Med-Consilium (Switzerland)

As Morocco accelerates its digital transformation, robust data protection has become a prerequisite for sustaining digital trust, ensuring economic resilience and enhancing global competitiveness. This paper argues that Morocco must transition from a compliance-based approach to proactive data governance, aligning its legal and operational frameworks with international standards such as the General Data Protect Regulation (GDPR) and International Standards Organization (ISO) certifications. The study proposes two complementary sets of recommendations. For businesses, it advocates the adoption of ISO standards (ISO/IEC 27001, 27701, 31000, 27005, 22301 and 37301), the appointment of qualified data protection officers (DPOs), integration of privacy-by-design principles and the implementation of structured data audits and risk management frameworks to foster a culture of cyber security and compliance. For regulators, the paper recommends reinforcing the investigative and sanctioning powers of the National Commission for the Control of Personal Data Protection (CNDP), introducing mandatory breach notification requirements, enhancing transparency through regular compliance reporting, and promoting a risk-based regulatory approach aligned with GDPR standards. Through a comparative legal analysis of Morocco’s Law 09-08, the European Union’s (EU) GDPR, and key African data protection frameworks, such as South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act 2013 (POPIA) and Nigeria’s Data Protection Regulation (NDPR), the paper identifies critical gaps in enforcement mechanisms, regulatory convergence and cross-border data governance. These findings are reinforced by qualitative insights gathered from interviews with leading Moroccan experts in compliance and cyber security, namely Mounim Zaghloul, Taieb Debbagh and Mohamed Achor Zyad, who highlight systemic challenges, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in implementing international data governance standards and provide targeted recommendations to bridge these gaps. To address these challenges, the paper introduces a Data Protection Maturity Model, providing a structured framework for assessing the readiness of Moroccan organisations and institutions in data protection governance. The study concludes that transforming data protection into a strategic asset is essential to position Morocco as a trusted digital hub in Africa and globally. Implementing these recommendations will not only strengthen national cyber security resilience but also enhance Morocco’s attractiveness for foreign investment and digital trade partnerships. This article is also included in The Business & Management Collection which can be accessed at https://hstalks.com/business/.

The histopathologic evaluation of regulatory toxicity studies using artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to increase study efficiency. For example, AI could initially identify and exclude all organs without histopathologic lesions, allowing pathologists to focus solely on evaluating organs with identified lesions. In this study, whole slide images (WSIs) of liver sections from 58 different rat toxicity studies were collected, along with their corresponding histopathologic lesion diagnoses. Each WSI was labeled as either "lesion" or "no lesion" based on the presence or absence of reported histopathologic lesions. Multiple instance learning (MIL) approaches, including a transformer variant, were tested to predict lesions within a weakly supervised framework. Both methods achieved acceptable to excellent area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) scores. Heatmap overlays were employed to visually assess the MIL model's effectiveness in detecting lesions, confirming the accuracy of targeted areas on the WSIs. In addition, using transfer learning principles, the MIL model initially developed for liver WSIs was adapted to kidney WSIs, demonstrating the model's versatility. This study showcases the application of weakly supervised learning for lesion detection in rat WSIs from toxicity studies, with the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency of the histopathologic evaluation process.

Abstract Background Quitting cigarette smoking can substantially reduce or eliminate the risk of developing numerous chronic diseases. Use of flavored tobacco or nicotine products (TNP) is commonly cited by adults who smoke cigarettes to be important in helping them reduce or quit smoking. The purpose of this analysis was to understand the association between the levels of use of flavored oral nicotine products (ONP) and smoking reduction and quitting and how reduction or quitting may differ between predominant users of fruit/other versus mint flavored ONP after six months of use. Methods Participants were provided with their choice of a variety of forms and flavors of Rogue® nicotine products (Study Products, SP) over a 6-month actual use period (AUP) and completed online surveys assessing TNP and SP use at enrollment (Baseline) and Months 1, 2, 4, and 6 thereafter. Results Among the 1393 participants at Month 6, 41.4% and 52.5% used predominantly fruit/other or mint SP flavors, respectively. Compared to predominant mint users, predominant fruit/other users had greater cigarette reduction (mean reduction in CPD: 50.0% vs. 48.4%) and a higher proportion had quit smoking (proportion quit: 15.4% vs. 11.6%) at Month 6. Additionally, 37.6% of all participants, 38.8% of predominant fruit/other users, and 39.3% of predominant mint users reduced their average CPD by > 50% from Baseline. Increased use of fruit/other flavors was independently associated with smoking reduction (8.6% greater reduction per 10 pieces/day; p<0.001) and odds of quitting smoking (OR=1.29 [95% CI: 1.04-1.59] per 10 pieces/day; p=0.017). Increased use of mint flavors was independently associated with smoking reduction (7.5% greater reduction per 10 mint pieces/day; p<0.001) but not with odds of quitting smoking. Conclusions Increased quantity of fruit/other or mint flavored SP use was associated with significantly greater smoking reduction, and increased quantity of fruit/other flavors was associated with increased odds of quitting smoking in bivariate and multivariable models. The levels of reduction and quitting smoking observed during the study, with an increased benefit for use of fruit/other flavors, suggests that the availability of a variety of ONP flavors may provide an increased harm reduction benefit for adults who smoke cigarettes. Trial Registration This study was observational. Participants were not prospectively assigned to one or more health-related interventions and could choose to use or not use the commercially available study products provided during the study. Thus, the study was not registered in a trial database by the Sponsor.

