Related papers: FilteredWeb: A Framework for the Automated Search-…
Online e-commerce scams, ranging from shopping scams to pet scams, globally cause millions of dollars in financial damage every year. In response, the security community has developed highly accurate detection systems able to determine if a…
Browsers often include security features to detect phishing web pages. In the past, some browsers evaluated an unknown URL for inclusion in a list of known phishing pages. However, as the number of URLs and known phishing pages continued to…
To combat fake news, researchers mostly focused on detecting fake news and journalists built and maintained fact-checking sites (e.g., Snopes.com and Politifact.com). However, fake news dissemination has been greatly promoted via social…
Online toxic content has grown into a pervasive phenomenon, intensifying during times of crisis, elections, and social unrest. A significant amount of research has been focused on detecting or analyzing toxic content using machine-learning…
This paper presents a study of the Internet infrastructure in India from the point of view of censorship. First, we show that the current state of affairs---where each ISP implements its own content filters (nominally as per a governmental…
The explosion of information constrains the judgement of search terms associated with Knowledge-Based Web Ecosystem (KBWE), making the retrieval of relevant information and its knowledge management challenging. The existing information…
With the explosive growth of accessible information, expecially on the Internet, evaluation-based filtering has become a crucial task. Various systems have been devised aiming to sort through large volumes of information and select what is…
Search engines have become an indispensable tool for browsing information on the Internet. The user, however, is often annoyed by redundant results from irrelevant Web pages. One reason is because search engines also look at non-informative…
Adblocking tools like Adblock Plus continue to rise in popularity, potentially threatening the dynamics of advertising revenue streams. In response, a number of publishers have ramped up efforts to develop and deploy mechanisms for…
Adblocking relies on filter lists, which are manually curated and maintained by a community of filter list authors. Filter list curation is a laborious process that does not scale well to a large number of sites or over time. In this paper,…
Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling…
Many recent news reports have claimed that content generated by large language models (LLMs) is taking over the web. However, these claims are typically not based on a representative sample of the web and the methodology underlying them is…
The global rise of online users and online devices has ultimately given rise to the global internet population apart from several cybercrimes and cyberattacks. The combination of emerging new technology and powerful algorithms (of…
The hidden nature and the limited accessibility of the Dark Web, combined with the lack of public datasets in this domain, make it difficult to study its inherent characteristics such as linguistic properties. Previous works on text…
Social media platforms are a rich source of information these days, however, of all the available information, only a small fraction is of users' interest. To help users catch up with the latest topics of their interests from the large…
The World Wide Web no longer consists just of HTML pages. Our work sheds light on a number of trends on the Internet that go beyond simple Web pages. The hidden Web provides a wealth of data in semi-structured form, accessible through Web…
Web testing has long been recognized as a notoriously difficult task. Even nowadays, web testing still heavily relies on manual efforts while automated web testing is far from achieving human-level performance. Key challenges in web testing…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
The proliferation of unreliable news domains on the internet has had wide-reaching negative impacts on society. We introduce and evaluate interventions aimed at reducing traffic to unreliable news domains from search engines while…
We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to…