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Many scholars treat the speeches in Deuteronomy as Persian-era pseudepigraphic compositions attributed to Moses to enhance their acceptance among readers and hearers. As part of a larger project this essay examines Moses' self-portrayal in Deuteronomy 3:12-26. After brief observations on the narrator's account of Moses' allotment of the Transjordanian territories of the Amorite kings Sihon and Og in Numbers 21:21-35, this study focuses on Moses' own recollections of that moment in Deuteronomy 3:12-21 and its sequel in 3:23-29. The results reinforce significant negative features that are observable earlier in this address (1:9-18; 1:22-25; and a critical refrain in 1:37; 3:26; 4:21). By casting a literary selfportrait incompatible with the increasing idealization of Moses in Israelite historical and literary traditions over time, they undermine theories of late pseudepigraphic composition of the first address (1:6-4:40). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the authorship claims of certain New Testament epistles have been defended by postulating the use of a secretary. According to the amanuensis hypothesis, secretaries in the Greco-Roman world were afforded varying degrees of compositional freedom during the letter-writing process. Proponents of this view maintain that such a consideration invalidates the practice of making authenticity judgments based on the style or even content of a given letter. To better understand the merits and limitations of the amanuensis hypothesis, this article outlines its earliest formulations, traces the development of its evidential basis, and examines the various ways it has been applied within modern authorship debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethereum is a digital asset whose transactions are kept on a decentralized, globally accessible ledger. An Ethereum Blockchain owner's real identity is concealed behind a pseudonym termed an address. Because of this, Ethereum is frequently used in illegal activities like gambling and ransomware attacks because it is popularly believed to offer the highest level of anonymity. As a result, it is necessary to categorize the various malicious cybercriminal users' activities and addresses in the Ethereum Blockchain. The Blockchain's public data enables an in-depth analysis. Using supervised machine learning models including linear, non-linear, and ensemble learning models based on malicious and non-malicious activities, the classification of Ethereum Blockchain addresses is carried out in this paper. In this research work, cross-validation accuracy, recall, precision, and f1-score have been employed for the assessment. Findings indicate that linear and non-linear machine learning approaches are superior to ensemble learning for classifying Ethereum Blockchain addresses. The results also show that it is possible to discover the Ethereum Blockchain addresses of malicious users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution I study Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels. I link Ferrante’s own pseudonymity with the way in which the classical author Vergil is represented in the series. An important theme in the novels is the appropriation of a female subjectivity by male authors. This theme features most prominently in the relation between Vergil and Queen Dido. Dido is a Leitmotif in Ferrante’s tetralogy: she is both a role model and an anti-model for the female protagonists, and the unconventional reading they give to her plays an important part throughout. Remarkably enough, Vergil is never mentioned as Dido’s ‘author’ whenever the protagonists discuss Dido. My suggestion is that Ferrante thus indicates that a text can only ever be open to interpretation once the author is ‘absent’ (or dead, in Barthes’ terms). Paradoxically, Vergil is precisely that, because he is such a classic: his text has become a reality on its own. This interpretation finds confirmation in the fact that Vergil does in fact occur in the novels, but only in the guise of Vergilius magus (the magician) of medieval legends. This shows that ‘biographical’ stories about authors do not necessarily have any relation to their work, nor help to interpret them: hence Ferrante’s own choice to be an absent author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many applications are equipped to utilize drones to provide various services to users in Internet of Drones (IoD) environments. In such applications, it is necessary to make a session key between a drone and a user to establish an authenticated and secure channel. It is also desirable to provide strong anonymity to increase user(drone) privacy. To provide robust anonymity, a protocol has to provide both pseudonymity and unlinkability. If a protocol provides only pseudonymity without unlinkability, user(drone) privacy could be breached by analyzing communication frequency or user(drone) movement. On the other hand, we consider drone capture attacks in the IoD, because if a drone is captured, the secret information of the drone could be revealed. To minimize the damage against the capturing attacks, a key exchange should provide the forward unlinkability as well as forward secrecy. Forward unlinkability means that even though the secret information of the drone is revealed, the unlinkability is guaranteed. In the paper, we suggest the first key agreement protocols providing both pseudonymity and forward unlinkability, whereas previous key agreement protocols provide only pseudonymity and unlinkability.

