Online Proxy Research Articles

Starting Right, an evidence-based assessment of children in municipalities healthcare centers

Abstract During the last century, children’s health has evolved significantly, with mental health issues becoming a prominent public health concern. Childhood health problems profoundly impact quality of life (QoL), development, school functioning, and social interactions, affecting society broadly. In Norway, child and school health services offer free comprehensive care within the municipal primary health care system, prioritizing health promotion and prevention to address social health inequalities. The Norwegian Starting RightTM project recruits’ children aged 6 months to16 years and their parents, emphasizing early intervention and support to reduce health inequalities and promote well-being. In the Starting RightTM project, online proxy- and child-reported questionnaires are used to support public health nurses (PHNs) in assessing children’s health and development in routine follow- up. Parents and children receive an SMS text message asking them to answer an online questionnaire before attending their regular appointments in child or school health services. Validated instruments measure the development (ASQ, ASQ-SE), mental health (SDQ) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL), (KIDSCREEN -27). By mapping children and adolescents’ health and through discussions with PHNs, parents and children may be more involved in children’s health and development and may increase their Health Literacy. The primary objective of the proposed project is to develop child and school health services and improve children’s health and HRQoL. The ongoing project is the first to systematically assess development, health and HRQoL in children and adolescents in Norway through ordinary services, and to do so longitudinally. At present, >2000 children have been included. The large sample size combined with a broad multi- and interdisciplinary approach is unique from a national perspective. The upcoming workshop will showcase findings from this innovative study.

Changing the incentive structure of social media may reduce online proxy failure and proliferation of negativity.

Social media takes advantage of people's predisposition to attend to threatening stimuli by promoting content in algorithms that capture attention. However, this content is often not what people expressly state they would like to see. We propose that social media companies should weigh users' expressed preferences more heavily in algorithms. We propose modest changes to user interfaces that could reduce the abundance of threatening content in the online environment.

Effect of Feedback on Drug Consumption Disclosures on Social Media

Deaths due to drug overdose in the US have doubled in the last decade. Drug-related content on social media has also exploded in the same time frame. The pseudo-anonymous nature of social media platforms enables users to discourse about taboo and sometimes illegal topics like drug consumption. User-generated content (UGC) about drugs on social media can be used as an online proxy to detect offline drug consumption. UGC also gets exposed to the praise and criticism of the community. Law of effect proposes that positive reinforcement on an experience can incentivize the users to engage in the experience repeatedly. Therefore, we hypothesize that positive community feedback on a user's online drug consumption disclosure will increase the probability of the user doing an online drug consumption disclosure post again. To this end, we collect data from 10 drug-related subreddits. First, we build a deep learning model to classify UGC as indicative of drug consumption offline or not, and analyze the extent of such activities. Further, we use matching-based causal inference techniques to unravel community feedback's effect on users' future drug consumption behavior. We discover that 84% of posts and 55% comments on drug-related subreddits indicate real-life drug consumption. Users who get positive feedback generate up to two times more drugs consumption content in the future. Finally, we conducted an anonymous user study on drug-related subreddits to compare members' opinions with our experimental findings and show that user tends to underestimate the effect community peers can have on their decision to interact with drugs.

Underground emissions and miners’ personal exposure to diesel and renewable diesel exhaust in a Swedish iron ore mine

PurposeUnderground diesel exhaust exposure is an occupational health risk. It is not known how recent intensified emission legislation and use of renewable fuels have reduced or altered occupational exposures. We characterized these effects on multipollutant personal exposure to diesel exhaust and underground ambient air concentrations in an underground iron ore mine.MethodsFull-shift personal sampling (12 workers) of elemental carbon (EC), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and equivalent black carbon (eBC) was performed. The study used and validated eBC as an online proxy for occupational exposure to EC. Ambient air sampling of these pollutants and particle number size distribution and concentration were performed in the vicinity of the workers. Urine samples (27 workers) were collected after 8 h exposure and analyzed for PAH metabolites and effect biomarkers (8-oxodG for DNA oxidative damage, 4-HNE-MA for lipid peroxidation, 3-HPMA for acrolein).ResultsThe personal exposures (geometric mean; GM) of the participating miners were 7 µg EC m−3 and 153 µg NO2 m−3, which are below the EU occupational exposure limits. However, exposures up to 94 µg EC m−3 and 1200 µg NO2 m−3 were observed. There was a tendency that the operators of vehicles complying with sharpened emission legislation had lower exposure of EC. eBC and NO2 correlated with EC, R = 0.94 and R = 0.66, respectively. No correlation was found between EC and the sum of 16 priority PAHs (GM 1790 ng m−3). Ratios between personal exposures and ambient concentrations were similar and close to 1 for EC and NO2, but significantly higher for PAHs. Semi-volatile PAHs may not be effectively reduced by the aftertreatment systems, and ambient area sampling did not predict the personal airborne PAHs exposure well, neither did the slightly elevated concentration of urinary PAH metabolites correlate with airborne PAH exposure.ConclusionMiners’ exposures to EC and NO2 were lower than those in older studies indicating the effect of sharpened emission legislation and new technologies. Using modern vehicles with diesel particulate filter (DPF) may have contributed to the lower ambient underground PM concentration and exposures. The semi-volatile behavior of the PAHs might have led to inefficient removal in the engines aftertreatment systems and delayed removal by the workplace ventilation system due to partitioning to indoor surfaces. The results indicate that secondary emissions can be an important source of gaseous PAH exposure in the mine.

