An Extensive Evaluation of the Internet's Open Proxies

Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of anonymity by concealing the requestor's IP address. To better understand their behavior and performance, we conducted a comprehensive study of open proxies, encompassing more than 107,000 listed open proxies and 13M proxy requests over a 50 day period. While previous studies have focused on malicious open proxies' manipulation of HTML content to insert/modify ads, we provide a more broad study that examines the availability, success rates, diversity, and also (mis)behavior of proxies. Our results show that listed open proxies suffer poor availability--more than 92% of open proxies that appear on aggregator sites are unresponsive to proxy requests. Much more troubling, we find numerous examples of malicious open proxies in which HTML content is manipulated to mine cryptocurrency (that is, cryptojacking). We additionally detect TLS man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, and discover numerous instances in which binaries fetched through proxies were modified to include remote access trojans and other forms of malware. As a point of comparison, we conduct and discuss a similar measurement study of the behavior of Tor exit relays. We find no instances in which Tor relays performed TLS MitM or manipulated content, suggesting that Tor offers a far more reliable and safe form of proxied communication

Internet performance modeling: the state of the art at the turn of the century

Seemingly overnight, the Internet has gone from an academic experiment to a worldwide information matrix. Along the way, computer scientists have come to realize that understanding the performance of the Internet is a remarkably challenging and subtle problem. This challenge is all the more important because of the increasingly significant role the Internet has come to play in society. To take stock of the field of Internet performance modeling, the authors organized a workshop at Schloß Dagstuhl. This paper summarizes the results of discussions, both plenary and in small groups, that took place during the four-day workshop. It identifies successes, points to areas where more work is needed, and poses “Grand Challenges” for the performance evaluation community with respect to the Internet

From Bricks to Pajamas: The Law and Economics of Amateur Journalism

Weblogs have proliferated rapidly in recent years, attracting significant attention and generating important legal issues. Yet so far no coherent economic framework for addressing these issues exists. This Article begins to develop such a framework. It views blogs as the vanguard of what might be called amateur journalism. Because the Web and related technology have enabled low entry barriers, blogs can be an important source of specialized knowledge. However, bloggers do not work within a monitoring structure as in large news organizations, and individual blogs may be less accurate than conventional news sources. On the other hand, blogs as a whole are subject to strong self-correction mechanisms, including rapid feedback through comments on posts and by other blogs. Also, because most bloggers have low-powered incentives, regulation can easily deter them and thereby reduce the value of these self-correction and market mechanisms. The Article applies these insights to a variety of legal issues, including the journalist\u27s privilege, election laws, defamation and licensing laws, media ownership restrictions, copyright laws, and vicarious liability

E-Contract Doctrine 2.0: Standard Form Contracting in the Age of Online User Participation

The growing popularity of e-commerce transactions revives the perennial question of consumer contract law: should non-salient provisions of consumer standard form contracts be enforced? With the focus presently on an ex-ante analysis, scholars debate whether consumers can and should read standardized terms at the time of contracting. In today\u27s information age, such a focus might be misguided. The online realm furnishes various tools, so-called Web 2.0 applications, which encourage the flow of information from experienced to prospective consumers. This Article, therefore, reframes the analysis of online consumer contracts while taking into account this new flow of information. In doing so, we draw out several typical ways in which such information flows in the online realm, while addressing the role of search engines, blogs, message boards and social networks. The Article also accounts for the major challenges to the success of such information flow: the motivations of both information providers and receivers, and the accreditation of the data which might be compromised both unintentionally and maliciously. After applying the key law and economics and behavioral law and economics insights pertaining to consumer contracts to the new dynamic created by the online environment, we conclude that this online information flow will strengthen market forces\u27 ability to generate a fair and balanced contractual equilibrium. We accordingly provide new policy recommendations that are better tailored to deal with online consumer contracts and thus limit the need for legal intervention in the market for consumer contract terms

Estimating the impact of the Internet of Things on productivity in Europe

Funding statement This work was supported by the EU/FIRE IoT Lab project – STREP ICT-610477.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The Art of Repression: Digital Dissent and Power Consolidation in El-Sisi’s Egypt

