The legal and technological battle in the music industry: Information-push versus information-pull technologies

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies are often seen as a threat by copyright owners because they encourage piracy by making digital copies easier to obtain. In response, major record companies have come up with new devices designed to protect original material, and lobbied to reinforce legal protection. We view traditional distribution as an information-push technology in which the firm pays to provide information to consumers and P2P as an information-pull technology where consumers spend resources to acquire information on products they have a potential interest in by searching, downloading and testing digital copies of original products before they make their purchase decision. We determine copyright owners’ protection strategies according to the level of legal protection, and we study their effects on profits and consumers’ surplus with the two different information transmission technologies.     

谈国家检察官学院图书馆的数字化建设

当前,数字图书馆建设浪潮正在世界展开,将现有图书馆馆藏资料数字化是其主要方式.国家检察官学院图书数字化建设的四个步骤(一)建立机读目录;(二)建立电子阅览室;(三)建立局域网;(四)实现馆际资源共享.     

关于数字环境下大学图书馆职能扩展与创新的初步分析

本文通过对数字时代大学图书馆面临的挑战和机遇进行分析,结合当前图书馆建设的实践,指出与其他馆、出版业以及搜索服务商合作进行数字图书馆建设;参与学术出版,建设大学知识机构库;支持远程访问;实施信息素养教育;构建信息共享空间等职能扩展与创新是大学图书馆创新的主要方面。     

Legislative genesis and judicial death of a directive: The European Court of Justice invalidated the data retention directive (2006/24/EC) thereby creating a sustained period of legal uncertainty about the validity of national laws which enacted it

The Grand Chamber has ruled that the data retention directive was invalid ex tunc since it seriously interfered with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and protection of personal data and exceeded the limits of the principle of proportionality which are provided for in the Charter. The scope and temporal effects of this ruling should be clarified, especially its legal impacts on national laws of Member States which enacted the directive. In addition, the findings of the Grand Chamber on geographical safeguards have far-reaching implications on the retention and storage of personal data in the EU.     

South Korea's innovations in data privacy principles: Asian comparisons

Over the last two decades, at least a dozen Asian jurisdictions have adopted significant data privacy (or ‘data protection’) laws. South Korea started to implement such laws in relation to its public sector in the 1990s, then its private sector from 2001, culminating in the comprehensive Personal Information Privacy Act of 2011. Internationally, there have been two stages in the development of data privacy principles (the common core of such laws), the first typified by the OECD's data protection Guidelines of 1981, and the second typified by the European Union data protection Directive of 1995, with a third stage currently under development.     

Discriminating natural images and computer generated graphics based on the impact of CFA interpolation on the correlation of PRNU

To discriminate natural images from computer generated graphics, a novel identification method based on the features of the impact of color filter array (CFA) interpolation on the local correlation of photo response non-uniformity noise (PRNU) is proposed. As CFA interpolation generally exists in the generation of natural images and it imposes influence on the local correlation of PRNU, the differences between the PRNU correlations of natural images and those of computer generated graphics are investigated. Nine dimensions of histogram features are extracted from the local variance histograms of PRNU to represent the identification features. The discrimination is accomplished by using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Experimental results and analysis show that it can achieve an average identification accuracy of 99.43%, and it is robust against scaling, JPEG compression, rotation and additive noise. Thus, it has great potential to be used in image source pipelines forensics.     

Information assurance in a distributed forensic cluster

When digital forensics started in the mid-1980s most of the software used for analysis came from writing and debugging software. Amongst these tools was the UNIX utility ‘dd’ which was used to create an image of an entire storage device. In the next decade the practice of creating and using ‘an image’ became established as a fundamental base of what we call ‘sound forensic practice’. By virtue of its structure, every file within the media was an integrated part of the image and so we were assured that it was wholesome representation of the digital crime scene. In an age of terabyte media ‘the image’ is becoming increasingly cumbersome to process, simply because of its size. One solution to this lies in the use of distributed systems. However, the data assurance inherent in a single media image file is lost when data is stored in separate files distributed across a system. In this paper we assess current assurance practices and provide some solutions to the need to have assurance within a distributed system.     

Police investigations in Internet open sources: Procedural-law issues

Analysing large amounts of data goes to the heart of the challenges confronting intelligence and law enforcement professionals today. Increasingly, this involves Internet data that are ‘open source’ or ‘publicly available’. Projects such as the European FP7 VIRTUOSO are developing platforms for open-source intelligence by law enforcement and public security, which open up opportunities for large-scale, automated data gathering and analysis. However, the mere fact that data are publicly available does not imply an absence of restrictions to researching them. This paper investigates one area of legal constraints, namely criminal-procedure law in relation to open-source data gathering by the police. What is the legal basis for this activity? And under what conditions can domestic and foreign open sources be investigated?     

Plain text passwords: A forensic RAM-raid

Despite many academic studies in the last 15 years acknowledging the investigative value of physical memory due to the potential sensitive nature of data it may contain, it arguably remains rarely collected at-scene in most criminal investigations. Whilst this may be due to factors such as first responders lacking the technical skills to do this task, or simply that it is overlooked as an evidence source, this work seeks to emphasise the worth of this task by demonstrating the ability to recover plain-text login credentials from it. Through an examination of logins made to 15 popular online services carried out via the Chrome, Edge and Mozilla Firefox browsers, testing shows that plain-text credentials are present in RAM in every case. Here, a transparent test methodology is defined and the results of test cases are presented along with ‘string markers’ which allow a practitioner to search their RAM captures for the presence of unknown credential information for these services in future cases.