properties.

Blockchain, metaverses and NFT in civil procedure and arbitration in Russia, China and USA

The research is devoted to the study of new technologies - blockchain, metaverse and NFT - in civil procedure and arbitration in Russia, China and USA. The author analyzes the basic concepts and characteristics of the above technologies and gives examples of their use in judicial practice. Recent US judicial precedents (2021 and 2022), which consolidate the possibility of using blockchain and NFT technologies in court proceedings are looked at. The research aims at shaping the idea of possible application of blockchain, metaverse and NFT technologies in civil proceedings; it is based on the analysis of regulations, judicial practice of Russia, foreign countries, and scientific sources. The employed methodology is empirical methods of comparison, description, and interpretation, theoretical methods of formal and dialectical logic. Private scientific methods include legal-dogmatic method and interpretation of legal norms. The outcome of the research shows that blockchain and NFT technologies have become an effective tool used by the courts of USA and China in the analysis of electronic evidence and some other procedural actions including notification of an unknown defendant through a non-interchangeable token (NFT). The research came to the following conclusions. Blockchain transactions are often called anonymous or at least pseudonymous, but this is not the case. The issue of blockchain anonymity has been raised in several cases heard by US courts. The blockchain analysis of tools industry has allowed the court and the parties to the dispute to analyze transactions on the blockchain and in many cases trace them to an identifiable user, even if such users have taken steps to conceal their identity. It is essential to refer to the US courts experience allowing private companies to conduct Technology Assisted Review (TAR).

A modified lightweight authenticated key agreement protocol for Internet of Drones

Drones can be embedded in the system Internet of Drones can make a military observation of a region, a transport system embedded with sensors. Drones played a highly important role in different fields and brought great convenience to production and lifestyle. But we know all the data collected by sensors embedded in drones suffer from security challenges and privacy issues. There are a lot of authenticated key agreement protocols for the security of transmitted data through drones. We have analyzed a recent protocol, “A lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme for Internet of Drones” by Zhang et al. in the year 2020. We have found that this protocol is not secure against stolen smart card attacks, and the control server stores extra data. We have tried to address security issues of password guessing, anonymity, user/server impersonation, insider attack, and stolen smart card attacks, and man in the middle attack. We have proposed a modified lightweight authenticated key agreement protocol for Internet of Drones. We have proved its security in the random oracle model. We have done a performance analysis of the proposed protocol with relevant protocols that ensures its efficiency and security as well.

How Silence Became “Outdated”: Secrecy, Anonymity and Artificial Insemination by Donor in Belgium, 1950s-1990s

This article for the first time places the issues of secrecy and anonymity in donor conception in historical perspective. It relates the gradual move away from secrecy to the growing importance attached to honesty and transparency in the 1970s, during the ‘sexual revolution’. Debates surrounding secrecy received new impetus in the 1980s, when single and lesbian mothers gained access to AID, who told their children the truth because there were no men in their life to assume the paternal role. Yet the issue of anonymity only became questioned under the influence of child development studies relating to adoption and identity.

A blockchain-enabled trust aware energy trading framework using games theory and multi-agent system in smat grid

Recently, multi-agent systems (MASs) have received attention due to the consideration of distributed optimization and control in blockchain (BC) based energy trading applications. However, due to the dynamic behavior of uncertain and random variables, the coordination and control of MAS are still challenging to attain resilience and dynamicity. Traditional trust systems, which rely on access control and cryptography, cannot deal with dynamic behavior of agents. Furthermore, they are inefficient in addressing the computational overhead of cryptographic primitives. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a BC-based trusted suite (TS) for MAS to handle privacy and anonymity issues during energy trading in a smart grid (SG). In this work, three objectives are simultaneously achieved: trust, cooperation, and confidentiality. Firstly, the proposed trust system is employed to perform trust credibility of agents based on trust deformation, coherence, and stability. The credibility evaluation is used to determine the dynamic behavior of agents and to detect dishonest agents in the system. Secondly, a tri-tit-for-tat (TTFT) repeated game approach is used to improve the cooperation among agents. The proposed strategy is more forgiving than the existing Di-TFT (DTFT) and TFT techniques. It motivates scammers and deceptive agents to regain their trust by cooperating in three consecutive rounds of a game. Furthermore a proof-of-cooperation (PoC) consensus mechanism is introduced to facilitate agent cooperation in block creation and validation. Thirdly, the publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) technique is introduced to preserve the privacy of the agents. Unlike VSS, PVSS provides the immunity against different types of security threats. Where, the dealer agent maintained the trust, while the verification of the dealer and combiner is maintained within agent-to-agent cooperation. Simulation results show that the devised BTS model is superior to the existing benchmark model such as fuzzy logic trust (FLT) in terms of detecting the cheating and deceptive behavior of agents in the system. Besides, the devised TTFT allows cheating agents to effectively regain the trust if they cooperate thrice in a row as compared to the existing DTFT and TFT strategies. Furthermore, This study analyzes two trust-related attacks: bad-mouthing and on-off. Analysis shows that the proposed system is protected from trust related attacks.

