Lawful Trojan Horse

News outlets don't usually report on training methods in counter-cyberterrorism, particularly lawful trojan attacks. Instead they describe recent cyberterrorist attacks, or threats, or laws and regulations concerning internet privacy or identity theft. Yet Europe is looking to do just that to head-off the next major cyberattack by creating rules for how member states should react and respond. Several news outlets, for example, reported that Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) were using a Trojan Horse to access the smartphone data of suspected individuals before the information was encrypted. Although the urge to strike back may be palpable, hacking-back can put power back into the hands of the suspect. The consensus now is that government action is preferable to hacking-back at attackers.

Spinoza’s Conatus Undoes Bourdieu’s Habitus

Bourdieu’s intermittent allusions to Spinoza’s conatus disclose the weaknesses of his concept of habitus. A thorough inspection of his involvement with the Spinozist legacy reveals a long-lasting inconsistency, for he expects that conatus will assist him in both 1) grounding the habitus and solving the uncertainties that surround this notion by endorsing a strong conatus, impervious to the resistances it will eventually encounter; and 2) re-instating agency in the structuralist mindset, a program retrospectively admitted by Bourdieu in 1987 and bound to a weak conatus, exposed to the interfering resistance of exterior forces and thus determined by the interaction with contingent events. Bourdieu noticed this incongruity around 1993. At that time, he renounced to buttressing the habitus by means of the dynamizing character of conatus. So began the later evolution of his thought, linked to the antithetical demand of both a weak and a strong conatus, a request commanded in its turn by an overarching habitus. One outcome of this conflict is that agency can hardly be summoned if Bourdieu’s conception of a “strong” conatus prevails and the dispositions making up the habitus are irreversible. In contrast, both Bourdieu’s appeal to controlled improvisation, and the ensuing concept of strategy, demand a “weak” conatus. Overall, the notion of habitus has been dubbed “a Trojan Horse for determinism” and endorses in fact what might be called the “mythology of permanence,” that is, the historically long-held belief in an all-embracing everlastingness. Bourdieu’s use of Spinoza’s conatus, in sum, besides highlighting the immutable social reproduction entailed by the habitus, acts as a litmus test for the ambiguities and shortcomings of this notion.

Lightweight mediated semi-quantum key distribution protocol with a dishonest third party based on Bell states

The mediated semi-quantum key distribution (MSQKD) protocol is an important research issue that lets two classical participants share secret keys securely between each other with the help of a third party (TP). However, in the existing MSQKD protocols, there are two improvable issues, namely (1) the classical participants must be equipped with expensive detectors to avoid Trojan horse attacks and (2) the trustworthiness level of TP must be honest. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing MSQKD protocols can resolve both these issues. Therefore, this study takes Bell states as the quantum resource to propose a MSQKD protocol, in which the classical participants do not need a Trojan horse detector and the TP is dishonest. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is shown to be secure against well-known attacks and the classical participants only need two quantum capabilities. Therefore, in comparison to the existing MSQKD protocols, the proposed protocol is better practical.