Abstract

The majority of the materials that survive from ancient Egyptian material culture are made of stones that were utilized for construction, jewellery, ornamentation, and practical purposes. These primarily originated from the Eastern and Nile Valley Deserts (some from the Western Desert as well), where more than 200 quarries dating from the Late Predynastic to the Late Roman periods have been found. These span around 3500 years. Up until the Late Period, when iron tools took the place of stone tools, the harder stones (almost all volcanic and metamorphic rocks, silicified sandstone, and chert) were mined using stone tools with the help of fire settings and wood levers. During the Dynastic Period, the softer stones (mostly limestone, sandstone, and quartzite) were removed using copper and then bronze picks and chisels; by the end of the Late Period, iron tools had once more taken the place of the earlier ones. The bigger blocks of quarried stone were hauled on sledges, typically over built roads, and possibly pushed by teams of men to the building sites or the Nile River for shipping until the Greco-Roman Period, when appropriate roads and wagons tough enough to carry them appeared. In addition to serving as supplies of stone, old quarries are also important archaeological sites that contain ruins and other cultural artifacts. Their unique viewpoint on life in ancient Egypt makes them worthy of study and preservation. The current study provides a thorough overview of the quarrying techniques used by the ancient Egyptians to differentiate between “soft-stones” (limestone, sandstone, travertine, anhydrite, gypsum, and soapstone) and “hardstones”, which are essentially igneous and metamorphic rocks plus silicified sandstone and chert.

Abstract

Ṣuġhrā Humāyūñ Mirzā (1884–1958) was a reformer, journalist, writer and traveller from the erstwhile princely state of Haidarābād, Dakkan. She wrote prolifically and used her fiction and non-fiction as a vehicle for her reformist ideas and objectives. However, scholarly focus on Ṣuġhrā Begum’s reformist work alone risks dismissal of her literary creativity and innovation. This paper aims to address this gap through an analysis of the narrative and stylistic features of Ṣuġhrā Begum’s Urdū novel, Mohinī (1929). I suggest a reading of this text on its own terms, i.e. one that emerges from the text and the motivations of its author, rather than through measurements with standard—usually Western—yardsticks or other assumptions about Ṣuġhrā Begum’s ostensibly singular priorities. Instead, I argue that Mohinī should be read in the context of the development of the Urdū novel, which was taking shape through the encounter between Western modes of representation made prominent through colonialism and existing Indian storytelling traditions, such as the qiṣṣāh. In the process, this paper expands the scholarship on this writer by offering a study of the creative features of her fiction and calls for the imagination of South Asian and wider Persianate print realisms that are not bound by rationalist epistemologies and encapsulate broader systems of knowledge.

Abstract

The recently proposed Transaction Fee Mechanism (TFM) literature studies the strategic interaction between the miner of a block and the transaction creators (or users) in a blockchain. In a TFM, the miner includes transactions that maximize its utility while users submit fees for a slot in the block. The existing TFM literature focuses on satisfying standard incentive properties - which may limit widespread adoption. We argue that a TFM is "fair" to the transaction creators if it satisfies specific notions, namely Zero-fee Transaction Inclusion and Monotonicity. First, we prove that one generally cannot ensure both these properties and prevent a miner's strategic manipulation. We also show that existing TFMs either do not satisfy these notions or do so at a high cost to the miners' utility. As such, we introduce a novel TFM using on-chain randomness - rTFM. We prove that rTFM guarantees incentive compatibility for miners and users while satisfying our novel fairness notions.

Abstract

Francesco Casetti recalling Andre Bazin, suggests in “The Relocation of Cinema” that the important question now, after a convergence of media systems is where, not necessarily what, is cinema. To fine tune this question, what is cinema now that it is everywhere? How and why do we recognise it such? The relocation of cinema away from public screenings to the viewership afforded by digital technologies of proliferation has reterritorialized a new form of spectatorship, allowing filmmakers to tell stories otherwise deemed too risky/risqué and attempt to re/claim a language of social and political critique. All productions circulate in and acknowledge new globalities, changed sexual and power relations of image cultures and the traction afforded to a deterritorialized screening space. However, they are bound by the exigencies of protecting and nurturing a particularly middle-class urban diasporic spectator from the vicissitudes of “too much critique.” This paper shall look at three texts from three different modes of recalling and “doing” Indian cinema in the digital age – short film Juice (Neeraj Ghaywan, 2017), limited release Is Love Enough? Sir (Rohena Gera, 2018) and top-grosser Laapataa Ladies (Lost Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2024). The three films engage with a particularly Indian iteration of class and gendered labour. This paper shall read these films to understand the new freedoms and limits made possible in these films that are located in distinctly different ambits of production and circulation. It shall interrogate the ways in which these productions are recalled as cinema. Using Walter Benjamin’s distinction between Apparat (the material basis of a medium) and Medium (the way in which this material basis organizes our experiences) I shall think through how the new cultural form that is the digital medium of cinema hold old forms social organization in relations of power.

Abstract

LSD and Anukul: An account of what it feels like to live in the early 21st century Keywords: Cinema, Digital technology, Affect Vivian Sobchack suggests in talking about post-cinema, “Insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence.” That is to say, as they have mediated and represented our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, photographic, cinematic, and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed. This paper shall look at the particular articulation of this formation of a self in a digital culture of cinema and cinema-like technologies. It shall consider two films – short Anukul (Sujoy Ghosh, 2017) and Love, Sex aur Dhokha (Dibakar Banerjee, 2010) to suggest that digital technologies of cultural production create affective maps. These film and video works are expressive: in the ways that they give voice (give sounds and images) to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in particular. The digital then in these instances, lies at the very heart of social production, circulation, and distribution. It generates subjectivity, and plays a crucial role in the valorization of capital.

