At a first sketch, the answer is: it depends on the circumstances. There is not a general rule that is always valid. Usually, we consider the e-mails as not trustable at all. They are plain text exchanged between servers without any kind of guarantee. E-mails as evidence are prone to cheating. Both the authenticity and the integrity of a generic e-mail file cannot be verified. The main reason is that the e-mail files could be easily forged. In some circumstances, the forgery could be very subtle and hard to identify. However, in some circumstances, both the authenticity and the integrity can be verified; without resorting to any invasive tool. Several e-mail servers may apply specific spam countermeasures that could help to verify the message. We point out a method to take advantage of these mechanisms for checking some properties of e-mail messages. Moreover, we sketch the conditions of applicability of this method. In some countries, such as in Italy, there is in place a so called Registered e-mail service, that provides by design e-mail integrity, authenticity, and date certainty. In that case no further methods are required.

This paper contains the first considerations of a computer scientist approaching the digital forensic. After some years of consultancies for both judges and parties I developed some thoughts that probably are worthwhile to share. Digital forensic is related to the specific laws of a state, therefore the worldwide computer science is somewhat confined by the national laws. Nevertheless, the basic principles and tools are still international. The ISO/IEC standards are an example of this scenario. A digital forensic expert needs to proficiently communicate with lawyers, that use a technical language, following different conceptual structures and reasoning. In my opinion, this interdisciplinary aspect is one of the most peculiar of this discipline.

We present a REST approach to build Health services on the Web. Our proposal originates by the necessity of evolving the current regional health service to accommodate emerging needs that are too complex to accomplish with the current system. The original system extends on the regional scale of Emilia-Romagna, and it is one of the most advanced in Italy. Our architecture inherits some of the basic Web methodologies and techniques to implement an highly scalable and flexible system that is capable to satisfy the current needs and their planned evolutions. Moreover, our approach should allow for an effortlessly addressing of future requirements not foreseen at the moment. Without revolutionizing the current IT infrastructure, our approach introduces a new paradigm that could be implemented by a sophisticated interface to access data and resources.

ABSTRACT The increase of wasted time and pollution due to vehicular traffic has paved the way to many different countermeasures, ranging from the enforcement of congestion tolls to the commercialization of vehicles powered by low‐emission hybrid engines. Advanced traveler information systems (ATISs), which are capable of supplying updated traffic information to all those citizens that are driving through city roads, represent a prominent approach to combat vehicular congestion. In brief, ATISs are concerned with collecting, processing, and disseminating traffic information, providing data that can be profitably exploited by an on‐board navigation system to compute the most convenient route to a given destination. Indeed, their role becomes progressively more relevant as their accuracy and reliability increases, thus encouraging more and more people to utilize them while driving. With this in mind, we devised a new congestion detection model that accurately estimates and forecasts the short‐term congestion state of a road without requiring any prior knowledge regarding any of its parameters. Such model can be easily integrated within an ATIS and usefully applied to any given road. The efficacy of our model is here proved through the results of several experiments, which witness the validity of our approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The ever-increasing processing power that can today support large scale and detailed simulations increased the depth of the research carried out on protocols and apps developed for single hop and multi-hop Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) environments. It is now possible, for example, to verify the effectiveness of peer-to-peer one-hop file exchange protocols between vehicles, while taking into account the effects that buildings have on point-to-point transmissions at street intersections, or also verify how a high density of vehicles can impact the transfer of multimedia information through multiple hops between passengers involved into an online game. However, what has not been possible so far, for the obvious reason that no highly dense VANETs in reality exists, is to effectively test any type of application or communication protocol in a real setting, especially for the scenarios concerned with multi-hop communications. But this may change, with the introduction of a creative approach to VANET research: we will here describe how it is possible to experiment with applications and protocols in scenarios that are close to reality, by simply using a few real vehicle resources. As an example of how this can be done, we will provide preliminary results from a set of experiments on a vehicular highway accident warning system, results that would have not been observable in reality without the adoption of our creative methodology.

Thanks to an ever increasing processing power that can today support advanced graphical capabilities within high bandwidth mobile devices, augmented reality technologies are now ubiquitous, finding profitable uses in a wide variety of scenarios. Augmented reality principles, in fact, can be beneficially put to good use within many types of mobile applications: for example, augmented city guides can properly display additional virtual objects that show how a monument was at the time of its construction (e.g., the Colosseum with the inclusion of its missing parts), or augmented games can add fictitious characters and objects to real world settings in proper places (e.g., Lara Croft in search of Bartoli in Venice). Nonetheless, the totality of such augmented mobile applications, to the best of our knowledge, limit the interactions that may occur to those that can happen between a single mobile user and the objects that are displayed on his/her mobile platform screen. In this work, we show that it is possible to devise a new interaction paradigm, augmenting augmented reality apps with the interactions that may occur between multiple users via the virtual objects displayed on multiple mobile platforms. In particular, we applied such ideas to the devise of a shooting game set in the 17thcentury to celebrate the 300thanniversary since the foundation of the Academy of Science of Bologna by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili. The paper describes and discusses the design choices and the technical issues at the basis of our system.

