Related papers: Exploring Server-side Blocking of Regions
This paper examines different reasons the websites may vary in their availability by location. Prior works on availability mostly focus on censorship by nation states. We look at three forms of server-side blocking: blocking visitors from…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
With the evolution of the online advertisement and tracking ecosystem, content-filtering has become the reference tool for improving the security, privacy and browsing experience when surfing the Internet. It is also commonly believed that…
The dominant understanding of Internet censorship posits that blocking access to foreign-based websites creates isolated communities of Internet users. We question this discourse for its assumption that if given access people would use all…
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in adblocker use, driven by increased web tracking and personalized ads. However, a significant issue for adblocker users is the web breakages they encounter, which worsens their browsing experience and…
Internet censorship is typically enforced by authorities to achieve information control for a certain group of Internet users. So far existing censorship studies have primarily focused on country-level characterization because (1) in many…
Heightened interest from nation states to perform content censorship make it evermore critical to identify the impact of censorship efforts on the Internet. We undertake a study of Internet architecture, capturing the state of Internet…
Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous…
Over the years, the Internet has democratized the flow of information. Unfortunately, in parallel, authoritarian regimes and other entities (such as ISPs) for their vested interests have curtailed this flow by partially or fully censoring…
Different countries have different privacy regulatory models. These models impact the perspectives and laws surrounding internet privacy. However, little is known about how effective the regulatory models are when it comes to limiting…
The topology of the Internet and its geographic properties received significant attention during the last years, not only because they have a deep impact on the performance experienced by users, but also because of legal, political, and…
One of the primary ways in which India engages in online censorship is by ordering Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in its jurisdiction to block access to certain websites for its users. This paper reports the different…
The use of secure connections using HTTPS as the default means, or even the only means, to connect to web servers is increasing. It is being pushed from both sides: from the bottom up by client distributions and plugins, and from the top…
If two or more identical HTTPS clients, located at different geographic locations (regions), make an HTTPS request to the same domain (e.g. example.com), on the same day, will they receive the same HTTPS security guarantees in response? Our…
Over the past decade, Internet centralization and its implications for both people and the resilience of the Internet has become a topic of active debate. While the networking community informally agrees on the definition of centralization,…
Our goal is to empirically discover how censors react to the introduction of new proxy servers that can be used to circumvent their information controls. We examine a specific case, that of obfuscated Tor bridges, and conduct experiments…
Data sent over the Internet can be monitored and manipulated by intermediate entities in the data path from the source to the destination. For unencrypted communications (and some encrypted communications with known weaknesses),…
We perform a passive measurement study investigating how a Protective DNS service might perform in a Research & Education Network serving hundreds of member institutions. Utilizing freely-available DNS blocklists consisting of domain names…
Blocking of foreign Web content by Internet access providers has been a hot topic for the last 18 months in Germany. Since fall 2001 the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia very actively tries to mandate such blocking. This paper will take a…
Modern web browsers are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code and over one thousand JavaScript functions and properties available to website authors. This work investigates how these browser features are used on the modern,…