Characterizing web pornography consumption from passive measurements

Web pornography represents a large fraction of the Internet traffic, with thousands of websites and millions of users. Studying web pornography consumption allows understanding human behaviors and it is crucial for medical and psychological research. However, given the lack of public data, these works typically build on surveys, limited by different factors, e.g. unreliable answers that volunteers may (involuntarily) provide. In this work, we collect anonymized accesses to pornography websites using HTTP-level passive traces. Our dataset includes about $15\,000$ broadband subscribers over a period of 3 years. We use it to provide quantitative information about the interactions of users with pornographic websites, focusing on time and frequency of use, habits, and trends. We distribute our anonymized dataset to the community to ease reproducibility and allow further studies.Comment: Passive and Active Measurements Conference 2019 (PAM 2019). 14 pages, 7 figure

Integrating Mobile Web 2.0 within tertiary education

Based on three years of innovative pedagogical development and guided by a participatory action research methodology, this paper outlines an approach to integrating mobile web 2.0 within a tertiary education course, based on a social constructivist pedagogy. The goal is to facilitate a student-centred, collaborative, flexible, context-bridging learning environment that empowers students as content producers and learning context generators, guided by lecturers who effectively model the use of the technology. We illustrate how the introduction of mobile web 2.0 has disrupted the underlying pedagogy of the course from a traditional Attelier model (face-to-face apprenticeship model), and has been successfully transformed into a context independent social constructivist model. Two mobile web 2.0 learning scenarios are outlined, including; a sustainable house design project (involving the collaboration of four departments in three faculties and three diverse groups of students), and the implementation of a weekly ‘nomadic studio session'. Students and lecturers use the latest generation of smartphones to collaborate, communicate, capture and share critical and reflective learning events. Students and lecturers use mobile friendly web 2.0 tools to create this environment, including: blogs, social networks, location aware (geotagged) image and video sharing, instant messaging, microblogging etc… Feedback from students and lecturers has been extremely positive

Multifaceted companion devices: applying the new model of media attendance to smartphone usage

This study inspects the relationship between outcome expectations, habit strength, and smartphone usage by attempting to validate the new model of media attendance (NMMA) (LaRose and Eastin, 2004) , a social-cognitive theory of uses and gratifications. The fast adoption rate of smartphones, and their inherent characteristics as convergent, always-on, always-connected devices, warrant a closer look into user habitualization of this medium. Using a sample of 481 smartphone users selected from a larger panel, we were able to support the NMMA, although surprisingly no significant effect of habit strength on smartphone usage was found. While some uncertainties connected to the method are noted, this suggests a more complex reality, in which habitualization of a convergent media device does not necessarily implicate a significant rise in usage

Analyzing Android Browser Apps for file:// Vulnerabilities

Securing browsers in mobile devices is very challenging, because these browser apps usually provide browsing services to other apps in the same device. A malicious app installed in a device can potentially obtain sensitive information through a browser app. In this paper, we identify four types of attacks in Android, collectively known as FileCross, that exploits the vulnerable file:// to obtain users' private files, such as cookies, bookmarks, and browsing histories. We design an automated system to dynamically test 115 browser apps collected from Google Play and find that 64 of them are vulnerable to the attacks. Among them are the popular Firefox, Baidu and Maxthon browsers, and the more application-specific ones, including UC Browser HD for tablet users, Wikipedia Browser, and Kids Safe Browser. A detailed analysis of these browsers further shows that 26 browsers (23%) expose their browsing interfaces unintentionally. In response to our reports, the developers concerned promptly patched their browsers by forbidding file:// access to private file zones, disabling JavaScript execution in file:// URLs, or even blocking external file:// URLs. We employ the same system to validate the ten patches received from the developers and find one still failing to block the vulnerability.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ISC'14 as a regular paper (see https://daoyuan14.github.io/). This is a Technical Report version for referenc

The role of an omnipresent pocket device : smartphone attendance and the role of user habits

Smartphones are convergent, always-on pocket devices that have taken up an important role in the life of their users. This warrants a closer look into how this medium is used in every-day situations. Are goal-oriented incentives the main drive for smartphone usage, or do habits play a critical role? This study with 481 Belgian smartphone users attempts to describe the precedents of smartphone attendance by validating the model of media attendance (MMA), a social-cognitive theory of uses and gratifications (LaRose & Eastin, 2004). We surprisingly did not find evidence for a significant effect of habits on smartphone usage. We suggest two explanations. First, we suggest some uncertainties concerning the MMA methodology. Second, we suggest a more complex reality in which several habitual use patterns are shaped, dependent on user, context and device. This warrants a more in-depth study, using more advanced measures for smartphone usage and habit strength

Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18