Journal of Palliative MedicineVol. 25, No. 3 Personal ReflectionThank YouElene DolmazashviliElene DolmazashviliAddress correspondence to: Elene Dolmazashvili, MD, Department of Clinical Oncology, LDT Multiprofile Clinic Consilium Medulla, Politkovskaya 6g, Tbilisi 0186, Georgia E-mail Address: e.dolmazashvili@onco.geDepartment of Clinical Oncology, LDT Multiprofile Clinic Consilium Medulla, Tbilisi, Georgia.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Mar 2022https://doi.org/10.1089/jpm.2021.0581AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View article"Thank You." Journal of Palliative Medicine, 25(3), p. 513FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 25Issue 3Mar 2022 InformationCopyright 2022, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Elene Dolmazashvili.Thank You.Journal of Palliative Medicine.Mar 2022.513-513.http://doi.org/10.1089/jpm.2021.0581Published in Volume: 25 Issue 3: March 1, 2022PDF download

Bulletproofs (Bünz et al. IEEE S&P 2018) are a celebrated ZK proof system that allows for short and efficient proofs, and have been implemented and deployed in several real-world systems. In practice, they are most often implemented in their non-interactive version obtained using the Fiat-Shamir transform, despite the lack of a formal proof of security for this setting. Prior to this work, there was no evidence that malleability attacks were not possible against Fiat-Shamir Bulletproofs. Malleability attacks can lead to very severe vulnerabilities, as they allow an adversary to forge proofs re-using or modifying parts of the proofs provided by the honest parties. In this paper, we show for the first time that Bulletproofs (or any other similar multi-round proof system satisfying some form of weak unique response property) achieve simulation-extractability in the algebraic group model. This implies that Fiat-Shamir Bulletproofs are non-malleable.

Many decentralized systems rely on flooding protocols for message dissemination. In such a protocol, the sender of a message sends it to a randomly selected set of peers. These peers again send the message to their randomly selected peers, until every network participant has received the message. This type of protocols clearly fail in face of an adaptive adversary who can simply corrupt all peers of the sender and thereby prevent the message from being delivered. Nevertheless, flooding protocols are commonly used within protocols that aim to be cryptographically secure, most notably in blockchain protocols. While it is possible to revert to static corruptions, this gives unsatisfactory security guarantees, especially in the setting of a blockchain that is supposed to run for an extended period of time. To be able to provide meaningful security guarantees in such settings, we give precise semantics to what we call $$\delta $$ -delayed adversaries in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. Such adversaries can adaptively corrupt parties, but there is a delay of time $$\delta $$ from when an adversary decides to corrupt a party until they succeed in overtaking control of the party. Within this model, we formally prove the intuitive result that flooding protocols are secure against $$\delta $$ -delayed adversaries when $$\delta $$ is at least the time it takes to send a message from one peer to another plus the time it takes the recipient to resend the message. To this end, we show how to reduce the adaptive setting with a $$\delta $$ -delayed adversary to a static experiment with an Erdős-Rényi graph. Using the established theory of Erdős-Rényi graphs, we provide upper bounds on the propagation time of the flooding functionality for different neighborhood sizes of the gossip network. More concretely, we show the following for security parameter $$\kappa $$ , point-to-point channels with delay at most $$\varDelta $$ , and n parties in total, with a sufficiently delayed adversary that can corrupt any constant fraction of the parties: If all parties send to $$\varOmega (\kappa )$$ parties on average, then we can realize a flooding functionality with maximal delay $$\mathcal {O}\bigl (\varDelta \cdot \log (n) \bigr )$$ ; and if all parties send to $$\varOmega \bigl ( \sqrt{\kappa n} \bigr )$$ parties on average, we can realize a flooding functionality with maximal delay $$\mathcal {O}(\varDelta )$$ .

We propose a framework for building Nakamoto-style proof-of-work blockchains where blocks are treated differently in the “longest chain rule”. The crucial parameter is a weight function assigning different weights to blocks according to their hash value. Our framework enables the analysis of different weight functions while proving all statements at the appropriate level of abstraction. This allows us to quickly derive protocol guarantees for different weight functions. We exemplify the usefulness of our framework by capturing the classical Bitcoin protocol as well as exponentially growing functions as special cases. We show the typical properties—chain growth, chain quality and common prefix—for both, and further show that the latter provide an additional guarantee, namely a weak form of optimistic responsiveness. More precisely, we prove for a certain class of exponentially growing weight functions that in periods without corruption, the confirmation time only depends on the unknown actual network delay instead of the known upper bound.

The existence of secure indistinguishability obfuscators (\(i\mathcal {O}\)) has far-reaching implications, significantly expanding the scope of problems amenable to cryptographic study. All known approaches to constructing \(i\mathcal {O}\) rely on d-linear maps. While secure bilinear maps are well established in cryptographic literature, the security of candidates for \(d>2\) is poorly understood.

Hintergrund: 09/201 – 02/2015 wurde vom Sächsischen Staatministerium für Soziales und Verbraucherschutz das Modellprojekt „Familiengesundheitspaten“ gefördert, das sich in ein Netzwerk aus regionalen Gesundheits- und Sozialeinrichtungen integriert. Dabei wird jungen oder werdenden Eltern eine ehrenamtliche „Familiengesundheitspatin“ als Beraterin zu allen Fragen der gesundheitlichen und sozialen Entwicklung der Kinder bis zum dritten Lebensjahr zur Seite gestellt. Der Beitrag berichtet Ergebnisse der externen Projektevaluation. Methodik: