Xinyuan Wang Knihy

Focusing on the experiences of the older generation in Shanghai, this book examines how smartphone use intertwines with the significant societal shifts brought about by both the digital revolution and historical communist changes. It highlights the unique challenges and adaptations faced by seniors as they navigate modern technology amidst their rich cultural and political history.

This brief systematically examines the trackback problem and its interaction with low-latency anonymous communication. First, it provides an overview of the common techniques a network-based attack may use to hide its origin and identity. Then the authors explore the MIX-based anonymity and the building blocks of low-latency anonymous communication. Later chapters offer a comprehensive study of the timing attacks on low-latency anonymous communication, and analyze the fundamental limitations of low-latency anonymous communication from the perspective of timing-based covert channel. Suitable for professionals and researchers, Traceback and Anonymity is a close look at a key aspect of cyber security studies. Advanced-level students interested in cyber security techniques or networking will also find the content valuable.

Life outside the mobile phone is unbearable.’ Lily, 19, factory worker. Described as the biggest migration in human history, an estimated 250 million Chinese people have left their villages in recent decades to live and work in urban areas. Xinyuan Wang spent 15 months living among a community of these migrants in a small factory town in southeast China to track their use of social media. It was here she witnessed a second migration taking place: a movement from offline to online. As Wang argues, this is not simply a convenient analogy but represents the convergence of two phenomena as profound and consequential as each other, where the online world now provides a home for the migrant workers who feel otherwise ‘homeless’. Wang’s fascinating study explores the full range of preconceptions commonly held about Chinese people – their relationship with education, with family, with politics, with ‘home’ – and argues why, for this vast population, it is time to reassess what we think we know about contemporary China and the evolving role of social media.

An anthropological account of the experience of aging in the smartphone era in China.The current oldest generation in Shanghai was born at a time when the average household could not afford electric lights, but today they can turn their lights off using smartphone apps. Grounded in extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, Ageing with Smartphones in Urban China tackles the intersection between the “two revolutions” experienced by the older generation in the contemporary smartphone-based digital revolution and the earlier communist revolutions and argues that we can only understand the smartphone revolution if we first appreciate the long-term consequences of these people’s experiences during the communist revolutions. Supported by detailed ethnographic material, the observations and analysis here provide a panorama view of the social landscape of contemporary China, addressing such topics the digital and everyday life, aging and healthcare, intergenerational relations and family development, community building and grassroots organizations, collective memories, and political attitudes among ordinary Chinese people.