Third-party Service Providers Research Articles

Legal Aspects of Intellectual Property Protection in Web Development: Analysis of Contractual Obligations and Parties' Liability

This study examines the intricate legal landscape surrounding intellectual property (IP) protection in web development, focusing on contractual obligations and liability issues among involved parties. The research explores the various forms of IP relevant to web development, including copyrights, trademarks, and patents, while analyzing common contractual provisions used to safeguard IP rights, such as ownership clauses, confidentiality agreements, and licensing terms. Additionally, the study investigates the allocation of liability between developers, clients, and third-party service providers in cases of IP infringement. Through an examination of case studies and legal precedents, this research aims to provide insights into best practices for IP protection in web development projects and highlight potential legal pitfalls. The findings emphasize the importance of clear contractual language, due diligence in IP clearance, and proactive risk management strategies to mitigate liability concerns in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

An optimized dynamic attribute-based searchable encryption scheme.

Cloud computing liberates enterprises and organizations from expensive data centers and complex IT infrastructures by offering the on-demand availability of vast storage and computing power over the internet. Among the many service models in practice, the public cloud for its operation cost saving, flexibility, and better customer support popularity in individuals and organizations. Nonetheless, this shift in the trusted domain from the concerned users to the third-party service providers pops up many privacy and security concerns. These concerns hindrance the wide adaptation for many of its potential applications. Furthermore, classical encryption techniques render the encrypted data useless for many of its valuable operations. The combined concept of attribute-based encryption (ABE) and searchable encryption (SE), commonly known as attribute-based keyword searching (ABKS), emerges as a promising technology for these concerns. However, most of the contemporary ABE-based keyword searching schemes incorporate costly pairing and computationally heavy secret sharing mechanisms for its realization. Our proposed scheme avoids the expensive bilinear pairing operation during the searching operation and costly Lagrange interpolation for secret reconstruction. Besides, our proposed scheme enables the updation of access control policy without entirely re-encrypting the ciphertext. The security of our scheme in the selective-set model is proved under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellmen (DBDH) assumption and collision-free. Finally, the experimental results and performance evaluation demonstrate its communication and overall efficiency.

Secured Sharing of Personal Health Records in Cloud with Optimised Signcryption: Improved Shark Smell Optimisation for Key Generation

Recently, personal health records (PHR) have been found to come into view as a patient- centric approach for exchanging health data. With the use of a PHR service, a physician may create, access and maintain all of their personal health information online in one convenient location. Additionally, it has greatly improved the efficient exchange, retrieval and storage of patient data. Each patient is also promised total ownership over their medical records and the option to share their data with a wider range of clients together with friends, family members or healthcare providers. Owing to the higher price of maintaining and building specific data centres, numerous PHR services were contracted out to third-party service providers. Therefore, this work is concerned with carrying out the secured sharing of PHR by inducing the signcryption model with an optimisation concept. In the signcryption model, the digital signature encryption is done using an improved AES approach. Further, the key generation is carried out using a self-customised shark smell algorithm (SC-SSA) algorithm. Finally, the evaluation is done to verify the improvement of the system that was used.

Navigating the data economy : Key considerations for decision makers in banking

The European Commission (EC) is advancing the data economy through a series of regulatory reforms aimed at giving customers control of their data and fostering innovation in third-party contexts. While the costs of developing existing banking infrastructures and creating open application programming interfaces have largely fallen on banks, third-party service providers have benefitted from new revenue streams and increased customer relevance. As a result, banks risk disintermediation with some customer segments. The impending Financial Data Access (FiDA) regulation is set to expand these dynamics by extending the range of financial data made accessible for third parties. Simultaneously, the entry into force of the Electronic Identification Authentication and Trust Services 2.0 (eIDAS2) introduces a digital wallet that allows consumers and businesses to share their identity credentials in online customer journeys, offering banks the potential to engage more effectively in the data economy. The key question is whether the new reforms will encourage banks to seek opportunities beyond compliance; more so than with the Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and open banking. This paper analyses the opportunities arising from FiDA, eIDAS2 and the Data Acts, providing strategic considerations for banks navigating the data economy. It emphasises that banks are ideally positioned to become data custodians by offering customers tools for the secure and reliable exchange of data-driven digital transactions across all sectors. Ultimately, this approach will unlock new value and enhance the relevance of banks in the data economy.

