For many decades multi-party computation (MPC) had been a predominantly theoretic endeavour in cryptography, but in recent years interest has arisen on the practical side. This has resulted in various implementation improvements and such protocols are becoming more applicable to practical situations. A key part in this transformation from theory to practice is in adapting theoretical protocols …
It’s a tough challenge to find the right depth and the right level of abstraction when introducing a new technology. A book can go too deep, and risk miring the reader in technological minutiae. This is hardly helpful, and—more often than not—it’s boring. A book can also stay at a very abstract level, and revel in theory, but even this is boring and useless for someone who hopes to achi…
To understand what cloud computing is and is not, it is important to understand how this model of computing has evolved. As Alvin Toffler notes in his famous book, The Third Wave (Bantam, 1980), civilization has progressed in waves (three of them to date: the first wave was agricultural societies, the second was the industrial age, and the third is the information age). Within each wave, there …
Firewalls have ample recognition as key elements in the field of protecting networks. Even though this is not a new subject, many important concepts and resources that could be helpful to designing a secure network are often overlooked or even ignored. This book is targeted at unveiling the potential of Cisco Firewall functionalities and prod- ucts and how they can be grouped on a structured …
This chapter introduces the functions that are commonly used in finance and discusses their properties and applications. For instance, the exponential function is used to discount forward prices to their present value and the inverse of the exponential function, the natural logarithmic function or ‘log’ for short, is used to compute returns in continuous time. We shall encounter numerous ot…
Advertising, an essential component in the marketing of any business, has been around for a long time. The Pompeii penis is positively modern compared to some of the advertising relics archaeologists have unearthed in ancient Arabia, China, Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Egyptians used papyrus to create posters and flyers, while lost-and-found advertising (also on papyrus and often relating t…
Application of depth methods to functional data provides new tools of analysis, in particular an ordering of curves from the center outwards. Two specific depth definitions are band depth and half-region depth (Lo ́pez-Pintado & Romo (2009). Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 718–734; Lo ́pez-Pintado & Romo (2011). Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 55, 1679–1695…
You may have some experience with vi, or what is now known as Vim (which is when simply put—vi improved). All too often, I find that those first experiences have never been good ones or to be looked back upon with much fondness. Guiding you through the initially unfathomable regime of vi, we are going to make sure that you are the master of vi and you leave wanting to use this tool from the g…
Enterprise application development over the decades has been a pendulum swinging back and forth between terminal and mainframe, between client and server. In the 1980s, business logic was largely pushed to the server by "dumb terminals" or "thin clients" which did very little except act as a middleman between the user and the server. Beginning in the 1990s, logic started to swing to the client…
The Raspberry Pi is a powerful, low-cost, credit-card sized computer, which lends itself perfectly as the controller of a sophisticated home security system. Using the available on-board interfaces, the Raspberry Pi can be expanded to allow the connection of a virtually infinite number of security sensors and devices. The Raspberry Pi has the processing power and interfaces available to build a…
You are responsible for managing your company’s foreign exchange positions. Your boss, or your boss’s boss, has been reading about derivatives losses suffered by other companies, and wants to know if the same thing could happen to his company. That is, he wants to know just how much market risk the company is taking. What do you say? You could start by listing and describing the company’s…
In this chapter, we will cover the major components that almost all alarm systems have in common. By the end of the chapter you will realize that the so-called high tech alarm systems and access control systems are not really as complicated as some would like you to believe. That said, let's get started. Every alarm system in the world does two and only two basic things. • It monitors the wor…
In the social and behavioral sciences, statistics serve two general purposes. First, they can be used to describe what happened in a particular study (descriptive statistics). Second, they can be used to help draw conclu- sions about what those results mean in some broader context (inferential statistics). The main question in inferential statistics is whether a result, finding, or observation …
Boost.Asio is a complex library, making networking quite simple. Building it is easy. It's done quite a good job at avoiding use of macros; it's got a few macros to turn options on/off, but there's only quite a few you need to worry about. Boost.Asio allows for both synchronous and asynchronous programming. They are very different; you should choose one way or the other as early as possible,…
Four decades ago, there were few democratically elected governments outside Western Europe and North America. Non-democracies had various kinds of authoritarian, unelected governments, including, military, one-party, no party and personalist dictatorships. From the mid-1970s, there was an unexpected, not regionally specific, shift from unelected to elected governments – a process of democrati…
This is the least fun—but nevertheless critical—part of the book, where we walk through setting up an environ- ment in which to write and test Python. We are going to do a crash course in setting up a Kali Linux virtual machine (VM) and installing a nice IDE so that you have everything you need to develop code. By the end of this chapter, you should be ready to tackle the exer- cises and co…
Microsoft officially announced SQL Server 2008, codenamed Katmai, at the first Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) conference in May 2007. I suppose I had the same reaction as many others — ‘‘Already?’’ SQL Server 2005 had only been released a year and a half earlier, and I started to wonder if it was too soon. I can’t tell you why I thought that. I also knew that it wasn’t unu…
In a relatively short period of time, Android has become the world’s most popular mobile platform. Although originally designed for smartphones, it now powers tablets, TVs, and wearable devices, and will soon even be found in cars. Android is being developed at a breathtaking pace, with an average of two major releases per year. Each new release brings a better UI, performance improvements, a…
One of the unique features of the Android operating system that has allowed it to grow rapidly has been that the binaries and source code are released as open source software. You can download the entire source code of the Android operating system, and it takes up approximately 2.6 GB of disk space. In theory, this allows anyone to design and build a phone that runs Android. The idea of keeping…
Network security is currently becoming one of the main problems for the develop- ment of new technologies and services in telecommunication networks. Hackers are constantly evolving towards new attack techniques and new target tech- nologies at a very high speed [1] [2], thus making the task of building defense mechanisms a hard mission. In this context, many efforts have been done by the rese…
Penetration testers are faced with a combination of firewalls, intrusion detection systems, host-based protection, hardened systems, and teams of knowledgeable analysts that pour over data collected by their security information management systems. In an environment such as this, simply running automated tools will typically yield few results. The false sense of this security can easily result …