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Software debloating tools seek to improve program security and performance by removing unnecessary code, called bloat. While many techniques have been proposed, several barriers to their adoption have emerged. Namely, debloating tools are…
Internet censorship limits the access of nodes residing within a specific network environment to the public Internet, and vice versa. During the last decade, techniques for conducting Internet censorship have been developed further.…
Browser fingerprinting is a pervasive online tracking technique used increasingly often for profiling and targeted advertising. Prior research on the prevalence of fingerprinting heavily relied on automated web crawls, which inherently…
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of topics,…
Content moderators play a key role in keeping the conversation on social media healthy. While the high volume of content they need to judge represents a bottleneck to the moderation pipeline, no studies have explored how models could…
Caching is a technique to reduce peak traffic rates by prefetching popular content into memories at the end users. Conventionally, these memories are used to deliver requested content in part from a locally cached copy rather than through…
The World Wide Web's connectivity is greatly attributed to the HTTP protocol, with HTTP messages offering informative header fields that appeal to disciplines like web security and privacy, especially concerning web tracking. Despite…
Web tracking is an omnipresent phenomenon in today's web, affecting users in their day-to-day lives. Filter lists and blockers were invented to detect trackers and to protect users. Due to limitations of said tools, researchers developed…
Millions of people rely on search functionality to find and explore content on entertainment platforms. Modern search systems use a combination of candidate generation and ranking approaches, with advanced methods leveraging deep learning…
Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or "reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken hold…
CDNs have reshaped the Internet architecture at large. They operate (globally) distributed networks of servers to reduce latencies as well as to increase availability for content and to handle large traffic bursts. Traditionally, content…
Searching for medical information is both a common and important activity since it influences decisions people make about their healthcare. Using search engine optimization (SEO), content producers seek to increase the visibility of their…
Clearly, no one likes webpages with poor quality of experience (QoE). Being perceived as slow or fast is a key element in the overall perceived QoE of web applications. While extensive effort has been put into optimizing web applications…
Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem. The online advertising ecosystem nowadays forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises…
A large amount of data on the WWW remains inaccessible to crawlers of Web search engines because it can only be exposed on demand as users fill out and submit forms. The Hidden web refers to the collection of Web data which can be accessed…
The evaluation of recommendation systems is a complex task. The offline and online evaluation metrics for recommender systems are ambiguous in their true objectives. The majority of recently published papers benchmark their methods using…
An information-centric network should realize significant economies by exploiting a favourable memory-bandwidth tradeoff: it is cheaper to store copies of popular content close to users than to fetch them repeatedly over the Internet. We…
To keep up with increasing demands on quality of experience, assessing and understanding the performance of network connections is crucial for web service providers. While different measures, like TCP options, alternative transport layer…
Replicating or caching popular content in memories distributed across the network is a technique to reduce peak network loads. Conventionally, the performance gain of caching was thought to result from making part of the requested data…
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…