Imprecise measurement tools impede the study of protest mobilization. Mobilization proxies, such as counting protesters and protest events, result in significant outliers and variance while ignoring sociocultural, cybernetic, economic, legal, and other features that relevant academic literature considers essential to understanding mobilization dynamics. Without accurate empirical models, researchers’ and policymakers’ investigations of autocratic repression have little explanatory power. This thesis proposes a methodological addition to the mobilization literature: Two three-level scales distinguish an event’s potential to attract an audience from the protest’s actual output relative to similar episodes. I employ the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project to demonstrate the measurement’s utility. Afterwards, I apply these models to conduct an impact assessment of recent Egyptian cyberregulatory laws. Controlling for the grievances of protesters and performing other robustness checks, the time series demonstrates a strong, statistically significant relationship between the policies and the reduction of low-level potential mobilizational capacity of Egyptian dissidents, but fails to identify an expected relationship between police pressure and the decline of mobilizational capacity. These findings contribute to the theoretical frameworks of mobilization scholars and policymaker discussions regarding the value of internet censorship tools for curtailing oppositional political action

The Internet vs. the Nation-State: Prevention and Prosecution Challenges on the Internet in Republic of TürkiyI

Social, economic, and technological developments are widely accepted as powerful forces that affect the role, power, and functions of nation-states. Being one of the most influential technological developments in the recent decades, the internet has come into prominence in this regard. With the use of the Internet, the monopoly of media and information controlled by official ideologies, capitalist barons, or elites is seriously challenged. Consequently the power balance between individuals and authorities in the mass media and communication has been transformed in a significant way. Though their reliability may sometimes be questionable, the number and type of information resources has increased dramatically, and accessing information has become easier substantially. People are more interconnected today than ever before. They can easily find, join, or construct their personal, social or political networks. With a number of internet applications and social media, collective reactions, social movements and activities are more organized and effective today than ever before. That is why we have seen so much social fluctuation, unrest. protest, and political activism all over the world in the last few years. Moreover new terms and phenomena like cyber-crime, cyber warfare, and cyber-attacks have urged nation-states to be more careful about the internet and increase their efforts to control it. This level of social chaos in different states and increasing cyber-crimes lead us to question the effectiveness of nation-states\u27 controlling measures. Focusing on one state, the Republic of Türkiye, this study analyzes two important dimensions of state control efforts, prevention and prosecution. On the prevention side, I explore the effectiveness of internet access blocking. On the prosecution side, I analyze the effectiveness of prosecution in internet child pornography. The result of testing to measure the effectiveness of Internet website blocking reveals that there are significant gaps, complications, and dilemmas in these policies. A similar situation is also seen in the investigations of internet child pornography. Analysis conducted of the operational investigation files reveals that in most of the files, suspects could not be identified, traced or brought before judicial authorities. As seen in these two fields, state policing efforts of the Internet in a country are not absolute, and the Internet can be a vulnerable space in which any local or foreign actor or agents like criminals, opposition groups, terrorists can create problems for nation-states

INNOVATION AND NATIONAL BROADBAND POLICIES: FACTS, FICTION AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS IN THE NET NEUTRALITY DEBATE

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Naming and discovery in networks : architecture and economics

In less than three decades, the Internet was transformed from a research network available to the academic community into an international communication infrastructure. Despite its tremendous success, there is a growing consensus in the research community that the Internet has architectural limitations that need to be addressed in a effort to design a future Internet. Among the main technical limitations are the lack of mobility support, and the lack of security and trust. The Internet, and particularly TCP/IP, identifies endpoints using a location/routing identifier, the IP address. Coupling the endpoint identifier to the location identifier hinders mobility and poorly identifies the actual endpoint. On the other hand, the lack of security has been attributed to limitations in both the network and the endpoint. Authentication for example is one of the main concerns in the architecture and is hard to implement partly due to lack of identity support. The general problem that this dissertation is concerned with is that of designing a future Internet. Towards this end, we focus on two specific sub-problems. The first problem is the lack of a framework for thinking about architectures and their design implications. It was obvious after surveying the literature that the majority of the architectural work remains idiosyncratic and descriptions of network architectures are mostly idiomatic. This has led to the overloading of architectural terms, and to the emergence of a large body of network architecture proposals with no clear understanding of their cross similarities, compatibility points, their unique properties, and architectural performance and soundness. On the other hand, the second problem concerns the limitations of traditional naming and discovery schemes in terms of service differentiation and economic incentives. One of the recurring themes in the community is the need to separate an entity\u27s identifier from its locator to enhance mobility and security. Separation of identifier and locator is a widely accepted design principle for a future Internet. Separation however requires a process to translate from the identifier to the locator when discovering a network path to some identified entity. We refer to this process as identifier-based discovery, or simply discovery, and we recognize two limitations that are inherent in the design of traditional discovery schemes. The first limitation is the homogeneity of the service where all entities are assumed to have the same discovery performance requirements. The second limitation is the inherent incentive mismatch as it relates to sharing the cost of discovery. This dissertation addresses both subproblems, the architectural framework as well as the naming and discovery limitations

On privacy and the prevention of unsolicited sessions in the IP multimedia subsystem

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-175)