Criteria for selecting third-party logistics service providers: Systematic Literature Review

Third-party logistics (3PL) is a strategic business partner for companies in carrying out company business activities that are outsourced or cannot be handled themselves. Mistakes in choosing a 3PL can have negative impacts on the company such as financial losses, reducing service quality, reducing customer trust, reducing the company's image, and so on. This article aims to classify third-party logistics based on current issue trends, the methods used in selecting criteria, and what criteria they produce. Using Systematic Literature Review, researchers reviewed, classified, and analyzed 56 relevant articles published in the 2020-2023 period from the Scopus database. The results of this review reveal that 3PL providers can be classified based on issue trends and company goals in selecting them, namely Traditional 3PL, Sustainable 3PL, Sustainable-resilient 3PL, Green 3PL, Gresilient 3PL, Traditional Third-Party Reverse Logistics, and Sustainable Third-Party Reverse Logistics. The priority criteria in selecting a 3PL provider are closely related to the 3PL classification, the industrial sector and business activity being outsourced, the country where the company operates, and the dimensions or attributes used in developing the criteria.

Out-Sourcing and Organizational Performance of Seroma Limited in Uganda

This study examines the outsourcing and organizational performance of Seroma LTD in Uganda. A sample of 66 respondents both female and male employees out of the target population of 70 of the company were used for the study. The study employed case study research. The study findings showed that the company does carry ·out outsourcing of services from third-party service providers as shown by the greater majority of respondents. The findings also showed that when it came to outsourcing management, the company was effective and thusconcluded that factors that were considered by the company before outsourcing were cost restructuring, quality appraisal, and current employee skills. Appraisal process and legal issues, stalling issues, and risk management. The study recommended that the company should carry out an appraisal of the outsourcing model that it is using which should also take into consideration the relationship the company has with the respective service providers. More so, the company should carry out a strict and vigorous appraisal process when selecting a potential outsourcing partner. This should be done in line with establishing reliability, post-transaction, service guarantees, and warranties as well as legal cover. Finally, the company should restructure its outsourcing strategy to take into account the need for productivity in Seroma since productivity is pivotal to organizational performance. Keywords: Organizational performance, Outsourced services, Outsourcing, Productivity, Strategic management

The undeclared use of third-party service providers in academic publishing is unethical: an epistemic reflection and scoping review.

There is a substantial body of scientific literature on the use of third-party services (TPS) by academics to assist as "publication consultants" in scholarly publishing. TPS provide a wide range of scholarly services to research teams that lack the equipment, skills, motivation, or time to produce a paper without external assistance. While services such as language editing, statistical support, or graphic design are common and often legitimate, some TPS also provide illegitimate services and send unsolicited e-mails (spam) to academics offering these services. Such illegitimate types of TPS have the potential to threaten the integrity of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In extreme cases, for-profit agencies known as "paper mills" even offer fake scientific publications or authorship slots for sale. The use of such illegitimate services as well as the failure to acknowledge their use is an ethical violation in academic publishing, while the failure to declare support for a TPS can be considered a form of contract fraud. We discuss some literature on TPS, highlight services currently offered by ten of the largest commercial publishers and expect authors to be transparent about the use of these services in their publications. From an ethical/moral (i.e., non-commercial) point of view, it is the responsibility of editors, journals, and publishers, and it should be in their best interest to ensure that illegitimate TPS are identified and prohibited, while publisher-employed TPS should be properly disclosed in their publications.

Developing an Avatar-Based Framework for Unified Client Identification in Banking Systems Using Generative AI and Graph Neural Networks

In today’s data-driven world, the accurate and consistent identification of clients across multiple platforms is a critical challenge for financial institutions, government comptroller departments, and third-party service providers. Fragmented and inconsistent data across various systems pose significant risks, including regulatory non-compliance, fraud, and operational inefficiencies. This thesis presents the development of an innovative avatar-based framework for unified client identification in banking systems, leveraging the power of Generative AI and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The framework synthesizes disparate client data into a single, cohesive representation in the virtual world, effectively addressing the challenges of data fragmentation and inconsistency. Generative AI models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), are employed to enhance data quality by generating realistic synthetic data and imputing missing values. These models augment the existing datasets, ensuring completeness and accuracy of client profiles. Simultaneously, GNNs are utilized to model the complex relationships and interactions within the client data, capturing intricate dependencies and enhancing the accuracy of client identification. The proposed framework offers substantial benefits, including improved regulatory compliance, enhanced operational efficiency, and superior customer experience. By providing a unified view of client data, financial institutions can better detect and prevent fraudulent activities, meet stringent regulatory requirements, and deliver personalized services. Government comptroller departments can ensure more effective public fund management and maintain transparency. Third-party service providers can leverage accurate client profiles for better service delivery and risk management. The race to implement such advanced frameworks is a pivotal factor in determining leadership in the financial and administrative sectors. Institutions that adopt and integrate this technology swiftly will gain a significant competitive advantage, setting new standards in client identification and data management. This research underscores the transformative potential of combining Generative AI and GNNs in creating a robust, scalable, and efficient system for unified client identification, paving the way for future advancements in this critical field.