Singapore needs to update regulation of frozen egg donation after permitting social egg freezing.

With social egg freezing being permitted in Singapore, there is expected to be an accumulated surplus of unused frozen eggs (vitrified oocytes) available for donation in coming years. A comprehensive update of current healthcare regulations pertaining to frozen egg donation is needed to resolve various pertinent ethical issues. In particular, the issue of egg donor anonymity should be addressed, together with the lack of sharing of medical and family information about the donor to prospective recipient patients and donor-conceived offspring. Rigorous and comprehensive genetic testing of prospective egg donors must be mandated to protect the welfare of recipient patients. Older women above 35years of age should be required to have at least one child, before being allowed to donate their unused frozen eggs, to prevent any future regret and psychological problems of remaining childless, while being unsure of whether they have an unknown genetic offspring out there. New regulations drafted to address these ethical issues must also prevent potential conflicts of interests. For example, fertility doctors soliciting and encouraging former patients to donate their unused frozen eggs face an obvious conflict of interest, because additional medical fees will be earned by performing the egg donation procedure on other patients. A centralized donor registry should be established by the Singapore government to oversee the distribution and allocation of donated unused frozen eggs to infertile IVF patients. Such a registry could also facilitate sharing of vital health information about the donor to recipient patients and donor-conceived offspring.

Gender in the Field of Education: The Impact of Gender Bias on the General Perception of Academic Integrity

This study aims to determine the impact of gender bias on the general perception of academic integrity in high school students. This study employed the experimental vignette methodology (EVM) to construct a two-versioned online survey that eliminates the issue of anonymity and to capture participants’ implicit mental processes and judgments for a sensitive topic regarding violation of academic integrity. This conjoint analysis study includes two fictional scenarios with the exact context except for the gender of the protagonist of the story, which is expressed through the name and pronouns used. The results suggest that the respondents have a slight tendency towards a lesser female involvement in violations of academic integrity and rationalization of their behaviors.

Second Life Lessons [Virtual Worlds

This article discusses online virtual worlds and gaming platforms such as Second Life, metaverse platforms and Facebook. Topics include avatars, security, safety and anonymity issues, gaming abilities, VR headsets, game backgrounds, game graphic rendering, and user generated content.

Blockchain-Based Online Voting System

Digital voting is the use of electronic device, such as voting machines or an internet browser to cast vote. It has disadvantages like security of data and potential attacks such as DoS and DDoS attack. One way to solve these security credentials problems is through the blockchain technology. Blockchain technology embraces a decentralized system and the entire database is owned by many users that overcome the disadvantage of centralized system. The existing system has many security, confidentiality, and anonymity issues. These issues can be resolved by using blockchain technology. Here in the proposed system Ethereum blockchain is used, which enables smart contracts. Smart contracts can be written with solidity, which is object oriented programming language. The outcome of the project is it provides privacy by keeping individual’s vote secret by providing a unique transaction id to each voter. Eligibility is made once to vote and the transaction will be highly secure and encrypted.

Implementation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in e-Mental Health Apps: Literature Review.

BackgroundTo address the matter of limited resources for treating individuals with mental disorders, e–mental health has gained interest in recent years. More specifically, mobile health (mHealth) apps have been suggested as electronic mental health interventions accompanied by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).ObjectiveThis study aims to identify the therapeutic aspects of CBT that have been implemented in existing mHealth apps and the technologies used. From these, we aim to derive research gaps that should be addressed in the future.MethodsThree databases were screened for studies on mHealth apps in the context of mental disorders that implement techniques of CBT: PubMed, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library. The studies were independently selected by 2 reviewers, who then extracted data from the included studies. Data on CBT techniques and their technical implementation in mHealth apps were synthesized narratively.ResultsOf the 530 retrieved citations, 34 (6.4%) studies were included in this review. mHealth apps for CBT exploit two groups of technologies: technologies that implement CBT techniques for cognitive restructuring, behavioral activation, and problem solving (exposure is not yet realized in mHealth apps) and technologies that aim to increase user experience, adherence, and engagement. The synergy of these technologies enables patients to self-manage and self-monitor their mental state and access relevant information on their mental illness, which helps them cope with mental health problems and allows self-treatment.ConclusionsThere are CBT techniques that can be implemented in mHealth apps. Additional research is needed on the efficacy of the mHealth interventions and their side effects, including inequalities because of the digital divide, addictive internet behavior, lack of trust in mHealth, anonymity issues, risks and biases for user groups and social contexts, and ethical implications. Further research is also required to integrate and test psychological theories to improve the impact of mHealth and adherence to the e–mental health interventions.

