Developer Prompts in Practice: An Empirical Study of Bias, Security, and Optimization

REVIEWS 123 could not have been bettered. While Deletant has a long establishedrecord for his work on Romania, dating back to the Communist era and Nicolai Ceau?escu's Securitate, the excellent Kieran Williams is venturing into relativelynew territory.Together, they explore the territorywith the greatest accomplishment.The authorshave traced the developments surroundingthe security apparatusesunder consideration in some detail using open sources and have produced a strong empirical and comparative study of Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakiaand theirCommunist antecedents. There is no equivalentbook, so it seems almostpointlessto saythatthisbook is the best of its kind but its kind should be understood to be a broader class than merely books on these formerCommunist countries'securityand intelligence services. It is an excellent book as a study of Communist and former Communist countries and it is an excellent book as a study of security and intelligence services.Indeed, one of its notable strengthsis the fine discussion given to the use of the terms 'security' and 'intelligence.' The conceptual approach here shows understandingandjudgement. These passagescould or shouldbe thebasisforseriousdiscussionon allcoursesdealingwithintelligence and securityaffairs not because their intrinsicquality and strength makes them right,butbecause theyaddressallthe rightangles.Not onlyis thevolume intellectuallysharp,but it is also compelling and contemporary.In particular, it is to the authors' credit that developments such as weak links in the newly enlarged NATO are covered (for example, there was a problem during the Kosovo operations in I999, when Pragueproved to be an embarrassmentby giving away vital information on those operations, on Iraq and on personnel from other countries notably the UK). No sooner had the Czech Republic joined the Alliance than it was demonstrating precisely the problems faced in former Communist countries in making the transition to democracy and to NATO and the EU. The authors not only get this into the book and get it right, but they also manage to explain it and situate it in a context of internal rivalries. This is testimony to the calibre of the authors and the fullness and reliability of an exemplary volume. This is one of those excellent volumes that perhaps too few people will read, finding themselves put off by the 'secret' subject matter. They should not be: this is a model book in terms of conceptual command and of comparative empirical scope. It would be hard to better and really ought to be read widely by all interested in the countries covered, in the study of former Communist countries in Europe and their westward transition, and in the study of intelligence and security services in their social-political context. It might also usefully be read by anyone interested in how to write an academic volume on a difficult and contemporary subject of any kind. king's CollegeLondoni JAMES Gow Moroney, J. D. P., Kuzio T. and Molchanov M. (eds). Ukrainian Foreign and Security Policy. Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives. Praeger, Westport, CT, and London, 2002. 298 Pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. [58.50. THERE are now many descriptive,essentiallychronological books on Ukrainian foreignpolicy on the market.This volume, however, claims its raison d'etre 124 SEER, 82, I, 2004 isthatit 'examinesthe orientationand trendsof Ukraine'sforeignand security policy from the perspective of severaldifferentand often opposing schools of international relations theory. It is, in short, an attempt to link area studies and internationalrelationstheory througha focus on Ukraine'sforeignpolicy orientation' (pp. 2-3). The contributors indeed draw on a variety of IR theories, although most incline to 'constructivism' over 'realism'. On the whole, the book sensiblyavoidsseekingan artificiallynarrowedconsensusand there is much that is interestingand useful amongst the conflictingviews (or, as Moroney puts it on page 7, 'widearrayof plausibleperspectives')expressed in the volume. Some contributors claim to see an underlying consistency in Ukraine's foreign policy since I99i; to others 'Ukrainian foreign policy is that of oscillation' (p. 227). Some see that consistency as maintaining an underlying pro-Western course; others see an inevitable balancing act. However, the theoretical pluralismencouraged by the editors does not necessarilyproduce divergent opinions given the constraining reality of Ukrainian circumstance . As Paul D'Anieri wisely points out, 'the same policy patternsseem to validate both power politics and constructivistapproaches. Currently, both internal identity politics and external geopolitics motivate Ukraine towards the same policy:workto establishclose...