A systematic literature review of logistics services outsourcing

Logistics is critical in every company's supply chain (SC), and outsourcing helps businesses concentrate on their core competencies. Third-party logistics (3 PL) or logistics service providers (LSPs) assist businesses in cutting costs while improving performance, sustainability, and revenue. Logistics evaluation and LSPs choice are complicated and critical components of value delivery. This study aims to review logistics outsourcing literature to understand the trends, prospects, factors, and strategies used in logistics companies' outsourcing choices. This work examines the literature on LSPs selection published between 2010 and 2023. This paper uses VOSviewer (version 1.6.19) to visualize the relationships. Pricing, timely shipment, service quality, reliability, agility, technology, and consumer feedback are the most commonly utilized, whereas societal and environmental factors are seldom used. The study comprises journal publications, the year, selection criteria, and assessment methodologies. Numerous scholars have discovered and employed many critical selection criteria. Many investigators have also embraced multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies, and their fuzzy form is widely used. In conclusion, recommendations for theorists and managers, limits, and future directions for research are offered.

Examining Public Sector Availability and Supply Chain Management Practices for Malaria Commodities: Findings From Northern Nigeria.

Nigeria accounts for substantial proportions of global malaria infections and deaths, with children aged younger than 5 years being the most affected group. This suggests that access to lifesaving malaria interventions could be suboptimal, especially at public health facilities where most rural dwellers seek health care. We conducted this study to ascertain if public health facilities have the commodities and the robust supply chain management (SCM) system required to deliver malaria interventions to children younger than 5 years. We conducted a cross-sectional survey in 1,858 health facilities across 7 states in Nigeria. Using structured questionnaires, we assessed the availability of selected malaria commodities required by children aged younger than 5 years. We also interviewed health workers to evaluate other core SCM activities. More than 50% of health facilities in 5 states were stocked out of malaria rapid diagnostic tests (mRDTs), and stock-out rates for artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) were over 50% for almost all assessed ACTs across all states. The percentage of health facilities that received malaria commodities within the recommended lead time was below average across most states (71%). States with a higher percentage of health workers who were aware of and placed orders following the national reporting timeline and those that delivered commodities to the last mile predominantly through third-party logistics service providers tended to have higher availability of mRDTs and artemether/lumefantrine combinations. The top 2 logistics challenges were insecurity and inadequate funding. The availability of lifesaving malaria commodities across the health facilities visited was suboptimal, possibly due to several SCM challenges. The results from this study underscore the urgent need to implement effective interventions to address the observed gaps. This will contribute to reducing malaria morbidity and mortality among children aged younger than 5 years in Nigeria.

Development of Trustworthiness for Cloud Service Providers Using DBN-Based Trust Model in Cloud Computing Environment

In order to facilitate diverse computing resources and services, cloud computing has evolve into a promising paradigm on-demand over the internet. To access services, cloud users have to rely on third-party service providers. Choosing a suitable Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with a raise in available cloud services in order to deliver the service safely is considered a serious concern for users. Regrettably, there are various problems that minimize the growth of cloud computing, like privacy, security loss, and control. The security issue is regarded as the most important element that could avoid the evolution of cloud computing. In the cloud environment, to handle the user’s requests, trust measures play a significant role when choosing appropriate service providers. Therefore, trustworthiness evaluation of CSP prior to choosing it to facilitate the service has become a significant obligation in cloud environment. In this work, a trust model, Deep Behavioral Feedback Quality of Service and Statistics based trust (Deep BFQS-trust), is developed to calculate trustworthiness of CSP based on its feedback and behavior, QoS and statistics-based given by the users. Also, to calculate behavioral trust values, various QoS attributes are considered. In order to maintain and calculate feedback trust value for service provider, diverse parameters from service level agreement are utilized. By computing the collective trust, trustworthiness of cloud service provider is judged that is computed by these trust factors. Moreover, the weights of the collective trust are determined by employing Deep belief network (DBN) model. Finally, the proposed Deep BFQS-trust technique is compared with the existing approaches, and exhibits that the proposed model attained utmost trustworthiness and successful interaction with the values of 0.860 and 0.888, respectively.

