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Content filtering in web browsers is a tedious process for most of the people, because of several reasons. By blocking JavaScript, Cookies and Popups, end users can ensure maximum protection from browser based attacks and vulnerabilities.…
A focused crawler traverses the web selecting out relevant pages to a predefined topic and neglecting those out of concern. While surfing the internet it is difficult to deal with irrelevant pages and to predict which links lead to quality…
The web has become a ubiquitous application development platform for mobile systems. Yet, web access on mobile devices remains an energy-hungry activity. Prior work in the field mainly focuses on the initial page loading stage, but fails to…
The median webpage has increased in size by more than 80% in the last 4 years. This extra complexity allows for a rich browsing experience, but it hurts the majority of mobile users which still pay for their traffic. This has motivated…
Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper…
Millions of web users directly depend on ad and tracker blocking tools to protect their privacy. However, existing ad and tracker blockers fall short because of their reliance on trivially susceptible advertising and tracking content. In…
The success of generative AI relies heavily on training on data scraped through extensive crawling of the Internet, a practice that has raised significant copyright, privacy, and ethical concerns. While few measures are designed to resist a…
The historical, cultural, and intellectual importance of archiving the web has been widely recognized. Today, all countries with high Internet penetration rate have established high-profile archiving initiatives to crawl and archive the…
Multi-media increases engagement and is increasingly prevalent in online content including news, web blogs, and social media, however, it may not always be beneficial to users. To determine what types of media users actually wanted, we…
Search engines could consistently favor certain values over the others, which is considered as biased due to the built-in infrastructures. Many studies have been dedicated to detect, control, and mitigate the impacts of the biases from the…
Technology based screentime, the time an individual spends engaging with their computer or cell phone, has increased exponentially over the past decade, but perhaps most alarmingly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many software based…
Free web proxies promise anonymity and censorship circumvention at no cost. Several websites publish lists of free proxies organized by country, anonymity level, and performance. These lists index hundreds of thousand of hosts discovered…
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…
Congestion control is an indispensable component of transport protocols to prevent congestion collapse. As such, it distributes the available bandwidth among all competing flows, ideally in a fair manner. However, there exists a constantly…
For a realistic traffic mix, we evaluate the hit rates attained in a two-layer cache hierarchy designed to reduce Internet bandwidth requirements. The model identifies four main types of content, web, file sharing, user generated content…
With mobiles overtaking desktops as the primary vehicle of Internet consumption, mobile web performance has become a crucial factor for websites as it directly impacts their revenue. In principle, improving web performance entails squeezing…
We present a study of how local frames (i.e., iframes loading content like "about:blank") are mishandled by a wide range of popular Web security and privacy tools. As a result, users of these tools remain vulnerable to the very attack…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
HTTP response size is a well-known side channel attack. With the deployment of HTTP/2.0, response size attacks are generally dismissed with the argument that pipelining and response multiplexing prevent eavesdroppers from finding out…
Looking into the growth of information in the web it is a very tedious process of getting the exact information the user is looking for. Many search engines generate user profile related data listing. This paper involves one such process…