Gamete donation-A review of ethical and legal issues.

Sperm and oocytes are building blocks in assisted reproduction. Sperm and ovum donation permit separation of the biological act of producing a child from the psychological process of nurturing and raising the child. However, the art of obtaining and use of these gametes are fraught with ethical and legal challenges. Relevant aspects concerning anonymity, genetic screening, consanguinity, informed consent and risk disclosure, compensation for donors, and child welfare are discussed. Though the issue of anonymity remains controversial, the importance of the welfare of the offspring has come to the fore as a result of the debate. Calls for more rigorous genetic testing for donated gametes to avoid genetic disease transmission, though supported by the principle of beneficence, has to be balanced by its possible deleterious effects on the donors and their relatives especially if findings reveal a serious genetic risk that has no medical treatment as yet. Reimbursement for direct and indirect costs, as well as fair compensation for time lost, inconveniences and risks suffered during treatment is recommended for oocyte donors. The risk of consanguinity remains a problem across the world even though the different guidelines limiting the number of pregnancies by a single gamete may be helpful, if enforceable. It is important that egg donors be clearly made to understand in simple language during the informed consent process of the yet unknown health risks involved so that the consent can be truly voluntary. This will protect donors from the backlash of the doctrine of "Volenti Non Fit Injuria". It is also suggested that specific legislation with regards to gamete donation, parenthood, and ART should be passed in countries where these are absent, to avoid controversies that may arise due to current gaps in the law.

A Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies Investigating Motives and Experiences of Recipients of Anonymous Gamete Donation.

The decision to use an anonymous gamete donation in fertility treatment could have significant long-term psychological and social effects for all stakeholders involved. In light of the growing recognition of donor-conceived children’s right to know their genetic parentage, this entails profound ethical implications. This review aims to carve out the full spectrum of recipients’ motives and experiences related to donor anonymity which could serve as an analytical framework for future ethical and sociological research on issues of donor anonymity. This review was conducted following a seven-step approach for systematic reviews of empirical bioethics literature. The characteristics and quality of the studies included in this review were reported. Data analysis was conducted using qualitative content analysis and was informed by sociological functionalist theorizations of ignorance. The 53 studies selected showed a diverse spectrum of characteristics concerning date and country of study, methodology, family type of participants, sample size, and the timing of data collection in relation to the stage of treatment. A total of 22 categories of motives and experiences of recipients concerning donor anonymity were identified inductively and grouped into five main categories. Donor anonymity was identified as a eufunctional form of ignorance, by which the recipients experienced or intended to control, regulate, or protect inter-stakeholder relations. Interpreting recipients’ motives and experiences concerning donor anonymity as a form of ignorance directed toward particular stakeholders helps reframe the discourse on donor anonymity. It is a fruitful approach that can be refined further and applied in future research. This review identified possible directions for future investigations on motives for donor anonymity: the need for more thorough inquiries into the change in recipients’ preferences over time, such as in the form of longitudinal studies and research on the perspective of non-biological parents.

MSCCS: A Monero-based security-enhanced covert communication system

Existing public blockchain-based covert communication systems are suffering the issues of insufficient robustness, anti-temper modification, and anonymity at both the transaction and network layers. In this paper, to overcome this problem, we propose a novel Monero-based security-enhanced covert communication system, in which a new storage-type covert channel is developed. This channel makes Monero transaction amount as data carrier for covert communication. Then, we devise two new algorithms, respectively for resisting Eclipse attacks and the two existing node crawling attacks. Extensive simulation experiments show that the developed new covert communication channel can achieve higher robustness, anti-detection, and anonymity. The new security-enhanced algorithms can effectively mitigate Eclipse attacks by 37.6%, and the two existing node crawling attacks by 21.1% and 17.1% respectively.

Теоретико-правовые аспекты права на анонимность в сети Интернет

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Internet as a global digital informationenvironment,which is used by almost all mankind. The problem of the need for identification/anonymityinthenetworkisdebatable. The author of the article is looking for answers to related questions: howis anonymityusedonline?Howanonymous is an Internet user and how can he achieve anonymity? What are the pros and cons of anonymityonthe web? How effective is the legal regulation of anonymity specifically by regulatory legal acts?Shouldtheinternational community establish a general directive on how anonymity issues should be regulatedinMemberStates? The problem of boxing on the Internet is also touched upon. The methodological basis of theworkwasthemethods of complex analysis of legal phenomena of procedures and processes, general scientificandprivatescientific methods of cognition.