AIDCT: An AI service development and composition tool for constructing trustworthy intelligent systems

The growing prevalence of AI services on cloud platforms is driving the demand for technologies and tools which enable the integration of multiple AI services to handle intricate tasks. Traditional methods of evaluating intelligent systems focus mainly on the performance of AI components, without providing comprehensive metrics for the system as a whole. Additionally, as these AI components are often sourced from third-party providers, users may face challenges due to inconsistent quality assurance and limitations in further developing AI models, and dealing with third-party service providers’ limitations. These limitations often involve quality assurance and a lack of capability for secondary development and training of services. To address these issues, we have developed a tool based on our previous work. It can autonomously build Intelligent systems from AI services while tackling the issues mentioned above. This tool not only creates service composition solutions that align with user-defined functional requirements and performance metrics but also executes these solutions to verify if the metrics meet user requirements. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of this tool in constructing trustworthy intelligent systems through a series of case studies.

Research on Member Decision-making of Dual-channel Supply Chain with TPL Participation

With the development of the Internet, more and more enterprises choose the dual-channel supply chain for the sale of goods, in which the third-party logistics service provider plays an important role. By adopting the modified hotelling model, this paper constructs a three-level two-channel supply chain model, discusses the influence of centralized and decentralized decision-making on the decision-making of supply chain members, and puts forward corresponding management suggestions.

Data Privacy Preservation and Authentication Scheme for Secured IoMT Communication Using Enhanced Heuristic Approach with Deep Learning

Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is a promising field that is widely used in healthcare applications nowadays. The IoMT is an extension of the Internet of Things (IoT) that is utilized for the processing, generation, collection, and evaluation of medical data. However, the most concerning issue in IoMT is regarding the privacy and protection of the IoMT data. Because privacy preservation of information is the major concern in IoT-based healthcare systems. Hence, there is a need for a trustworthy end-to-end system, which can tolerate even insider attacks. The core aim of this research work is to promote the latest secure technique for transmitting the data from sink nodes to the server and also to ensure the security level of communication between them. Here, the gathered sink node is authenticated by deep hybrid methods of combining the Auto Encoder (AE) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM). This hybrid model is named as Auto Encoder-Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (AE-Bi-LSTM), in which the parameters are tuned by the Improved Chimp Optimization Algorithm (IChoA). Hence, data privacy preservation makes to secure communication in the networks. The proposed privacy-prevention model is utilized for maintaining communication between sink nodes and servers. The communication is done through three different steps (a) Sanitation, (b) Optimal key generation, and (c) Restoration. Moreover, from the overall result analysis, the accuracy and precision rate of the designed IChoA-AE-Bi-LSTM approach are 95.58 and 91.93%. The experimental analysis shows that the designed model offers a better authentication scheme and guarantees data privacy than traditional models. Moreover, applying a high amount of energy will reduce the lifetime of the sensor nodes. Here, privacy preservation is a challenging task due to fraudulent attacks from third-party service providers. In the future, advanced techniques will be implemented with lightweight encoded mechanisms.

Account Information and Payment Initiation Services and the Related AML Obligations in the Law of the European Union

The Second Payment Services Directive introduced new services into the European Union legal system—Payment Initiation and Account Information Services. These services are based on payment accounts already opened and maintained for customers by the Account Servicing Payment Service Provider (bank, payment institution, electronic money institution). The Account Services Payment Service provider performs AML/CFT verification of the account holder and applies customer due diligence measures to the account holder, such as identifying beneficial owners, obtaining information on the purpose and intended nature of the business relationship, and ongoing monitoring of the business relationship. Payment Initiation and Account Information services are therefore provided to a previously verified client and based on the payment account currently maintained for him. European Union law does not clearly specify whether a Third-Party Service Provider offering Payment Initiation or Account Information Services is obliged to re-apply financial security measures to customers. The aim of this article was to perform a legal analysis of the regulations and soft law acts in force in the European Union and to answer the question. The purposive (teleological) and linguistic–logical (grammatical) methods of interpretation of regulations were used for the analysis. The structure of the legal system of the European Union as a civil law (code law) system was taken into account. This article shows that in the current legal situation, there is no doubt that Third-Party Service Providers are obliged entities in terms of AML/CFT law and are obliged to apply the AML/CFT to customers using Payment Initiation and Account Information services. However, the degree to which customer due diligence measures have to be applied varies depending on the adopted model of providing Payment Initiation and Account Information services. Third-Party Service Providers will be obliged to apply financial security measures in cases where the relationship between the customer and the service providers will have a continuing character. In the case of occasional provision of services, when the transaction value does not exceed a certain threshold, the supplier may only perform simplified customer verification. In particular, this applies to Payment Initiation service models, where the Payment Initiation Service Provider works for merchants, enabling them to accept payments for goods and services sold. In such a model, the Service Provider has a continuous relationship with the merchant but only performs an occasional transaction for the user. The analysis also allowed for the conclusion that European Union law, including that in the draft phase, does not regulate in a sufficiently precise manner when a given model of Account Services and Payment Initiation Services may be treated as based on an occasional transaction. This made it possible to formulate a de lege ferenda request to include this issue in the proposal for an EU Regulation on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing.

