Related papers: Government mandated blocking of foreign Web conten…
Web Accessibility for disabled people has posed a challenge to the civilized societies that claim to uphold the principles of equal opportunity and nondiscrimination. Certain concrete measures have been taken to narrow down the digital…
Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news providers that rely on advertising revenue tend to perceive users adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the…
Internet censorship is enforced by numerous governments worldwide, however, due to the lack of publicly available information, as well as the inherent risks of performing active measurements, it is often hard for the research community to…
Websites employ third-party ads and tracking services leveraging cookies and JavaScript code, to deliver ads and track users' behavior, causing privacy concerns. To limit online tracking and block advertisements, several ad-blocking (black)…
A recent paper (circa 2020) by Osterwile et al., entitled "21 Years of Distributed Denial of Service: A Call to Action", states: "We are falling behind in the war against distributed denial-of-service attacks. Unless we act now, the future…
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…
Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people's behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online…
A new era of Information Warfare has arrived. Various actors, including state-sponsored ones, are weaponizing information on Online Social Networks to run false information campaigns with targeted manipulation of public opinion on specific…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
Web applications are becoming truly pervasive in all kinds of business models and organizations. Today, most critical systems such as those related to health care, banking, or even emergency response, are relying on these applications. They…
It is known that some network operators inject false content into users' network traffic. Yet all previous works that investigate this practice focus on edge ISPs (Internet Service Providers), namely, those that provide Internet access to…
There is a growing concern about consolidation trends in Internet services, with, for instance, a large fraction of popular websites depending on a handful of third-party service providers. In this paper, we report on a large-scale study of…
Internet users highly rely on and trust web search engines, such as Google, to find relevant information online. However, scholars have documented numerous biases and inaccuracies in search outputs. To improve the quality of search results,…
Online video piracy (OVP) is a contentious topic, with strong proponents on both sides of the argument. Recently, a number of illegal websites, called streaming cyberlockers, have begun to dominate OVP. These websites specialise in…
Over the last 30 years, the World Wide Web has changed significantly. In this paper, we argue that common practices to prepare web pages for delivery conflict with many efforts to present content with minimal latency, one fundamental goal…
EU Directive 95/46/EC and the upcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation grant Europeans the right of access to data pertaining to them. Consumers can approach their service providers to obtain all personal data stored and processed…
The loading of resources from third-parties has evoked new security and privacy concerns about the current world wide web. Building on the concepts of forced and implicit trust, this paper examines cross-domain transmission control protocol…
Modern websites include various types of third-party content such as JavaScript, images, stylesheets, and Flash objects in order to create interactive user interfaces. In addition to explicit inclusion of third-party content by website…
Third-party web tracking is a common, and broadly used technique on the Web. Almost every step of users' is tracked, analyzed, and later used in different use cases (e.g., online advertisement). Different defense mechanisms have emerged to…
An increasing number of systems have been proposed or deployed to the transit core of the Internet with the goal of observing and manipulating traffic in flight, systems we term Traffic Manipulating Boxes. Examples of these include: decoy…