This research seeks to identify in which way the technodiscursive pseudonymity phenomenon materializes itself in the Twitter profile "Haddad Debochado" for the construction of the extimacy discourse encouraging the vaccination against Covid-19. For this to be possible, our research is based in the assumptions of the Digital Discourse Analysis, by Marie-Anne Paveau (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2021), that describes pseudonymity and presents the notion of extimacy in the native discourse of the web. We qualitatively analyzed the profile and one tweet of each week of June 2021, among those that were most representative according to the practice of pseudonymity for the creation of extimal tweets. The results show that the pseudonym "Haddad Debochado" reveals an "I" that encourages vaccination and is contrary to the ideas of the government of Jair Bolsonaro. We conclude that pseudonymity is a democratic and constitutive strategy of the extimacy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nearly unanimous consensus of modern scholarship is that 2 Thess. 2.2 refers to a letter either written or alleged to have been written by Paul, as captured in the most common rendering of the text, 'a letter allegedly from/by us'. The thesis of this article is that the relevant phrase, ὡς δι' ἡμῶν, does not serve to qualify 'letter' or the other two substantives that precede ('a spirit', 'a word'), but that it identifies Paul (the implied author) as a medium of information alternative to the other three media, thus posing a contrast between teaching conveyed through Paul and teaching conveyed through not-Paul, in a manner analogous to Gal. 1.8. In addition to the greater probability of this interpretation grammatically, this interpretation is offered as resolving further difficulties concerning 1 Thess. 2.2, as well as its relationship to 2.15. Evidence is also offered that the consensus view does not find unanimous support among ancient interpreters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to a symposium on The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown discusses Brown's late eighteenth-century magazine writing and the questions they raise around authorial attribution, literary anonymity and pseudonymity, and periodical composition, which point to new understandings of Brown's canonical works and early American literary culture more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical context of the Revelation of John is a much-debated issue. This article discusses the most popular theories concerning the dating and authorship of Revelation and finds them wanting. Rather than being a composition of an otherwise unknown prophet named John in the late first century, it is argued that Revelation should be regarded as one of many pseudonymous apocalypses that are composed in the early second century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are turning to social media platforms as research sites, and as platforms expand their communicative possibilities, they create more spaces for users to enact a multitude of identities. Most platforms allow users to have 'pseudonymous' identities; that is, they can engage in practices intended to facilitate nonidentifiable content. But pseudonymity presents a series of unique challenges to the principles of anonymisation in qualitative research. This article explores the slippery nature of dealing with pseudonymous social media users' personally identifiable data during research, framed around my responses to four questions I was asked when I applied for ethical approval to conduct research with pseudonymous fan communities on social media. The four questions concern: (Q1) changing notions of 'public' and 'private' forms of data; (Q2) identifying underage and therefore vulnerable participants online; (Q3) changes to the processes of obtaining informed consent from social media users; and (Q4) the risks social media research might bring to those conducting it. This article concludes by calling for qualitative researchers and Ethics Review Boards (ERBs) to engage with institutional ethics review across the duration of a project, or at the very least to advocate for ongoing consent as research progresses, especially for (but certainly not limited to) research involving pseudonymous social media users. The article aims to be useful to other researchers facing similar dilemmas. Indeed, given the popularity of pseudonymity on social media and the growing penetration of platforms across global demographics, a need for ethical discussions of this kind is surely set to increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wording of the thanksgiving formula in 2Thess 1,3 ("we ought to give thanks to God") departs from the pattern found in the undisputed Pauline letters ("I/we give thanks to God"). This article argues that previous explanations for the change fail to identify the cultural significance of the language of "obligation" ("ought"). This language indicates neither that the Thessalonians had denied Paul's previous praise, nor that the Thessalonians' merit induced stronger language than usual, nor that