Construction of Certificateless Proxy Signcryption Scheme From CMGs

As a cryptography primitive for secure data transmission, certificateless proxy signcryption (CLPS) allows an original signcrypter to entrust his signing authority to a proxy signcrypter for signing specified message on his behalf. In this paper, we combine CLPS with cyclic multiplication groups (CMGs) to construct a new certificateless proxy signcryption scheme from CMGs (CMGs-CLPSS). CMGs-CLPSS will receive significant attention because it simplifies the traditional public key cryptosystem (PKC) and solves the key escrow issue suffered by identity-based public key cryptosystem (IB-PKC). In CMGs-CLPSS, an encrypted message can only be decrypted by a designated receiver who is also responsible for verifying the message; moreover, if a later dispute over repudiation occurs, the designated receiver can readily announce ordinary CLPS for public verification without any extra computation effort. CMGs-CLPSS is proved to have the indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2 security) and existential unforgeability under adaptive chosen-message attacks (UF-CMA security) in the random oracle model. CMGs-CLPSS outperforms the existing schemes on the basis of computational complexity and is suitable for applications in digital contract signing and online proxy auction, and so on.

Cryptanalysis and improvement of certificateless proxy signcryption scheme for e-prescription system in mobile cloud computing

Certificateless proxy signcryption (CLPSc) is one of the most efficient security primitives for secure data transmission. The entrustment of signing rights to a proxy signcrypter at the behest of an original signcrypter imparts its utility in various fields such as an online proxy auction, healthcare industry, cloud computing, mobile-agents, ubiquitous computing, etc. Unlike the traditional sign-then-encrypt approach, signcryption primitive saves computational costs and bandwidth load. Recently, a pairing-free CLPSc scheme has been proposed which claims to be secure against forgery under adaptive chosen-message attacks. This paper unveils that the aforementioned scheme has failed to provide unforgeability. As an improvement of their scheme, a novel pairing-free certificateless proxy signcryption scheme using elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been proposed for e-prescription system in mobile cloud computing. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure against indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack and existential forgery under adaptive chosen-message attack in the random oracle model against Type 1 and Type 2 adversaries through formal analysis. The proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of computational efficiency making it suitable for futuristic mobile cloud computing applications.

Internet Search Behavior, Liquidity and Prices in the Housing Market

AbstractWe employ detailed internet search data to examine price and liquidity dynamics of the Dutch housing market. We show that the number of clicks on properties listed online proxies demand and the number of listed properties proxies supply. From this internet search behavior, we create a market tightness indicator and we find that this indicator Granger causes changes in both house prices and housing market liquidity. The results of a panel VAR suggest that a demand shock results in a temporary increase in liquidity and a permanent increase in prices in urban areas. This is in accordance with search and matching models.

Timing disownership experiences in the rubber hand illusion

Some investigators of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) have suggested that when standard RHI induction procedures are employed, if the rubber hand is experienced by participants as owned, their corresponding biological hands are experienced as disowned. Others have demurred: drawing upon a variety of experimental data and conceptual considerations, they infer that experience of the RHI might include the experience of a supernumerary limb, but that experienced disownership of biological hands does not occur. Indeed, some investigators even categorically deny that any experimental paradigm has been employed or any evidence can be adduced to support the claim that disownership experiences occur during the RHI. It goes without saying that RHI experiences can be elusive, and that there is some evidence to support claims that supernumerary limb experiences can sometimes occur. Here, however, we test the claim that the conscious experience of disownership can occur during the RHI. In order to test this claim, we developed two new online proxies—onset time for the illusion and illusion duration—and combined these with established questionnaires that concern the conscious contents of the RHI, in particular ownership/disownership experiences. Both online proxy data and post hoc questionnaire data converge in supporting the claim that disownership experiences do occur, at least when the left hand is the object of investigation. Our findings that onset time and illusion duration are reliable measures suggest that investigations of the RHI stand to benefit by devoting more attention to data collected while the RHI is being experienced, in particular data concerning temporal dynamics.

