National Institute on Consumer Education

Distributed social networking services (SNSs) recently received significant attention as an alternative to traditional, centralized SNSs, which have inherent limitations on user privacy and freedom. We provide the first in-depth security analysis of Nostr, an open-source, distributed SNS protocol developed in 2019 with more than 1.1 million registered users. We investigate the specification of Nostr and the client implementations and present a number of practical attacks allowing forgeries on various objects, such as encrypted direct messages (DMs), by a malicious user or a malicious server. Even more, we show a confidentiality attack against encrypted DMs by a malicious user exploiting a flaw in the link preview mechanism and the CBC malleability. Our attacks are due to cryptographic flaws in the protocol specification and client implementation, some of which in combination elevate the forgery attack to a violation of confidentiality. We verify the practicality of our attacks via Proof-of-Concept implementations and discuss how to mitigate them.

We evaluate the phase noise properties and inter-core correlations induced by different cores of multicore fibers on the time scale from microseconds to 10 seconds, which may be exploited in future repeated quantum communication systems.

We designed, fabricated, and tested a 16-port wave-length equalizing dynamic optical filter with a circulator, supporting 13.6THz O-Band (1240-1348nm) transmission. The device showed an insertion loss from 4-7dB for most ports, with all ports maintaining an insertion loss below 8dB and extinction ratio exceeding 35dB.

INTRODUCTION: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has affected millions of lives globally. Despite the favourable impact of Mediterranean Dietary Pattern on cardiometabolic disorders that predispose themselves to COVID-19 infection, it is important to know the dietary components with potential to improve disease-related outcomes. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the association of the Mediterranean Dietary Pattern and its components with the severity of COVID-19 symptoms. METHODOLOGY: Cross-sectional study with a sample of adults recovered from COVID-19 infection, residents of Funchal and unvaccinated. Data on sociodemographic variables, lifestyle, presence of chronic diseases, and intake of supplements food, self-perceived health status, COVID-19 symptoms and dietary consumption was collected using the Computer Assisted Telephone Interview method. Mediterranean Dietary Pattern adherence was obtained from the MEDAS (Mediterranean Diet Adherence Score) questionnaire. Simple and multiple logistic regression models were used to analyse the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and different metrics. RESULTS: A total of 541 adults were included in the study, 60.0% were female and 53.9% were 40-59 years old. Data show that 15.7% of the participants were asymptomatic for COVID-19 infection and 26.9% had severe symptoms. A strong adherence to Mediterranean Dietary Pattern was found in 14.8% of the participants, and it was significantly higher among the asymptomatic participants than those who reported mild or severe symptoms. A low ingestion of red/ processed meats, fats (butter/cream/margarine), commercial pastry and carbonated/ sugar-sweetened drinks, as well as consumption of poultry more than red meat, was associated with less severe COVID-19 symptoms, after adjustment for sex, age and education level. Participants who reported an adequate consumption of olive oil (OR=0.47; 95% CI: 0.25-0.88) and vegetables (OR=0.57; 95% CI: 0.35-0.94) were less likely to experience any symptoms of disease. Nevertheless, results were not consistent when several items, associated in bivariate analysis and in unadjusted logistic regression models, were taken into consideration. CONCLUSIONS: Adherence to Mediterranean Dietary Pattern, in particular adequate consumption of olive oil and vegetables, and limited ingestion of commercial pastry, red/ processed meat, fats and carbonated/ sugar-sweetened drinks, was associated with less severe symptoms of COVID-19 infection.

We review recent optical fiber transmission system demonstrations using space-division multiplexing for data rates of more than one petabit/s. We further discuss switching architectures suitable for petabit/s networks.

It is our great honor to invite you to the 17th annual Asia Joint Conference on Information Security 2022 (abbreviated as AsiaJCIS 2022) that will be held in the Hebei University in Heibei, China on August 15- 16, 2022, as well as virtually due to global COVID-19 pandemic.

A new Phased Array Radar (PAR) system for meteorological application has been developed by Toshiba Corporation and Osaka University under a grant of NICT, and installed in Osaka University, Japan in 2012. The PAR system has the unique capability of scanning the whole sky with 100 m and 10 to 30-second resolution up to 60 km. The system adopts the digital beam forming technique for elevation scanning and mechanically rotates the array antenna in azimuth direction within 10 to 30 seconds. The radar transmits a broad beam of several degrees with 24 antenna elements and receives the back scattered signal with 128 elements digitizing at each element. Then, by digitally forming the beam in the signal processor, the fast scanning is realized. After the installation of the PAR, SIP project has started to develop a new PAR with dual polarimetric capabilities, which was installed in Tokyo metropolitan area in 2017. Within the project, studies are being conducted to perform very short predictions of torrential rainfall events with deep neural networks.

In this paper, we describe KreolMorisienMT, a dataset for benchmarking machine translation quality of Mauritian Creole.Mauritian Creole (Kreol Morisien) is a French-based creole and a lingua franca of the Republic of Mauritius.KreolMorisienMT consists of a parallel corpus between English and Kreol Morisien, French and Kreol Morisien and a monolingual corpus for Kreol Morisien.We first give an overview of Kreol Morisien and then describe the steps taken to create the corpora.Thereafter, we benchmark Kreol MorisienEnglish and Kreol MorisienFrench models leveraging pre-trained models and multilingual transfer learning.Human evaluation reveals our systems' high translation quality.

<p>We examine impacts of geomagnetic activity on CO<sub>2</sub>-driven trend in the Ionosphere and Thermosphere (IT) using the GAIA whole atmosphere model. The model reveals three salient features. (1) Geomagnetic activities usually weakens the CO<sub>2</sub>-driven trend at a fixed altitude. Among the IT parameters analyzed, the thermosphere mass density is the most robust indicator for CO<sub>2</sub> cooling effect even with geomagnetic activity influences. (2) Geomagnetic activities can either strengthen or weaken the CO<sub>2</sub>-driven trend in hmF2 and NmF2, depending on local time and latitudes. This renders the widely used linear fitting methods invalid for removing geomagnetic effects from observations. (3) An interdependency exists between the efficiency of CO<sub>2</sub> forcing and geomagnetic forcing, with the former enhances at lower geomagnetic activity level, while the latter enhances at higher CO<sub>2</sub> concentration. This could imply that the CO<sub>2</sub>-driven trend would accelerate in periods of declining geomagnetic activity, while magnetic storms may have larger space weather impacts in the future with increasing CO<sub>2</sub>. These findings provide a preliminary model framework to understand interactions between the CO<sub>2</sub> forcing from below and the geomagnetic forcing from above.</p>