A personalized information filtering system must specialize to current interests of the user and adapt as they change over time. It must also explore newer domains for potentially interesting information. A learning approach to building personalized information filtering systems is proposed. The system is designed as a collection of information filtering interface agents. Interface Agents are intelligent and autonomous computer programs which learn users' preferences and act on their behalf --- electronic personal assistants that automate tasks for the user. This thesis presents the basic framework for personalized information filtering agents, and describes an implementation, "Newt", built using the framework. Newt uses a keyword based filtering algorithm. The learning mechanisms used are relevance feedback and the genetic algorithm. The user interface is friendly and accessible to both naive as well as power users. Experimental

NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, has been labelled the most widely implemented elective protocol in the Internet. The growth of the Internet has meant more sites exchanging NNTP data. While the explosive growth in Usenet traffic places demands on all sites, the goal of fast network access puts particular demands on NNTP hosts. InterNetNews is an implementation of the Usenet transport layer designed to address this situation. It replaces the standard UNIX server architecture with a single long-running server that handles all incoming connections. It has proven to be quite successful, providing quick and efficient news transfer. Introduction Usenet is a distributed bulletin board system, built as a logical network on top of other networks and connections. By design, messages resemble standard Internet electronic mail messages as defined in RFC822 [Crocker82]. The Usenet message format is described in RFC1036 [Adams87]. This defines some additional headers. It also limits the v...

Future network intruders will probably use a zombie army to deliver many different attacks, rather than recruiting a new army per attack. We describe a Midgard Worm, which can build an extremely resilient and scalable overlay network to deliver attack code quickly. The worm's master could disseminate a 1-megabyte exploit or upgrade to a million zombies from any zombie in less than six minutes. Even if 80 % of the zombies were disinfected, 70 % of the remainder would remain connected and ready to receive new exploits. We discuss the basic design principles behind such a worm and methods of combating this kind of attack. 1.

this paper has been carried out by the MOCCA group (working group 2) of the European CO-TECH programme. CO-TECH is aimed at conducting basic research into CSCW and at establishing a Europe-wide CSCW community through a number of different working groups. 1. Introduction The label CSCW applies to a wide variety of applications including shared editors, audio/video-conferencing, computerised meeting rooms, group design tools, coauthoring systems, shared calendars, work-flow systems, voting tools, whiteboards and message-based conferencing. Many researchers have attempted to find a common underlying model which could be used to describe such applications and, ultimately, to construct a range of new ones [WINOGRAD 86, BOWERS 88, PANKOKE 89, BIGNOLI 91, KREIFELTS 92]. These models frequently provide a notation or language for "configuring" applications which can be interpreted by a general purpose underlying CSCW system. The goal of a CSCW system which supports a wide variety of cooperative uses is a worthy one. However, the idea that all CSCW applications can be built to a common model may prove to be impractical. CSCW applications provide diverse models and mechanisms aimed at supporting either a particular cooperative activity or a class of activities. It is likely that this multiplicity of approaches will persist and that users will exploit a range of different applications. Unfortunately cooperative applications are often unaware of the existence of other applications and provide few mechanisms for working in conjunction with other applications. This observation provides the motivation for the work presented in this paper. The goal is to make it possible to run many CSCW applications in an integrated way. However, instead of looking for a monolithic solution to CSCW, we...

NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, has been labelled the most widely implemented elective protocol in the Internet. The growth of the Internet has meant more sites exchanging NNTP data. While the explosive growth in Usenet traffic places demands on all sites, the goal of fast network access puts particular demands on NNTP hosts.

OPERATION ARGUMENT Read-args RESULT Read-result ERRORS { accessControlError, objectError, attributeError } ::=7 Read-args ::= SET { name [0] ObjectName, targetAttributes [1] SET OF AttributeType } Read-result ::= SET { 8 name [0] DistinguishedName, targetAttributes [1] Attributes, errors [2] Errors Figure 3: A Fragment of the ASN.1 Formal Notation In addition to existing formal textual notations such as the one above, the current working documents have also developed a simple set of drawing conventions to aid the modeling process. These simple conventions are currently being included in the descriptive Information Model and are shown in figure 4 so that they can be used throughout the rest of the paper.

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Abstract: This collection consists of four parts. Part 1 describes the main functions in Computer Conferencing Systems, both functions which almost all systems have, and functions only available in a few systems, but of value for distance education. For each function, the chapter describes how the function is implemented in some well-known conference systems and which terms are used to describe it. The chapter can be used as basis for a wish-list when procuring conference system software. Part 2 discusses how standards for Computer Conferencing can be developed and describe the status of work in this area within ISO and CCITT. Part 3 discusses whether the software design has any influence on user behaviour or not. Part 4 discusses how the computer conferencing software and data base can be used to perform research on social behaviour in the systems.