Abstract

In today’s digital age, access to knowledge and information is crucial for societal growth. Although widespread resources like Wikipedia exist, there is still a linguistic barrier to breakdown for low-resource languages. In India, millions of individuals still lack access to reliable information from Wikipedia because they are only proficient in their regional language. To address this gap, our work focuses on enhancing the content and digital footprint of multiple Indian languages. The primary objective of our work is to improve knowledge accessibility by generating a substantial volume of high-quality Wikipedia articles in Telugu, a widely spoken language in India with around 95.7 million native speakers. Our work aims to create Wikipedia articles and also ensures that each article meets necessary quality standards such as a minimum word count, inclusion of images for reference, and an infobox. Our work also adheres to the five core principles of Wikipedia. We streamline our article generation process, leveraging NLP techniques such as translation, transliteration, and template generation and incorporating human intervention when necessary. Our contribution is a collection of 8,929 articles in the movie domain, now ready to be published on Telugu Wikipedia.

Abstract

Air Smart Vehicular Networks (ASVNs) have become increasingly essentials in military and commercial industries in recent years, where drones are deployed to interact among each other via wireless medium in airspace due to their agility and versatility. ASVNs can form a closed loop from data perception to final execution by integrating communication devices, computation tools, and control modules. However, the used unencrypted and publicly available navigational signals like Global Positioning System (GPS) and communication over (public) insecure Internet connections, including wireless networks and WiFi, make ASVNs vulnerable to security breaches. Attackers can easily gain access to a drone's configuration and take control remotely, by launching various attacks such as GPS spoofing, false sensor data injection, maldrone malware injection, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle, Denial-of-Service (DoS), replay, forgery, and Skyjack attacks. This paper proposes a robust and efficient multi-factor biometric-based security mechanism using blockchain as a service to address the security and privacy breaches in ASVNs. A comparative study demonstrates that the proposed scheme provides superior security and better functionality features with low communication and computation overheads as compared to the existing analogous schemes. The feasibility of the proposed scheme in real-life drone applications is also demonstrated through a real-time testbed and blockchain simulation. Furthermore, a detailed security analysis using the automated software validation tool, namely Scyther, verifies the proposed scheme's significant level of security

Abstract

Owing to the growth of the intelligent Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the notion of the Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) has emerged. SIoV is based on the intelligent IoV combined with social needs, and it uses existing vehicle self-organizing network technologies to enable in-vehicle social networking platforms. The rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an explosion in the number of in-vehicle electronic devices, external facilities, vehicles, and a massive amount of real-time data generated by these vehicles, devices, drivers, passengers, and other social relationships. This explosion has put tremendous load pressure on servers; hence, researchers have started to apply fog computing to SIoV to spread server overload. However, there are still a number of risks and challenges associated with SIoV. Therefore, we propose an authentication scheme for fog computing-enabled SIoV that guarantees user anonymity and security. Detailed security analysis proves that the proposed scheme can secure against known attacks. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our scheme, and the results show that it has excellent security, computation, and communication performances.

Abstract

The key factor accelerating the development of intelligent transportation and reduced traffic congestion is the vehicle ad hoc network (VANET). However, the swift upsurge in the diversity of vehicles puts the development of the vehicle network's safety system through plentiful glitches. To receive the messages promptly, attain the confidentiality of vehicle identity, and authentication swiftly in VANET, we present a new identity-based aggregate signature (IBAGS) system using the lattices. The proposed lattice-based method presented in this article combines the batch verification and aggregate signature scheme (ASS), which finishes the authentication of several vehicular units and aggregates multiple users' signatures into a single (compact) signature. This boosts the competence of the verification process. Furthermore, the vehicle pseudo-identities are also utilized to meet the goals of vehicle identity and privacy protection. Finally, dependable cloud storage technology efficiently enables the secure storing of message signatures. This article demonstrates the lower storage overhead and increases authentication efficiency while maintaining security compared to similar competing schemes.

Abstract

The rise of smart cities is directly connected to the increasing use of vehicles. The growing vehicle utilization has driven the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), facilitating instant information exchange among vehicles. The system provides essential information regarding road conditions, traffic patterns, and more relevant data. VANETs encompass two fundamental categories of communication exchanges, namely Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I). V2I technology facilitates the integration of cars and transportation infrastructure, enabling effective communication between vehicles and infrastructure. Nevertheless, the potential of V2I communication has various security concerns arising from prevalent security threats. Current authentication techniques encounter challenges regarding complexity, security, and privacy considerations. We designed a hash-based lightweight and anonymous authentication scheme to address the aforementioned restrictions and enhance the effectiveness of authentication in V2I architecture. This scheme effectively combines identity, password, and bio-metric to enhance resistance against impersonation, denial of service, and privileged insider attacks. The devised scheme distinguishes itself by a comparative analysis and security proofs, highlighting its superior capability in guaranteeing secure authentication in V2I communication. The comprehensive security analysis conducted formally and informally showcases the robustness of the proposed solution against several threats. The performance evaluation results show that our scheme demonstrates a decrease in the computational cost of 51.40% approximately and a reduction in communication overhead of around 22.57%. These results establish the efficiency and scalability of the proposed scheme as a viable solution for V2I architecture.