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This paper presents a state‐of‐the‐art review of the Web privacy and anonymity enhancing security mechanisms, tools, applications and services, with respect to their architecture, operational principles and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, to facilitate a detailed comparative analysis, the appropriate parameters have been selected and grouped in classes of comparison criteria, in the form of an integrated comparison framework. The main concern during the design of this framework was to cover the confronted security threats, applied technological issues and users' demands satisfaction. GNUnet's Anonymity Protocol (GAP), Freedom, Hordes, Crowds, Onion Routing, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), TRUSTe, Lucent Personalized Web Assistant (LPWA), and Anonymizer have been reviewed and compared. The comparative review has clearly highlighted that the pros and cons of each system do not coincide, mainly due to the fact that each one exhibits different design goals and thus adopts dissimilar techniques for protecting privacy and anonymity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible explanations for the slow adoption and development of online anonymity technology. The ability to remain anonymous while engaging in different activities, online is increasingly sought after by consumers with privacy concerns. Currently, the only way to maintain online anonymity is through the use of technology. This paper reviews and analyzes the tools currently available to consumers to maintain online anonymity. There are only four tools available to consumers to ensure online anonymity: anonymous remailers, rewebbers, The Onion Router (Tor) and the Invisible Internet Project (I2P). These tools provide the protection needed for an Internet user to remain anonymous but suffer from a lack of usability and adoption.

The authors have selected a few specific online anonymity technologies based on the following criteria: the technology satisfies our full anonymity definition, the technology is currently available for public use and the technology has been academically researched.

Few anonymity technologies are available for public use that offer the ability for full online anonymity, and these technologies are difficult for the average computer user to operate. Further research is still needed to help determine what the average user wants to see in an anonymity technology as well as ways to help users integrate the technology into their commodity software (such as Web browsers). Future online anonymity technologies should enable the user to decide when, how and with whom their information is shared if it is shared at all with ease and simplicity.

The authors identify, explain and analyze publicly available online anonymity technologies in terms of their usability. The authors identified ways as to how online anonymity technology can be improved to increase public adoption. The authors make pertinent recommendations on how the design and development of online anonymity technology can be improved in the future.

It is increasingly difficult to ignore the importance of anonymity on the internet. Tor has been proposed as a reliable way to keep our identity secret from governments and organizations. This research evaluates its ability to protect our activity on the Web.

Using traffic analysis over ACK packets among others, fingerprints of websites can be created and later on used to recognise Tor traffic.

Tor does not add enough entropy to HTTP traffic, which allows us to recognise the access to static websites without breaking Tor's cryptography.

This work shows that the method presented behaves well with a limited set of fingerprints. Further research should be performed on its reliability with larger sets.

Tor has been used by political dissidents and citizens in countries without freedom of speech to access banned websites such as Twitter or Facebook. This paper shows that it might be possible for their countries to know what they have done.

This paper shows that while Tor does a good work keeping the content of our communication, it is weak protecting the identity of the website being accessed.

This paper aims to explore the implications of the 2014 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) publication and guidelines on virtual currency definitions and the overall impact of blockchain technology on anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and regulation. The report cites three case study examples, which the FATF paper uses and which this paper questions as to their relevance, especially to the formal banking sector.

The paper has provided a critical analysis of a FATF publication and guideline document. Additional secondary data has been used on blockchain technology and to analyse the relevance and implications of the case studies used in the FATF document.

The main findings are that virtual currency technology has the potential to support AML frameworks within banking when and if they are better understood. However, generic case examples of virtual currency legal cases are not necessarily useful when developing AML risk assessment frameworks within the banking sector.

The implications from the research affect any financial organisation undertaking AML risk analysis or compliance especially for virtual currencies. It applies to the banking, insurance and auditing professions and is of interest to academics working on virtual and digital currencies.

The social implications are that virtual currency technology can be used to add protection to banking transactions and could also be considered for client identity information such as beneficial ownership.

The originality of this paper is the topic of blockchain technology being considered in AML frameworks and the critical analysis of the FATF cases.

