Abstract A growing number of companies have announced zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to eliminate commodities produced at the expense forests from their supply chains. Translating these aspirational goals into forest conservation requires mapping and monitoring (M&M) systems that are technically adequate therefore credible, salient so they address needs decision makers, legitimate in...

Selective opening attacks against commitment schemes occur when the commitment scheme is repeated in parallel (or concurrently) and an adversary can choose depending on the commit-phase transcript to see the values and openings to some subset of the committed bits. Commitments are secure under such attacks if one can prove that the remaining, unopened commitments stay secret. We prove the follo...

Although remote-controlled robots flying over the Middle East and Central Asia now dominate reports on new military technologies, robots that are capable of detecting, identifying, and killing enemies on their own are quietly but steadily movingfrom the theoretical to the practical. The enormous difficulty in assigning responsibilities to humans and states for the actions ofthese machines grows...

Abstract Scientific responsibility has changed with the successful professionalization of science. Today, science is a privileged profession, one (tacit) management mandate for systematic knowledge acquisition. Within this framework, acts responsibility. This chapter reflects in German context. After Wold War 2, extraordinary scientists, which C.F. von Weizsäcker emphasized, referred to specifi...

We introduce and construct timed commitment schemes, an extension to the standard notion of commitments in which a potential forced opening phase permits the receiver to recover (with effort) the committed value without the help of the committer. An important application of our timed-commitment scheme is contract signing: two mutually suspicious parties wish to exchange signatures on a contract...