Related papers: Measuring and Modeling the Free Content Web
Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to various real-world applications, leveraging massive, web-sourced datasets like Common Crawl, C4, and FineWeb for pretraining. While these datasets provide linguistic data essential for…
With the increase in the number of web services, many web services are available on internet providing the same functionality, making it difficult to choose the best one, fulfilling users all requirements. This problem can be solved by…
Malicious domains are part of the landscape of the internet but are becoming more prevalent and more dangerous to both companies and individuals. They can be hosted on variety of technologies and serve an array of content, ranging from…
Template detection and content extraction are two of the main areas of information retrieval applied to the Web. They perform different analyses over the structure and content of webpages to extract some part of the document. However, their…
Malware spread among websites and between websites and clients is an increasing problem. Search engines play an important role in directing users to websites and are a natural control point for intervening, using mechanisms such as…
The detection of malicious websites has become a critical issue in cybersecurity. Therefore, this paper offers a comprehensive review of data-driven methods for detecting malicious websites. Traditional approaches and their limitations are…
A common approach when setting up a website is to utilize third party Web hosting and content delivery networks. Without taking this trend into account, any measurement study inspecting the deployment and operation of websites can be…
Natural language generation tools are powerful and effective for generating content. However, language models are known to display bias and fairness issues, making them impractical to deploy for many use cases. We here focus on how fairness…
Scholars, awards committees, and laypeople frequently discuss the merit of written works. Literary professionals and journalists differ in how much perspectivism they concede in their book reviews. Here, we quantify how strongly book…
Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses, including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for criminal…
In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not…
There is no denying the fact that with the widespread usage of computers and the Internet in our daily lives, security of information and data has gained increased attention. Information stored in electronic form is more susceptible to…
Traditional defect prediction approaches often use metrics that measure the complexity of the design or implementing code of a software system, such as the number of lines of code in a source file. In this paper, we explore a different…
Commercial web search engines employ near-duplicate detection to ensure that users see each relevant result only once, albeit the underlying web crawls typically include (near-)duplicates of many web pages. We revisit the risks and…
SourceRank is a scoring system made of 18 metrics that assess the popularity and quality of open-source packages. Despite being used in several recent studies, none has thoroughly analyzed its reliability against evasion attacks aimed at…
The dark web hosts a dynamic ecosystem of cybercrime forums and marketplaces that adapt to law enforcement pressure, technological change, and economic incentives. Prior research has extracted cyber threat intelligence from these platforms…
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…
This paper investigates the effectiveness of TikTok's enforcement mechanisms for limiting the exposure of harmful content to youth accounts. We collect over 7000 videos, classify them as harmful vs not-harmful, and then simulate…
The prevalence of short form video platforms, combined with the ineffectiveness of age verification mechanisms, raises concerns about the potential harms facing children and teenagers in an algorithm-moderated online environment. We…
URLs are central to a myriad of cyber-security threats, from phishing to the distribution of malware. Their inherent ease of use and familiarity is continuously abused by attackers to evade defences and deceive end-users. Seemingly…