Zinc oxide-decorated multiwalled carbon nanotubes: a selective electrochemical sensor for the detection of Pb(II) ion in aqueous media

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Multiwalled carbon nanotubes, due to high conductivity, stability, and large specific surface area, have a potential ability to promote...     

Effect of lysine incorporation,annealing and heat moisture treatment alone and in combination on the physico-chemical,retrogradation, rheological properties and in vitro digestibility of kithul (Caryota urens L.) starch

Physico-chemical, retrogradation, rheological properties and in vitro digestibility of lysine incorporated kithul starch modified by annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combinations were studied. LS-AHMT (annealed-heat moisture treated lysine incorporated kithul starch) exhibited lowest amylose leaching. LS-AHMT showed significantly (P ≤ 0.05) higher relative crystallinity. LS-ANS (annealed lysine incorporated kithul starch), LS-HMT (heat moisture treated lysine incorporated kithul starch) and LS-AHMT formed more weak gel by the effect of annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combination. LS-AHMT showed lowest pasting viscosities, G′ and G″ values among the modified kithul starch, which indicates its lower retrogradation properties. In vitro digestibility of kithul starch decreased after modifications and LS-ANS, LS-HMT and LS-AHMT showed significantly higher resistant starch content. The current study showed that annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combination on NS-LS (lysine incorporated kithul starch) effectively modified kithul starch properties.     

Use and Standardisation of Mauritian Creole in Electronically Mediated Communication1

New technologies have affected language use and attitudes in many communities. Kreol, a French‐lexified Creole and the nonstandardised first language of the majority of Mauritians, is now gaining ground as a written language in the specific context of electronic‐mediated communication. This has led to the emergence of writing norms among users of the language. These norms are founded on etymological phonemic and mixed conventions. This study based on data gathered through questionnaires analyses the attitudes of 66 young Mauritians towards the three orthographies used in electronically mediated communication and the standardisation of the language in new technologies. It also briefly discusses some of the spelling conventions used in Internet postings. I show that the etymological system is perceived as most readable, learnable and closest to French. Users believe that Kreol can act as a unifying factor among different ethnolinguistic groups in Mauritius. Responses also highlight the potential of users and electronic‐mediated communication in bringing about the standardisation of Kreol.     

Feature Selection Based Correlation Attack on HTTPS Secure Searching

Search engine plays an irreplaceable role in web information organizing and accessing. It is very common for Internet users to query a search engine when retrieving web information. Sensitive data about search engine user’s intentions or behavior can be inferred from his query phrases, the returned results pages, and the webpages he visits subsequently. In order to protect contents of communications from being eavesdropped, some search engines adopt HTTPS by default to provide bidirectional encryption. This only provides an encrypted channel between user and search engine, the majority of webpages indexed in search engines’ results pages are still on HTTP enabled websites and the contents of these webpages can be observed by attackers once the user click on these links. Imitating attackers, we propose a novel approach for attacking secure search through correlating analysis of encrypted search with unencrypted webpages. We show that a simple weighted TF–DF mechanism is sufficient for selecting guessing phrase candidates. Imitating search engine users, by querying these candidates and enumerating webpages indexed in results pages, we can hit the definite query phrases and meanwhile reconstruct user’s web-surfing trails through DNS-based URLs comparison and flow feature statistics-based network traffic analysis. In the experiment including 28 search phrases, we achieved 67.86% hit rate at first guess and 96.43% hit rate within three guesses. Our empirical research shows that HTTPS traffic can be correlated and de-anonymized through HTTP traffic and secured search of search engines are not always secure unless HTTPS by default enabled everywhere.     

High Performance and Energy Efficient Image Watermarking for Video Using a Mobile Device

Wireless Personal Communications - This article describes the basic information hiding technique that is most commonly used nowadays. As evolution in the communication media has made information...     

An improved surveillance video forgery detection technique using sensor pattern noise and correlation of noise residues

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Digital videos have become an important aspect of our lives lately, from a personal memorable to surveillance videos which can be presented in a court as an...     

FFT-ETM based distortion less and high payload image steganography

This paper is presenting a novel high capacity based imperceptible and robust image steganography technique for obscured communication. A considerable literature studied on this domain reveals distortion that drastically affects image quality. These techniques obscure covert data in most significant bits or least significant bits of host image via easy or unsystematic replacement. Such schemes are vulnerable to malevolent attacks like sample pair method, chi-square test, and quality of host image especially badly affected by MSB replacement. Furthermore, such schemes are lacking in carrying maximum covert information as the number of host image pixels and covert image pixels has the ratio 8:1. In our proposed scheme robust and imperceptibility feature is injected using insignificant pixel value divergence of host and a high capacity covert image. We have proposed frequency entropy method that compares frequencies of covert image and host image in FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) domain. The eminent rate of frequency ETM (Entropy Threshold Match) leads to good image quality and information carrying capability. Moreover, our proposed technique also encrypts the secret image in frequency domain with multi flipped permutated random key vector that provides robustness. Therefore, experiments exhibit that this scheme has improved signal to noise ratio and BPP (bits per pixel) in contrast to existing schemes.