Related papers: Third-party Service Dependencies and Centralizatio…
Online data sources offer tremendous promise to demography and other social sciences, but researchers worry that the group of people who are represented in online datasets can be different from the general population. We show that by…
Online services like Google provide a variety of application programming interfaces (APIs). These online APIs enable authenticated third-party services and applications (apps) to access a user's account data for tasks such as single sign-on…
Scams are a widespread issue with severe consequences for both victims and perpetrators, but existing data collection is fragmented, precluding global and comparative local understanding. The present study addresses this gap through a…
Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet. A DNS resolves queries for URLs into IP addresses for the purpose of locating computer services and…
The prevailing wisdom is that more network bandwidth does not matter much and that website performance is primarily limited by network latency. However, as mobile websites become more complex and mobile network performance improves, does…
The topological structures of the Internet and the Web have received considerable attention. However, there has been little research on the topological properties of individual web sites. In this paper, we consider whether web sites (as…
The internet has been blurring the lines between local and global cultures, affecting in different ways the perception of people about themselves and others. In the global context of the internet, search engine platforms are a key mediator…
Recent research has unveiled the importance of online social networks for improving the quality of recommender systems and encouraged the research community to investigate better ways of exploiting the social information for…
The domain name system (DNS) that maps alphabetic names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses plays a foundational role for Internet communications. By default, DNS queries and responses are exchanged in unencrypted plaintext, and…
It is notoriously difficult to securely configure HTTPS, and poor server configurations have contributed to several attacks including the FREAK, Logjam, and POODLE attacks. In this work, we empirically evaluate the TLS security posture of…
Conventional online social networks (OSNs) are implemented in a centralized manner. Although centralization is a convenient way for implementing OSNs, it has several well known drawbacks. Chief among them are the risks they pose to the…
The original design of the Internet was a resilient, distributed system, that maybe able to route around (and therefore recover from) massive disruption --- up to and including nuclear war. However, network routing effects and business…
Web tracking has been extensively studied over the last decade. To detect tracking, previous studies and user tools rely on filter lists. However, it has been shown that filter lists miss trackers. In this paper, we propose an alternative…
We analyze the influence and interactions of 60 largest world banks for 195 world countries using the reduced Google matrix algorithm for the English Wikipedia network with 5 416 537 articles. While the top asset rank positions are taken by…
The percentages of shares of world publications of the European Union and its member states, China, and the United States have been represented differently as a result of using different databases. An analytical variant of the…
User data is the primary input of digital advertising, fueling the free Internet as we know it. As a result, web companies invest a lot in elaborate tracking mechanisms to acquire user data that can sell to data markets and advertisers.…
The internet is considered as the most extensive market in the world. To keep its gradual reputation, it must confront real problems that result from its distribution and from the diversity of the protocols used to insure communications.…
This paper revisits the issue of the performance of DNS resolution services available to Internet users. While several prior studies addressed this important issue, significant developments, namely, the IPv6 finally getting traction and the…
During disasters, crisis, and emergencies the public relies on online services provided by official authorities to receive timely alerts, trustworthy information, and access to relief programs. It is therefore crucial for the authorities to…
We present an analysis of 12 million instances of privacy-relevant reviews publicly visible on the Google Play Store that span a 10 year period. By leveraging state of the art NLP techniques, we examine what users have been writing about…