Virtual Worlds are 3-D constructs that exist in cyber-space. Participants operate within these constructs in the form of avatars. Although wirtual worlds appear at first to be merely games, in fact they can be used to carry out criminal conspiracies or terrorism. The book has the assistance of Akil Ar-Raqib is a researcher working in Beirut, Lebannon and Zurich, Switzerland.
The fusion between virtuality and reality has created a new quality of experience establishing metaverses and virtual worlds. Second Life, Twinity, Entropia Universe or Fregger have experienced rapid growth in recent years and show no signs of slowing down. Not only have countless companies discovered these “virtureal worlds” as marketplaces, but so have fraudsters and other criminals. In this book, European experts from different academic disciplines show how to meet the new challenges arising from virtual worlds. They discuss the reasons for and the impacts of these new forms of criminality as well as the necessity and means of combating them. Moreover, other fundamental issues are examined, such as the addictive potential of virtual-world use, media violence, and conflict resolution problems arising in the context of virtual worlds.
Virtual Worlds and E-Commerce: Technologies and Applications for Building Customer Relationships presents various opinions, judgments, and ideas on how the use of digitally created worlds is changing the face of e-commerce and extending the use of internet technologies to create a more immersive experience for customers. Containing current research on various aspects of the use of virtual worlds, this book includes a discussion of the elements of virtual worlds; the evolution of e-commerce to virtual commerce (v-commerce); the convergence of online games and virtual worlds; current examples of virtual worlds in use by various businesses, the military, and educational institutions; the economics of virtual worlds: discussions on legal, security and technological issues facing virtual worlds; a review of some human factor issues in virtual worlds; and the future of virtual worlds and e-commerce.
We’ve always dreamed of perfect places: Eden, heaven, Utopia. Imagine gambling without loss, love without heartbreak, sex without exposure, experience without risk. Welcome to the fascinating world of online virtual reality, the land of invented places and populations that is entered and inhabited every week by nearly fifty million people worldwide. Each participant creates a virtual body, works at virtual jobs, and makes virtual friends and family. In Second Lives, Tim Guest, an internationally acclaimed young journalist, takes us on a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass as he investigates one of the most bizarre phenomena of the twenty-first century. From Second Life to EverQuest and beyond, here are the computer-generated environments and characters that can easily become more engrossing and fulfilling than earthly existence. With the click of a mouse you can select eye color, face shape, height–you can even give yourself wings. Your character, or avatar, can build houses, make and sell works of art, earn money, get married and divorced. In this fascinating and groundbreaking book, Guest meets people who found meaningful love and friendship despite never having met in person, catches up with the companies that have used virtual worlds to make big money, investigates the U.S. military’s massive online global model that trains soldiers to fight anyone anywhere, and travels all the way to gaming-crazed Korea to get a taste for just how big this phenomenon really is. At first glance, these new computer-generated places seem free from trouble and sorrow. But Guest examines the dark side of this technology too, including the online criminals who plague imaginary worlds, from cyber mafiosos and prostitutes to real hackers and terrorists. It seems that one cannot escape greed, corruption, and human weakness–even inside a computer screen. Are these virtual worlds a way to enhance life or to escape it? Guest explores this question personally as he lets himself be transported into myriad parallel universes. By turns provocative, inspiring, and disturbing, Second Lives is a crucial book for this millennium. After all, real life is so twentieth century. Advance praise for Second Lives “Tim Guest is a young writer with the literary goods. My Life in Orange, his hit memoir of growing up in a commune, looked at his past; his riveting new book, Second Lives, looks at our future: the world of virtual reality and the spellbound people who inhabit it. The book is some kind of revelation–by turns compelling, chilling, and illuminating. Curious, intelligent, offbeat, and artful, Guest is at the beginning of a big career.” ——John Lahr, senior drama critic, The New Yorker, author of Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton Praise from England for Second Lives “An anthropological adventure but also Guest’s personal voyage . . . a fascinating portrait of rainbow landscapes and their inhabitants.” –Time Out London “Rich and colourful . . . an important mapping of a new social frontier.” –The Guardian “Remarkably timely.” –The Sunday Telegraph “Astonishing.” –The Sunday Times
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, serious concerns were raised on domestic and international security issues. Consequently, there has been considerable interest recently in technological strategies and resources to counter acts of terrorism. In this context, this book provides a state-of-the-art survey of the most recent advances in the field of counterterrorism and open source intelligence, demonstrating how various existing as well as novel tools and techniques can be applied in combating covert terrorist networks. A particular focus will be on future challenges of open source intelligence and perspectives on how to effectively operate in order to prevent terrorist activities.
The 18th issue of the Transactions on Computational Science journal, edited by Arjan Kuijper, is devoted to the topic of cyberworlds. The 14 papers in the volume constitute revised and extended versions of a selection of contributions presented at CW 2012, the International Conference on Cyberworlds, held in Darmstadt, Germany in September 2012. The selected papers span the areas of human path prediction, gesture-based interaction, rendering, valence-levels recognition, virtual collaborative spaces, virtual environment, emotional attention, virtual palpation, sketch-book design, animation, and avatar-face recognition.
The Palgrave Handbook of Criminal and Terrorism Financing Law focuses on how criminal and terrorist assets pose significant and unrelenting threats to the integrity, security, and stability of contemporary societies. In response to the funds generated by or for organised crime and transnational terrorism, strategies have been elaborated at national, regional, and international levels for laws, organisations and procedures, and economic systems. Reflecting on these strands, this handbook brings together leading experts from different jurisdictions across Europe, America, Asia, and Africa and from different disciplines, including law, criminology, political science, international studies, and business. The authors examine the institutional and legal responses, set within the context of both policy and practice, with a view to critiquing these actions on the grounds of effective delivery and compliance with legality and rights. In addition, the book draws upon the experiences of the many senior practitioners and policy-makers who participated in the research project which was funded by a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant. This comprehensive collection is a must-read for academics and practitioners alike with an interest in money laundering, terrorism financing, security, and international relations.
Criminal and terrorist organisations are increasingly turning to white collar crime such as fraud, e-crime, bribery, data and identity theft, in addition to more violent activities involving kidnap and ransom, narcotics and arms trafficking, to fund their activities and, in some cases pursue their cause. The choice of victims is global and indiscriminate. The modus operandi is continually mutating and increasing in sophistication; taking advantage of weaknesses in the system whether they be technological, legal or political. Countering these sources of threat finance is a shared challenge for governments, the military, NGOs, financial institutions and other businesses that may be targeted. Shima Keene’s Threat Finance offers new thinking to equip any organisation regardless of sector and geographical location, with the knowledge and tools to deploy effective counter measures to tackle the threat. To that end, she brings together a wide variety of perspectives - cultural, legal, economic and technological - to explain the sources, mechanisms and key intervention methodologies. The current environment continues to favour the criminal and the terrorist. Threat Finance is an essential read for fraud and security practitioners, financial regulators, policy-makers, intelligence officials, judges and barristers, law enforcement officers, and researchers in this field. Dr Keene offers an antidote to the lack of good, applied, research; shortcomings in in-house financial and forensic expertise; misdirected financial compliance schemes; legal and judicial idiosyncrasies; unhelpful organisation structures and poor communication. She argues convincingly for a coherent, aggressive, informed and cross-disciplinary approach to an ever changing and rapidly growing threat.