Needs assessment for the establishment of a Masters of Arts program in international studies with a concentration in international security and a specialization in international terrorism

Electronic mail is one of the oldest and widely used services in the Internet. In this paper, an empirical study of the security properties of email server communication within the German IP address space range is presented. Instead of investigating end-user security or end-to-end encryption, we focus on the connections between SMTP servers relying on transport layer security. We analyze the involved ciphers suites, the certificates used and certificate authorities, and the behavior of email providers when communicating with improperly secured email servers. Conclusions drawn from this analysis lead to several recommendations to mitigate the security issues currently present in the email system as it is deployed in the Internet.

Smart contract decompilers, converting smart contract bytecode into smart contract source code, have been used extensively in many scenarios such as binary code analysis, reverse engineering, and security studies. However, existing studies, as well as industrial engineering practices, all assumed that smart contract decompilers are reliable and trustworthy, to generate correct and semantically equivalent source code from binaries. Unfortunately, whether such an assumption truly holds in practice is still unknown.In this paper, we conduct, to the best of our knowledge, the first and most comprehensive large-scale empirical study of smart contract decompilers, to gain an understanding of the reliability, limitations, and remaining research challenges of state-of-the-art smart contract decompilation tools. We first designed and implemented a software prototype SOLINSIGHT, then used it to study 5 state-of-the-art smart contract decompilers. We obtained important findings and insights from empirical results, such as: 1) we proposed 3 root causes leading to decompiler failures; 2) we revealed 2 reasons hurting performance; 3) we identified 3 root causes affecting decompilation effectiveness; 4) we proposed a measurement metric for completeness; and 5) we investigated the resilience of contract decompilers against program transformations. We suggest that: 1) decompiler builders should enhance decompilers in terms of effectiveness, performance, and completeness; and 2) security researchers should select appropriate decompilers based on the suggestions in this study. We believe these findings and suggestions will help decompiler builders, contract developers, and security researchers, by providing better guidelines for contract decompiler studies.

The article considers approaches to the study of psychological security of the individual, reveals the concept of uncertainty. On the basis of theoretical analysis, indicators of psychological security of the teacher's personality are identified. An empirical study was conducted on a sample of 672 people, 631 of them are educators and 31 representatives of administrative and managerial per-sonnel of higher educational organizations from nine federal districts of the Russian Federation. The results of an empirical study are presented, it is revealed that the most significant indicators in the structure of psychological security are “psychological health”, “a prosperous socio-psychological atmosphere in the family”, “a prosperous socio-psychological atmosphere in the working/educational team”, “the absence of psychological violence”, sexual and age-related features in the evaluation of psychological safety indicators. The factor analysis of the obtained research data revealed 5 compo-nents in the structure of psychological security: Self-regulation in conditions of uncertainty, External security, Professional efficiency, Socio-psychological capital, Psychological health.

It is necessary to adjust the contemporary perception of national defense in accord with the transformation of the spatiotemporal factors since the external threats with the nature of the use of force are no longer the only source that leads to national insecurity or social instability. While trade liberalization is establishing a closed interaction and interdependence among states, conflicts are inevitable because of the higher possibility of friction and antagonism emerging from either different countries or varied groups within one state. Despite the nonmilitary characteristic of conflicts caused by trade liberalization, this paper, however, argues that the understanding of it cannot make sense without the concern about national security as trade liberalization exerts its solid influence on national security. Based on the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) with the movement that aimed at warning the government attempting to pass the controversial bill in the Legislative Yuan this March, this paper explains the relationship between the signing of free trade agreement and affairs related to security studies from the perspectives of ＂legal order＂ and ＂distributive justice＂. Further, in light of the misunderstanding of medical industry as an example, the paper offers one empirical case study with simplification and reliability, which shows the backfire deriving from trade liberalization as well as its downside to national security.

Android apps include third-party native libraries to increase performance and to reuse functionality. Native code is directly executed from apps through the Java Native Interface or the Android Native Development Kit. Android developers add precompiled native libraries to their projects, enabling their use. Unfortunately, developers often struggle or simply neglect to update these libraries in a timely manner. This results in the continuous use of outdated native libraries with unpatched security vulnerabilities years after patches became available. To further understand such phenomena, we study the security updates in native libraries in the most popular 200 free apps on Google Play from Sept. 2013 to May 2020. A core difficulty we face in this study is the identification of libraries and their versions. Developers often rename or modify libraries, making their identification challenging. We create an approach called LibRARIAN (LibRAry veRsion IdentificAtioN) that accurately identifies native libraries and their versions as found in Android apps based on our novel similarity metric bin2sim. LibRARIAN leverages different features extracted from libraries based on their metadata and identifying strings in read-only sections. We discovered 53/200 popular apps (26.5%) with vulnerable versions with known CVEs between Sept. 2013 and May 2020, with 14 of those apps remaining vulnerable. We find that app developers took, on average, 528.71 ±40.20 days to apply security patches, while library developers release a security patch after 54.59 ± 8.12 days---a 10 times slower rate of update.

