In February 2006, the Chinese Ministry of Finance formally announced that, from 2007 onwards, the Chinese Accounting Standards (CAS) would be converging with International Accounting Standards (IAS). This significant step towards international accounting harmonization, for the purpose of attracting foreign investment, invokes the question as to whether the newly implemented IAS will indeed achi...

This paper outlines some basic characteristics of digital rights management (DRM) systems, as well as the ways that DRM systems can threaten user privacy. The author asserts that consent-based privacy laws are alone insufficient to address privacy threats posed by DRM. The author suggests that privacy norms can be infused in DRM design and implementation and that the interests of end-users, DRM...

National-scale critical infrastructure protection depends on many processes: intelligence gathering, analysis, interdiction, detection, response and recovery, to name a few. These processes are typically carried out by different individuals, agencies and industry sectors. Many new threats to national infrastructure are arising from the complex couplings that exist between advanced information t...

Competition for consumers to visit company websites has intensified in recent years. An important indicator of website popularity (and consequent survival) is the extent to which the website can draw consumer visits vis-à-vis other websites. A majority of the current understanding on consumer visits is limited to a single website, and leaves little knowledge on the performance of one website co...

Power laws have been observed in various contexts in the Internet. There has been considerable interest in identifying the mechanisms behind these power laws. Most of these have focused on the tail behavior of the distributions. We argue that the the tails and their asymptotic behavior is very hard to substantiate in realistic engineering systems. In this paper we describe some of the proposed ...

National-scale critical infrastructure protection depends on many processes: intelligence gathering, analysis, interdiction, detection, response and recovery, to name a few. These processes are typically carried out by different individuals, agencies and industry sectors. Many new threats to national infrastructure are arising from the complex couplings that exist between advanced information t...

Mobile, nomadic, and fixed wireless devices form new types of resourcesharing networks called wireless grids.1 This issue of IEEE Internet Computing, beginning with our extended editorial introduction, presents an overview of current research in the area. We hope this issue of IC will serve to map the wireless grid landscape, to help others explore it in greater detail in the future. Grid compu...

This study attempts to examine empirically how social institutional factors relate to Internet diffusion in 39 countries. Based on nine-year cross-country data, the analytical results show that the rule of law, educational systems, and industrialization significantly influenced the global Internet diffusion, while the economic system did not exert significant impact. Uncertainty avoidance as a ...

The definition of privacy, according to Merriam-Webster, is the quality or state of being apart from company or observation. Under the rapid development of internet technology, people’s right to maintain private lives have been challenged by the massive volume of information one can access and the fast speed at which information traverse spatially. The paper explains two typical reasons why cur...

This paper describes the state of Lawful Interception of the Internet and compares it with Lawful Interception of access networks. Lawful Interception is the process of secretly intercepting communications between parties of interest to Law Enforcement agencies. Internet interception is both more difficult and much more immature than access network interception. Refusal by the main standards bo...