Freshness-keeping effort vs. sustainability: an efficient approach for perishable supply chain system

Last few decades, unwanted climate change and global warming have forced us to think about the world environment. This paper investigates a perishable supply chain system consisting of one manufacturer, one third-party logistics service provider, and multiple retailers. The logistics provider and retailers use cooling technologies to maintain the product's freshness. Here, consumers' demand is evaluated from the utility function based on price, freshness, and sustainability level. The environmental impacts of the system are measured from the amount of energy consumption and carbon emission. Also, the supply chain members are taking their decisions in cooperation, non-cooperation, and coordination decision scenarios to maximise their profit and reduce total environmental impacts. We develop a general model and a particular model under different decision scenarios. The optimal sustainability level, price, and freshness-keeping-effort (FKE) are derived using the Stackelberg game theory. A numerical experiment as well as sensitivity analyses of various important parameters are conducted. It explores that (i) FKEs have more impact than the sustainability level for the consumption of perishable products. (ii) The retailer-leadership scenario is the most effective for reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption whereas the cooperative decision scenario is better for maintaining the freshness level.

Outbreak investigations of Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae serotype 15 in central Iowa in the winter of 2021-2022

From November 2021 to January 2022, 20 growing-pig sites in central Iowa reported severe clinical respiratory disease and weekly mortality of up to 50%. Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae serotype 15 was identified as the causative agent of the clinical disease. Given that A pleuropneumoniae serotype 15 has been infrequently diagnosed in the United States, an outbreak investigation was conducted to explore biosecurity hazards and epidemiological aspects associated with the surge of cases. The investigations revealed that all farms had significant gaps in biosecurity and relied heavily on third-party service providers, which may have contributed to the pathogen spread.

E-Government in The Implementation of T-Tax System in Palembang City

Electronic Government, an essential aspect of contemporary governance, harnesses information technology and the internet to optimize governmental activities, fostering enhanced public services and heightened government efficiency and transparency. This research investigates Palembang City's foray into e-government, specifically in regional tax collection, utilizing an online tax application initiated in 2018. Employing a descriptive qualitative research methodology encompassing interviews, observation, documentation, and literature review, the research reveals Palembang City's strategic move to simplify local tax collection through online taxes. Third-party service providers, in collaboration with Bank Sumsel Babel, play a pivotal role in monitoring and facilitating e-tax implementation. Success factors include robust policy support via Mayor Regulations, alongside effective communication strategies utilizing social and electronic media. Challenges persist, such as uneven distribution of tax payment kiosks and low taxpayer compliance with voluntary e-tax adoption. This research offers comprehensive insights into the complexities and opportunities of regional e-government, illuminating the nuanced landscape of digital governance at the local level.

Third Party Assurance: Need More Attention on SOC Reports

<p>According to a Deloitte survey in 2022 , 76 percent of respondents had their IT services delivered through third party models, and more than 90 percent of the respondents will rely on third-party service providers for data analytics and robotic process automation deployment arrangements. However, as these organizations (called user entities) can not directly monitor the service providers’ controls over the outsourced systems that may influence user entities’ business operations and financial reports, whether these service providers establish suitable and effective controls to ensure the data confidentiality and privacy, system integrity, availability becomes an important issue for user entities.</p>

Analysis of Human Resource Management Trends and Innovative Approaches in the Era of Sharing Economy

Based on the analysis of human resource management trends and innovation in the era of sharing economy, this paper discusses the innovation paths in the era of sharing economy through the three aspects of human resource recruitment and selection, human resource training and development, and employee relationship management, and concludes that the trends of human resource management based on the era of sharing economy are mainly reflected in the co-operation with third-party service providers and management, the application of new technologies and tools, flexibility, and the use of new technologies and tools. technologies and tools, flexibility and personalised employee care, and the importance of socialising and networking. The conclusion will provide useful reference for HRM in the era of sharing economy and promote the innovative development of HRM in the new era.