The specific features of inter-vehicular communications are allowing the deployment of a broad gamut of possible applications including traffic control, road safety and in-car entertainment. At the basis of all this lies the improvement of VANET-based transmission techniques that are becoming technologically mature. Within this context, in this paper we provide an experimental comparison between two of the most effectual algorithms whose aim is that of quickly broadcasting messages throughout a given platoon of vehicles. The most prominent characteristic of both the algorithms under investigation is that they were designed for wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, with in mind only realistic transmission conditions (that is, asymmetric and variable vehicles' transmission ranges). Even if both algorithms were conceived based on the idea to span application messages as far as possible, while minimizing the number of relaying vehicles, our extensive analysis demonstrates that one of the two outperforms the other.

We present an overview or the video games available at the Film Library of Bologna. This institution, in collaboration with the University of Bologna, has a whole collateral branch dedicated to the video games, as they can be considered a recreational activity somehow related to movies. This collection of video games conceptually starts from the ones that are strictly connected to movies, and then expands to a wider class of video games. A video game could be related with a movie either as its direct inspiration, its prequel or collateral plot, or also be created as a direct consequence of that movie. The expansion of the collection available in the Library includes a historical set of video games. In this paper we discuss the historical perspective of the relationship between technology and video games, providing a complete historical view of the video games by means of the titles and the consoles available in the Library. Several dedicated consoles are still in working conditions and could be used by the visitors of the Library.

Infrastructure networks like Internet have some coverage gaps (e.g. rural areas) where no service connectivity is provided. Cellular networks could be used in alternative but they usually associate their services with a usage cost. Nowadays, the growing number of mobile devices equipped with a wireless interface and the end-user trend to shift toward wireless technology has opened new possibilities for networking. Opportunistic networking seems a feasible solution in filling in these coverage gaps by providing service connectivity where it is not sustained by an infrastructure. In this context we provide a delay tolerant platform that ensures service connectivity where it is absent. Our approach follows the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) paradigm by implementing a store-and-forward communication model between mobile users and carrier entities (e.g. buses), where a user delegates the carrier a task (bundle), the carrier stores it locally and whenever service connectivity is available (e.g. wi-fi at the bus station) tries to accomplish it, successively notifying the user of the task output next time they encounter again.

The main idea behind this paper is to take advantage of game design and implementation to learn several principles of distributed systems. This approach represents the other end of the spectrum with respect to the usual meaning of edutainment. The educational part is the building of a game, instead of playing that game. This paper shows how several of the main principles of distributed systems have a “natural” mapping in distributed games, thus inducing their deep comprehension in the developers of the game. We discuss an experimentation that lasted several years, involving students of computer science, at the forth year of their curricula in our University. The course in distributed systems requires the design and implementation of a distributed game, and the students are requested to perform that task in small groups. The students are requested to design and implement a Web based game between peers, avoiding any form of centralization during the game playing. Moreover, the game has to be tolerant to some kind of faults, keeping coherent behavior for the correct players.

With the development of vehicular networks, it is possible to implement accident warning systems that directly (i.e., without any external supporting infrastructure) alert approaching vehicles. In this scenario, each vehicle is provided with a sensor that, under abnormal conditions, triggers an alarm message. A vehicle that receives this information: (a) warns the driver; and (b) relays such information to following vehicles for safety purposes. We here present an optimal algorithm for one dimensional (1D), multi-lane, strip-shaped portions of roads. It guarantees alarm messages are received along the minimum hop path, even when communications are asymmetric and transmission ranges vary from vehicle to vehicle. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm capable of reaching such performance under realistic wireless propagation assumptions.

We present a distributed algorithm to fast multi-hop message propagation for ad hoc vehicular networks (VANET). Our protocol obtains optimal performances in challenging scenarios which are likely in real situations, but that have been not extensively studied in the literature as they are complex to be tackled. In particular, the Farther Relay and Oracle for VANET (FROV) deals with asymmetric communications and varying transmission ranges. Even in this case, FROV broadcast any application message with the minimal number of hops. Moreover, FROV is both scalable with respect to the number of participating vehicles, and tolerant to faults and changes of membership of the platoon, vehicles that leave or join it. At the current state of development, our protocol is optimal in the case of unidimensional roads and we are studying its extension to a web of urban roads. This paper presents the preliminary results of simulations carried out to verify the main characteristics of FROV.

