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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…
Privacy-enhancing blocking tools based on filter-list rules tend to break legitimate functionality. Filter-list maintainers could benefit from automated breakage detection tools that allow them to proactively fix problematic rules before…
Ad and tracking blocking extensions are popular tools for improving web performance, privacy and aesthetics. Content blocking extensions typically rely on filter lists to decide whether a web request is associated with tracking or…
Censorship of the Internet is widespread around the world. As access to the web becomes increasingly ubiquitous, filtering of this resource becomes more pervasive. Transparency about specific content that citizens are denied access to is…
Various methods have been proposed for creating and maintaining lists of potentially filtered URLs to allow for measurement of ongoing internet censorship around the world. Whilst testing a known resource for evidence of filtering can be…
The ability to accurately predict cyber-attacks would enable organizations to mitigate their growing threat and avert the financial losses and disruptions they cause. But how predictable are cyber-attacks? Researchers have attempted to…
In the view of massive content explosion in World Wide Web through diverse sources, it has become mandatory to have content filtering tools. The filtering of contents of the web pages holds greater significance in cases of access by…
The rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on ad- vertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block…
Misconfigurations and outdated software are a major cause of compromised websites and data leaks. Past research has proposed and evaluated sending automated security notifications to the operators of misconfigured websites, but encountered…
Websites use third-party ads and tracking services to deliver targeted ads and collect information about users that visit them. These services put users' privacy at risk, and that is why users' demand for blocking these services is growing.…
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,…
Web tracking harms user privacy. As a result, the use of tracker detection and blocking tools is a common practice among Internet users. However, no such tool can be perfect, and thus there is a trade-off between avoiding breakage (caused…
Link prediction is a fundamental problem in network science, aiming to infer potential or missing links based on observed network structures. With the increasing adoption of parameterized models, the rigor of evaluation protocols has become…
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…
While JavaScript established itself as a cornerstone of the modern web, it also constitutes a major tracking and security vector, thus raising critical privacy and security concerns. In this context, some browser extensions propose to…
The fast growing ad-blocker usage results in large revenue decrease for ad-supported online websites. Facing this problem, many online publishers choose either to cooperate with ad-blocker software companies to show acceptable ads or to…
Modern websites heavily rely on JavaScript (JS) to implement legitimate functionality as well as privacy-invasive advertising and tracking. Browser extensions such as NoScript block any script not loaded by a trusted list of endpoints, thus…
Despite the prevalence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, there is little information about the purpose and risks of the Internet traffic these devices generate, and consumers have limited options for controlling those risks. A key open…
Content blocking is an important part of a performant, user-serving, privacy respecting web. Most content blockers build trust labels over URLs. While useful, this approach has well understood shortcomings. Attackers may avoid detection by…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of the privacy behaviors and attributes of eight recent, popular browser agents. Browser agents are software that automate Web browsing using large language models and ancillary tooling. However,…