the author lacked a personal relationship with the audience and was not Paul. Rather, the language of "obligation," in connection with reference to the gift(s) of the gods / God and thanksgiving as a proper return, relates to ancient conceptions of benefaction as seen in in Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Mundell (1961. “A Theory of Optimum Currency Areas.” The American Economic Review 51 (4): 657–665) framed the fixed-versus-flexible exchange rate controversy in a novel way when he focused attention on currency areas and the ingredients necessary for a group of nations to form an optimal currency area (OCA). This paper proposes an analogous theory for cryptocurrencies, called optimal currency scope (OCS), and explains the conditions necessary for an OCS to exist. In contrast to an OCA, which is defined by its non-overlapping geographic areas, an OCS is defined by its multiple-overlapping attributes and the needs they solve, which we call scope. Scopes are not geographic and have fuzzy boundaries; so, the possibility of competing currencies in a single scope needs to be considered. The central issues surrounding an OCS are the optimal number and magnitude of currency attributes, rather than whether nations should adopt fixed versus fluctuating exchange rates. Similar to the findings since Mundell first introduced his OCA Theory, we find that the optimum number of cryptocurrency attributes and, therefore, the optimal number of cryptocurrencies must be determined empirically rather than theoretically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementing pseudonymity, key-management, non-repudiation and data minimisation features in isolated procedures is trivial. However, integrating all of them in one consistent architecture has several challenges to tackle. This work proposes data structures to represent Self-Sovereign Identities and to handle those features in a consolidated architecture. Key-management is constructed using secret sharing principles, capable of recovering from a lost or compromised key to a new one without losing track of the original account. Pseudonymity and data minimisation is established using anonymous profiles, showing different views of the same identity. Non-repudiation is contemplated in the profile disclosure process. Profiles are protected against tampering with the use of digital signatures and blockchain cryptographic constructions. All profiles and registries are controlled with a single asymmetric key pair that can be provided by a smart card. Flexible structures are defined that can be used to register claims, attestations, authorisation grants, user consents, or any other activities. All definitions take into consideration the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Name‐altering practices are common in many creative fields—pen names in literature, stage names in the performing arts, and aliases in music. More than just reflecting artistic habits or responding to the need for distinctive brands, these practices can also serve as test devices to probe, validate, and guide the artists' active participation in a cultural movement. At the same time, they constitute a powerful probe to negotiate the boundaries of a subculture, especially when its features are threatened by appropriation from the mass‐oriented culture. Drawing evidence from electronic music, a field where name‐altering practices proliferate, we outline dynamics of pseudonymity, polyonymy, and anonymity that surround the use of aliases. We argue that name‐altering practices are both a tool that artists use to probe the creative environment and a device to recursively put one's creative participation to the test. In the context of creative subcultures, name‐altering practices constitute a subtle but effective form of underground testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quantitative social media content analysis was conducted to examine the role of anonymity, imagined audience and impression management, and incivility in the context of a controversial Eurovision Song Contest win. User comments to posts featuring the artist's winning performance from Facebook and YouTube were culled and analyzed. Although comments about the singer's performance were predominantly positive on both platforms, non-performance-related comments were far more negative on Facebook than on YouTube. Though valence of the replies targeting other social media users and the Eurovision organization ranged from neutral to negative, as predicted by notions of imagined audience and impression management, YouTube comments were more negative than Facebook comments toward other users. YouTube comments also contained more profanity than Facebook comments. In terms of interacting with other users, YouTube comments more frequently targeted other users and used more profane language in doing so. Overall, the results suggest that anonymity may not necessarily promote negative commenting behaviors; however, the desire for impression management triggered by the nature of imaginary audience could influence social media user interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]