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Anonymity is one of the most controversial issues related to the Internet. It greatly encourages misdeeds such as piracy, defamation, and fraud. However, anonymity is important to protect the privacy of individuals and to support the freedom of speech. Identity escrow is a potential solution to achieving a balance between anonymity and identity. The basic idea is to utilize a two-tiered identity: the first-tier identity carries the minimal amount of information for normal use, and the second-tier identity bears precise information regarding the individual to be disclosed when necessary. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized identity escrow scheme called DECIDE. It has three identity tiers: anonymity, pseudonymity, and identity, and it has a high decentralization capability. We also present an analysis on three service models -online discussion community, whistleblowing, school networking -to explore the public acceptance of the proposed scheme.

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Due to the growing volume of digital image data in recent years, the demand and necessity for a system that can manage large image sets are rising. It is vital to create sophisticated retrieval functions in order to enhance the user's convenience. A lot of attention is now being placed on feature-based similarity retrieval which employs features extracted automatically from images. We have been carrying out research on the image retrieval system called ExSight which makes use of featurebased similarity retrieval. In this paper, we propose a similarity measure for evaluating image shape similarity, and an access method for the proposed similarity measure. We also discuss our experimental observations.