We used an iterative design process to develop a privacy label that presents to consumers the ways organizations collect, use, and share personal information. Many surveys have shown that consumers are concerned about online privacy, yet current mechanisms to present website privacy policies have not been successful. This research addresses the present gap in the communication and understanding of privacy policies, by creating an information design that improves the visual presentation and comprehensibility of privacy policies. Drawing from nutrition, warning, and energy labeling, as well as from the effort towards creating a standardized banking privacy notification, we present our process for constructing and refining a label tuned to privacy. This paper describes our design methodology; findings from two focus groups; and accuracy, timing, and likeability results from a laboratory study with 24 participants. Our study results demonstrate that compared to existing natural language privacy policies, the proposed privacy label allows participants to find information more quickly and accurately, and provides a more enjoyable information seeking experience.

The diagnosis of novel unidentified viral plant diseases can be problematic, as the conventional methods such as real‐time PCR or ELISA may be too specific to a particular species or even strain of a virus, whilst alternatives such as electron microscopy (EM) or sap inoculation of indicator species do not usually give species level diagnosis. Next‐generation sequencing (NGS) offers an alternative solution where sequence is generated in a non‐specific fashion and identification is based on similarity searching against GenBank. The conventional and NGS techniques were applied to a damaging and apparently new disease of maize, which was first identified in Kenya in 2011. ELISA and TEM provided negative results, whilst inoculation of other cereal species identified the presence of an unidentified sap transmissible virus. RNA was purified from material showing symptoms and sequenced using a Roche 454 GS‐FLX+. Database searching of the resulting sequence identified the presence of Maize chlorotic mottle virus and Sugarcane mosaic virus, a combination previously reported to cause maize lethal necrosis disease. Over 90% of both viral genome sequences were obtained, allowing strain characterization and the development of specific real‐time PCR assays which were used to confirm the presence of the virus in material with symptoms from six different fields in two different regions of Kenya. The availability of these assays should aid the assessment of the disease and may be used for routine diagnosis. The work shows that next‐generation sequencing is a valuable investigational technique for rapidly identifying potential disease‐causing agents such as viruses.

We introduce the Expandable Grid, a novel interaction technique for creating, editing, and viewing many types of security policies. Security policies, such as file permissions policies, have traditionally been displayed and edited in user interfaces based on a list of rules, each of which can only be viewed or edited in isolation. These list-of-rules interfaces cause problems for users when multiple rules interact, because the interfaces have no means of conveying the interactions amongst rules to users. Instead, users are left to figure out these rule interactions themselves. An Expandable Grid is an interactive matrix visualization designed to address the problems that list-of-rules interfaces have in conveying policies to users. This paper describes the Expandable Grid concept, shows a system using an Expandable Grid for setting file permissions in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system, and gives results of a user study involving 36 participants in which the Expandable Grid approach vastly outperformed the native Windows XP file-permissions interface on a broad range of policy-authoring tasks.

Comparative analyses were undertaken to characterize Xanthomonas campestris pv. musacearum, the causal agent of a wilt of enset and banana, and to assess its relatedness to other xanthomonads by fatty acid methyl esters, genomic fingerprinting using rep-PCR and partial nucleotide sequencing of the gyrase B gene. The results from all three analyses indicated that strains of X. campestris pv. musacearum are homogeneous and very similar to X. vasicola strains isolated from sugarcane and maize from Africa. Pathogenicity studies indicated that strains of X. vasicola pv. holcicola and X. vasicola from sugarcane induced no symptoms on banana, whereas X. campestris pv . musacearum produced severe disease. These data will support a future proposed reclassification of X. campestris pv. musacearum as X. vasicola pv . musacearum when more data are available.

Abstract. Online privacy policies are difficult to understand. Most privacy policies require a college reading level and an ability to decode legalistic, confusing, or jargon-laden phrases. Privacy researchers and industry groups have devised several standardized privacy policy formats to address these issues and help people compare policies. We evaluated three formats in this paper: layered policies, which present a short form with standardized components in addition to a full policy; the Privacy Finder privacy report, which standardizes the text descriptions of privacy practices in a brief bulleted format; and conventional non-standardized human-readable policies. We contrasted six companies' policies, deliberately selected to span the range from unusually readable to challenging. Based on the results of our online study of 749 Internet users, we found participants were not able to reliably understand company's privacy practices with any of the formats. Compared to natural language, participants were faster with standardized formats but at the expense of accuracy for layered policies. Privacy finder formats supported accuracy more than natural language for harder questions. Improved readability scores did not translate to improved performance. All formats and policies were similarly disliked. We discuss our findings as well as public policy implications.

Security may be compromised when humans make mistakes at the user interface. Cleartext is mistakenly sent to correspondents, sensitive files are left unprotected, and erroneously configured systems are left vulnerable to attackers. Such mistakes may be blamed on human error, but the regularity of human error suggests that mistakes may be preventable through better interface design. Certain user interface constructs drive users toward error, while others facilitate success.Two security-sensitive user interfaces were evaluated in a laboratory user study: the Windows XP file-permissions interface and an alternative interface, called Salmon, designed in accordance with an error-avoiding principle to counteract the misleading constructs in the XP interface. The alternative interface was found to be more dependable; it increased successful task completion by up to 300%, reduced commission of a class of errors by up to 94%, and provided a nearly 3x speed-up in task completion time. Moreover, users spent less time searching for information with the alternative interface, and a greater proportion of time on essential task steps. An explanatory theory in its early stages of development is presented.

Web browser warnings should help protect people from malware, phishing, and network attacks. Adhering to warnings keeps people safer online. Recent improvements in warning design have raised adherence rates, but they could still be higher. And prior work suggests many people still do not understand them. Thus, two challenges remain: increasing both comprehension and adherence rates. To dig deeper into user decision making and comprehension of warnings, we performed an experience sampling study of web browser security warnings, which involved surveying over 6,000 Chrome and Firefox users in situ to gather reasons for adhering or not to real warnings. We find these reasons are many and vary with context. Contrary to older prior work, we do not find a single dominant failure in modern warning design-like habituation-that prevents effective decisions. We conclude that further improvements to warnings will require solving a range of smaller contextual misunderstandings.

The complete genome sequence for an isolate of the Ugandan and Tanzanian strain types of Cassava brown streak virus have been determined using the novel approach of non-directed next generation sequencing. Comparison of the genome sequences revealed that CBSV is highly heterogeneous at the isolate level as well as the strain level. The isolate of the Ugandan strain was found to have a genome 9,070 nucleotides long coding for a polypeptide with 2,902 amino acid residues. The isolate of the Tanzanian strain was 9,008 nucleotides long and coded for a polypeptide with 2,916 amino acid residues. Nucleotide identity between the isolates across the genome was 76%, with protein encoding regions 57-77% and individual proteins had 65-91% amino acid similarity. In addition between the two strains four protein products (PIPO, CI, NIa-Vpg and coat protein) varied in size and an unusual HAM1-like protein, whilst of identical nucleotide length, was found to have the lowest homology. The implication of diversity of CBSV is discussed in the context of speciation, evolution, development of diagnostics, and breeding for resistance.