At first glance, acute grief would not seem to be a medical or psychiatric disorder in the strict sense of the word but rather a normal reaction to a distressing situation. However, the understanding of reactions to traumatic experiences whether or not they represent clear-cut neuroses has become of ever-increasing importance to the psychiatrist. Bereavement or the sudden cessation of social interaction seems to be of special interest because it is often cited among the alleged psychogenic factors in psychosomatic disorders. The enormous increase in grief reactions due to war casualties, furthermore, demands an evaluation of their probable effect on the mental and physical health of our population. The points to be made in this paper are as follows: i. Acute grief is a definite syndrome with psychological and somatic symptomatology. 2. This syndrome may appear immediately after a crisis; it may be delayed; it may be exaggerated or apparently al)sent. 3. In place of the typical syndrome there may appear distorted pictures, each of which represents one special aspect of the grief syndrome. 4. By appropriate techniques these distorted pictures can be successfully transformed into a normal grief reaction with resolution. Our observations comprise tot patients. Included are (i) psychoneurotic patients who lost a relative during the course of treatment, (2) relatives of patients who uied in the hospital, (3) bereaved disaster victims (Cocoanut Grove Fire) and their close relatives, ( ) relatives of members of the armed forces.

Health care artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly integrated into clinical workflows, yet remain vulnerable to data-poisoning attacks. A small number of manipulated training samples can compromise AI models used for diagnosis, documentation, and resource allocation. Existing privacy regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the General Data Protection Regulation, may inadvertently complicate anomaly detection and cross-institutional auditing, thereby limiting visibility into adversarial activity. This study provides a comprehensive threat analysis of data poisoning vulnerabilities across major health care AI architectures. The goals are to (1) identify attack surfaces in clinical AI systems, (2) evaluate the feasibility and detectability of poisoning attacks analytically modeled in prior security research, and (3) propose a multilayered defense framework appropriate for health care settings. We synthesized empirical findings from 41 key security studies published between 2019 and 2025 and integrated them into an analytical threat-modeling framework specific to health care. We constructed 8 hypothetical yet technically grounded attack scenarios across 4 categories: (1) architecture-specific attacks on convolutional neural networks, large language models, and reinforcement learning agents (scenario A); (2) infrastructure exploitation in federated learning and clinical documentation pipelines (scenario B); (3) poisoning of critical resource allocation systems (scenario C); and (4) supply chain attacks affecting commercial foundation models (scenario D). Scenarios were aligned with realistic insider-access threat models and current clinical deployment practices. Multiple empirical studies demonstrate that attackers with access to as few as 100-500 poisoned samples can compromise health care AI systems, with attack success rates typically ≥60%. Critically, attack success depends on the absolute number of poisoned samples rather than their proportion of the training corpus, a finding that fundamentally challenges assumptions that larger datasets provide inherent protection. We estimate that detection delays commonly range from 6 to 12 months and may extend to years in distributed or privacy-constrained environments. Analytical scenarios highlight that (1) routine insider access creates numerous injection points across health care data infrastructure, (2) federated learning amplifies risks by obscuring attribution, and (3) supply chain compromises can simultaneously affect dozens to hundreds of institutions. Privacy regulations further complicate cross-patient correlation and model audit processes, substantially delaying the detection of subtle poisoning campaigns. Health care AI systems face significant security challenges that current regulatory frameworks and validation practices do not adequately address. We propose a multilayered defense strategy that combines ensemble disagreement monitoring, adversarial testing, privacy-preserving yet auditable mechanisms, and strengthened governance requirements. Ensuring patient safety may require a shift from opaque, high-performance models toward more interpretable and constraint-driven architectures with verifiable robustness guarantees.