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The purpose of the paper is to provide a two‐tier framework for managing semantic‐aware distributed firewall policies to be applied to the devices existing in one administrative domain.

Special attention is paid to the CIM‐based information model defined as the ontology to be used in this framework and the AI‐based reasoning mechanisms and components used to perform the conflict discovery tasks over the distributed firewall policies.

Mechanisms presented allow the solving some of the current issues of the network‐centric security model being used in the Internet. The two‐tier framework designed provides semantic‐aware mechanisms to perform conflict detection and automatic enforcement of policy rules in the distributed firewall scenario. This framework is based on the use of a standard information model and a semantic‐aware policy language to formally define (and then process) firewall policies.

Ongoing work is focused on identifying all kind of conflicts and anomalies that may exist in firewall systems; in parallel to this task a semi‐automatic resolver of conflicting policies is currently under design.

Network and security administrators can specify firewall policies and validate them to find syntactic and semantic errors (i.e. policy conflicts). A framework for automated validation and distribution of policies at different levels is included. This ensures that firewall policies produce the desired effects, facilitating the creation and maintenance of firewall rules in one administrative domain.

A practical and novel two‐tier system that provides detection of conflicts in rules existing in a distributed firewall scenario and the automatic and secure deployment of these rules. A packet‐filtering model, which is simple and powerful enough for the conflict discovery and rule analysis processes, has been proposed. Moreover, ontology and rule reasoning are being proposed as techniques for the conflict detection problem in this particular scenario.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a questionnaire to assess the expectations of university teachers about the importance of generic competences in Higher Education Institutions of Ecuador (E-DUC, acronym in Spanish), based on the competences typology from the Tuning Latin America Project.

A questionnaire with Likert scales was administered to 458 university teachers from seven universities in Ecuador. Exploratory and confirmatory analyzes have been carried out to validate the theoretical model.

After the validation process, four groups of generic competences were confirmed and the measurement model showed high levels of reliability, as well as content and construct validity.

Since tuning project has an international scope, the research could be replicated in other Latin American countries for comparability purposes regarding teachers’ perceived importance of generic competences in teaching activity. In addition, further research can relate teachers’ expectations with teaching performance and other constructs, based on a broad theoretical framework.

These technical characteristics allow the use of E-DUC as an instrument to measure the expectations of teachers on the general competences that are worked on in higher education in Ecuador. Data about these perceptions are useful for the design of teachers’ training programs, curriculum reforms and other higher education policies.

It is the first research carried out in Ecuador and Latin America in order to validate a scale for measuring the expectations of teachers about the importance of the generic competences proposed in the Tuning Latin America Project.

This study aims to analyse the strategic moves used by major tobacco corporations to thwart the ratification of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in Brazil.

The authors conducted a detailed historical case study spanning 1988–2005 and encompassing the period leading up to Brazil’s FCTC ratification. The authors collected qualitative data from various sources to triangulate and develop a comprehensive historical account.

The historical analysis identified three distinct phases. First, the acquisition of a Brazilian cigarette factory, Souza Cruz, by British American Tobacco dramatically altered power dynamics, strengthening the position of the tobacco industry. The second phase regards the era of dictatorship and the efforts of various actors advocating against smoking and the tobacco industry. The third phase involved Brazil’s re-democratisation and the challenges of securing FCTC ratification, during which fierce industry opposition had to be overcome. Throughout these phases, the authors identified four key strategies used by multinational corporations (MNCs) in Brazil to uphold unsustainable practices and products that contradicted public interests instead of reforming them: shaping collective memory, dissimulation, re-presentation and redirecting attention.

This study contributes to critical international business research on emerging economies by examining how Brazil’s position in the global capitalist system has influenced its dependency and how MNCs produce and maintain cycles of poverty and unsustainable practices through the exploitation of power dynamics within the country.