This paper aims to propose an anonymous web‐browsing protocol that harnesses some of the advantages of store‐and‐forward anonymity solutions whilst retaining some of the interactive properties of web browsing. Anonymity research on high latency, store‐and‐forward mediums such as e‐mail have led to comparatively well‐researched anonymity technologies. However, similar achievements have proven to be more difficult for low‐latency communications such as web browsing.

A review of existing anonymity solutions notes the advantages of mix technologies versus the advantages offered by Onion Routing. A solution is presented that features a combined approach of both solutions.

The proposed protocol differentiates between web requests and web responses – a request is treated as a store‐and‐forward message whilst the response is handled as a data stream.

The solution described can be used by existing anonymous web browsing solutions in order to improve the level of anonymity whilst minimising the overhead of anonymously distributing web content.

Fake news is presently one of the most discussed phenomena in politics, social life and the world of business. This paper aims to report the aggregated opinions of 42 brand management academics on the level of threat to, the involvement of, and the available actions of brand managers resulting from fake news.

A Delphi study of 42 academics with peer-reviewed publications in the brand management domain.

The study found that on some dimensions (e.g. the culpability of brand managers for incentivizing fake news by sponsoring its sources), expert opinion varied greatly. Other dimensions (e.g. whether the impact of fake news on brand management is increasing) reached a high level of consensus. The general findings indicate that fake news is an increasing phenomenon. Service brands are most at risk, but brand management generally is need of improving or implementing, fake news mitigation strategies.

Widely diverse opinions revealed the need for conclusive research on the questions of: whether brands suffer damage from sponsoring fake news, whether fake news production is supported by advertising and whether more extensive use of internet facilitated direct interactions with the public through crowdsourcing increased vulnerability.

Experts agreed that practitioners must become more adept with contemporary tools such as fake news site blacklists, and much more aware of identifying and mitigating the brand vulnerabilities to fake news.

A noteworthy breadth of expert opinion was revealed as to whether embellished or fabricated brand narratives can be read as fake news, inviting the question as to whether brands now be held to higher standards of communication integrity.

This paper provides a broad-shallow exploratory overview of the professional opinions of a large international panel of brand management academics on how the recent arrival of industrial fake news does, and will, impact this field.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to thinking and creating scenarios about future crimes and terror attacks relying on the Internet of Things (IoT), and to present a crowdsourcing research based on this thinking, which resulted in both high- and low-probability scenarios with dramatic impact.

The research relies on general morphological analysis for deconstructing wicked problems into core components, and on crowdsourcing 50 experts on Wikistrat’s commercial platform, allowing them to suggest core components, rank them by importance and develop scenarios together. This methodology allowed a wider view than usual, and allowed the experts to examine unorthodox combination of components, leading to the creation of wild-card scenarios.

Analysis of both the core components and the resulting scenarios indicates that the IoT is set to have a dramatic role in crime and terror attacks in the near future. High-impact high-probability scenarios include attacks on power plants, cyber wallets and personal assistants. High-impact low-probability scenarios include terrorist attacks by environmentalist groups, accidental attacks conducted by immature pranksters and having a computer worm propagating in a low-security but critical facility like a hospital.

This paper brings a standardized method which can be used to examine complex events like crime and terror attacks using a disruptive and emerging technology. The results can be used by practitioners to further study the issue and develop many other scenarios more tailored to their needs. The scenarios presented in this paper can also be of value to security bodies who wish to be better prepared for the future.

With the worldwide growth of open telecommunication networks and in particular the Internet, the privacy and security concerns of people using these networks have increased. On the one hand, users are concerned about their privacy, and desire to anonymously access the network. On the other hand, some organizations are concerned about how this anonymous access might be abused. This paper intends to bridge these conflicting interests, and proposes a solution for revocable anonymous access to the Internet. Moreover, the paper presents some legal background and motivation for such a solution. However, the paper also indicates some difficulties and disadvantages of the proposed solution, and suggests the need for further debate on the issue of online anonymity.