We show the main characteristics of both the AIDA auction service and a client for that service running on a mobile device. The AIDA system supports responsive and available auction services in a large scale distributed environment, such as the Internet. \nThe AIDA service allows for fast evolving auctions on the Internet. In this paper we present the main architectural challenges to implement a mobile client for AIDA. We propose the design of a client that can run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone. \nMoreover, our system provides the auctioneers with a simple mechanism to switch between computing platforms, such as mobile devices and desktop computers. The auctioneer can switch between several devices as long as those those can exchange a single and small file.

This paper discuss the design and implementation of an Architecture for Internet-based Distributed Auctions (AIDA). The AIDA system implements responsive and available auction services in a large scale distributed context, such as the Internet, by means of geographically distributed servers. AIDA can support fast auctions, whose duration could be as short as few tents of seconds. Moreover, AIDA does not suffer some drawbacks of the current online auctions, such as the "last minute bidding". Therefore, AIDA enables types of auction that are rarely implemented online; conversely, these are very common in traditional auctions. Further characteristics of AIDA are fault tolerance and scalability. The system can tolerate any predefined number of faults, both of servers and of network. The number of servers and the communication bandwidth increase linearly with respect to the number of clients.

Steganography is an historical technique to send secret messages embedded into carrier messages. The introduction of computers provided very sophisticated techniques to create carrier messages, to embed the secret, and to detect steganographic messages. \nThe smartphone devices are both popular and ubiquitous, and they can be used as an ``all-in-one'' device for steganography.The users can shoot photos, and use them as carrier message. By means of the computational capacity of the smartphones, the user can also embed and retrieve small messages into the photos stored into the device. \nMoreover, the user can securely communicate its secrets by means of sending and receiving MMS messages. \nThe Multimedia Messaging Service, MMS, is a common technique to exchange images in the actual scenario of cellular telephony. \nIn this paper we show the results of preliminary studies to test the feasibility of such an approach.

We present a hybrid approach to the scheduling of jobs in a distributed system where the critical response is the bandwidth to access stored data. Our approach supports the master-worker scheme, but could be applied to other cases of parallel computation over stored data. We tested our new approach under various circumstances and measured it performance by means of several metrics. We made comparisons of our approach with respect to other scheduling policies; it performed significantly better than the majority of cases, and in worst cases, it was as good as the best of the others.

We describe the architecture of a middleware system that exploits a novel technology to enhance the traditional pen and paper agenda. We describe the architecture of an application service handler to synchronize its digital agenda with its classical paper counterpart. A user may create, modify, or delete appointments in the paper agenda, and the system reproduces these modifications into the digital agenda. The system is almost transparent to the user. The same methodology has been applied to the address book of the agenda. Our system has as low an impact as possible to the classical users, whilst using state of the art technology. Our system allows the enhancement of the traditional paper agenda, transforming it into a proactive tool instead of a passive one.

The Nile system is a distributed environment for running very large, data-intensive applications across a network of commodity workstations. These applications process data from elementary particle collisions, generated by the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, and are used by physicists of the CLEO experiment. The applications have a simple data-parallel structure, and so Nile executes them using as much parallelism as is available. Nile currently runs at any single site. It is being used by alpha testers and is scheduled for beta release in March 1998. We describe how we are adapting this local-area Nile system to allow for wide-area, multiple site interactions. In particular, we consider the two problems of scaling and of fault tolerance.

Modern distributed systems consisting of powerful workstations and high-speed interconnection networks are an economical alternative to special-purpose supercomputers. The technical issues that need to be addressed in exploiting the parallelism inherent in a distributed system include heterogeneity, high-latency communication, fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing. Current software systems for parallel programming provide little or no automatic support towards these issues and require users to be experts in fault-tolerant distributed computing. The Paralex system is aimed at exploring the extent to which the parallel application programmer can be liberated from the complexities of distributed systems. Paralex is a complete programming environment and makes extensive use of graphics to define, edit, execute, and debug parallel scientific applications. All of the necessary code for distributing the computation across a network and replicating it to achieve fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing is automatically generated by the system. In this paper we give an overview of Paralex and present our experiences with a prototype implementation.

Modern distributed systems consisting of powerful workstations and high-speed interconnection networks are an economical alternative to special-purpose super computers. The technical issues that need to be addressed in exploiting the parallelism inherent in a distributed system include heterogeneity, high-latency communication, fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing. Current software systems for parallel programming provide little or no automatic support towards these issues and require users to be experts in fault-tolerant distributed computing. The Paralex system is aimed at exploring the extent to which the parallel application programmer can be liberated from the complexities of distributed systems. Paralex is a complete programming environment and makes extensive use of graphics to define, edit, execute and debug parallel scientific applications. All of the necessary code for distributing the computation across a network and replicating it to achieve fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing is automatically generated by the system. In this paper we give an overview of Paralex and present our experiences with a prototype implementation.