Design of Pairing-Based Proxy Signcryption System Model for Online Proxy Auctions

In recent years, the online auction of consumers’ goods is an increasingly popular selling channel. To copy with this tendency, the bidders’ convenience and security have to be considered. Some online auctions (such as eBay or Amazon) introduced a proxy bidding strategy that the bidder can decide a maximum bid and delegate his authority to a legal agent to automatically outbid other competitors for the last winner. In this paper, we identify some practical issues in the current bidding strategies and propose a system model of a pairing-based proxy signcryption which includes two cryptographic schemes; further, we apply the proposed schemes to the online proxy auction system for comparing two authorized online proxy auction policies (agents anonymity setting and agents accountability setting) with different applications of short message and long message. Also, we discuss some critical security issues under the online proxy auctions. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.43.4.6348

Could Behavioral Medicine Lead the Web Data Revolution?

Could Behavioral Medicine Lead the Web Data Revolution?

The insecurity of two proxy signcryption schemes: proxy credential forgery attack and how to prevent it

Securing different online e-business activities usually requires applying different cryptographic algorithms. The proxy signcryption algorithms are designed for applications such as online proxy auction or online proxy signatures on business contracts, which require a proxy agent to sign on confidential messages. This paper proposes a proxy credential forgery attack to two recent proxy signcryption schemes in the literature. Using the attack, a malicious proxy signer can create a fake proxy credential from his original credential to extend his signing power. Simple modifications to these two schemes are also provided in this paper to prevent the attack without adding too much computational complexity. In addition to the contribution of introducing a new type of attacks to signcryption schemes, the paper also points out that, while designing a secure proxy signcryption scheme, not only the unforgeability of proxy signatures is important, but also that of proxy credentials as well.

Detecting Anonymising Proxy Usage on the Internet

Anonymising proxies are a growing problem for organisations as more people become aware of their capabilities. These proxy sites enable users to bypass the network’s filtering system leaving the network open to banned content and harmful threats. Network administrators do try to block these online proxy sites, but with a growing number of new sites created, this task is not a trivial one. Many existing solutions rely almost entirely on Access Control Lists, which blacklist undesirable websites; the end result being that many users learn that anonymous proxies allow them to easily bypass this filtering. While Access Control Lists serve a purpose, there are lots of difficulties especially in detecting if users are circumventing the policies and Access Control Lists. One possible solution is to focus on detecting access to anonymous proxies. This paper outlines procedures required to discover anonymous proxies on the Internet.

Avatar Ethics: Beyond Images and Signs

Emmanuel Levinas argues that moral responsibility is enacted in the encounter between two people. Increasingly, however, encounters take place online and, rather than between two people, are mediated by virtual representatives known as avatars. In this paper, I explore the theoretical conditions for grounding encounters between users mediated by these online proxies, and the extent that they can be convincingly cast as moral. First, I draw on aesthetic theory in order to argue that online environments in which such interactions occur can gesture towards the moral responsibilities experienced in the offline world. Second, I explore ways of grounding the encounter in these online environments through theories of signification, ultimately utilising Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the tensor read alongside the Levinasian ethical demand. Altogether, this paper attempts to provide an articulation of the very possibility of responsibility enacted and mediated through avatars and, as such, focuses upon the basic conditions of moral life online in order to provide a theoretical grounding.

Efficient proxy signcryption scheme with provable CCA and CMA security

For facilitating the confidential transaction with delegation such as on-line proxy auction and business contract signing by an authorized proxy, we propose an efficient proxy signcryption scheme from pairings. Our scheme allows an original signer to delegate his signing power to a proxy one such that the latter can signcrypt a plaintext on behalf of the former. The signcrypted message can only be decrypted by a designated recipient who is also responsible for verifying the recovered proxy signature. To deal with a later dispute over repudiation, the designated recipient can easily announce the ordinary proxy signature for public verification without extra computational efforts. To guarantee the realistic applicability, we demonstrate that our scheme outperforms previous works in terms of functionalities and computational efficiency. Moreover, the security requirement of confidentiality against indistinguishability under adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2) and that of unforgeability against existential forgery under adaptive chosen-message attacks (EF-CMA) are proved in random oracle models.