Understanding and mitigating the impact of Internet demand in everyday life

Digital devices and online services are increasingly embedded within our everyday lives. The growth in usage of these technologies has implications for environmental sustainability due to the energy demand from the underlying Internet infrastructure (e.g. communication networks, data centres). Energy efficiencies in the infrastructure are important, but they are made inconsequential by the sheer growth in the demand for data. We need to transition users’ Internet-connected practices and adapt HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) design in less demanding and more sustainable directions. Yet it’s not clear what the most data demanding devices and online activities are in users’ lives, and how this demand can be intervened with most effectively through HCI design. In this thesis, the issue of Internet demand is explored—uncovering how it is embedded into digital devices, online services and users’ everyday practices. Specifically, I conduct a series of experiments to understand Internet demand on mobile devices and in the home, involving: a large-scale quantitative analysis of 398 mobile devices; and a mixed-methods study involving month-long home router logging and interviews with 20 participants (nine households). Through these studies, I provide an in-depth understanding of how digital activities in users’ lives augment Internet demand (particularly through the practice of watching), and outline the roles for the HCI community and broader stakeholders (policy makers, businesses) in curtailing this demand. I then juxtapose these formative studies with design workshops involving 13 participants; these discover how we can reduce Internet demand in ways that users may accept or even want. From this, I provide specific design recommendations for the HCI community aiming to alleviate the issue of Internet growth for concerns of sustainability, as well as holistically mitigate the negative impacts that digital devices and online services can create in users’ lives

Tor:From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy

A biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, and global politics at the internet's core.Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy, Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet.The story of Tor begins in the 1990s with its creation by the US Navy's Naval Research Lab, from a convergence of different cultural worlds. Drawing on in-depth interviews with designers, developers, activists, and users, along with twenty years of mailing lists, design documents, reporting, and legal papers, Collier traces Tor's evolution from those early days to its current operation on the frontlines of global digital power—including the strange collaboration between US military scientists and a group of freewheeling hackers called the Cypherpunks. As Collier charts the rise and fall of three different cultures in Tor's diverse community—the engineers, the maintainers, and the activists, each with a distinct understanding of and vision for Tor—he reckons with Tor's complicated, changing relationship with contemporary US empire. Ultimately, the book reveals how different groups of users have repurposed Tor and built new technologies and worlds of their own around it, with profound implications for the future of the Internet

Davix: a toolset for data analysis and visualization

Master's Project (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 201

Critical infrastructure: a social worlds study of values, design and resistance in Tor and the Tor community

While cybercrime research has become well-established within criminology, there is very little criminological research which treats the infrastructures and platforms of the Internet as subjects of criminological enquiry. These are increasingly taking on responsibility for the governance of large populations of users, and the engineers and developers of these platforms are increasingly having to navigate problems of crime, harm, and policing. This thesis explores, through qualitative empirical research, an Internet infrastructure which has particularly faced these issues: the Tor Project, an anonymity network which gives millions of users around the world extremely strong protections against online surveillance and censorship. This has been an important tool for whistleblowers, journalists, and activists, however it has also become associated with a range of criminal uses, especially the rise of ‘cryptomarkets’, marketplaces for illegal services and goods accessible through the Tor network which are very difficult for law enforcement to shut down. I explore how the Tor community attempt to navigate these issues and how they make sense of the role Tor plays in society, drawing on interviews with members of the Tor community, including designers and developers, the people who maintain Tor’s infrastructure, and others in the Tor community, as well as extensive archival research in Tor’s online mailing list archives. I use frameworks from Science and Technology Studies, in particular, social worlds theory, to explore the values of the Tor community, how they attempt to materialise them through infrastructure, and the challenges they face in practice. The Tor community, rather than sharing a strong set of shared values, is in fact a dense thicket of contradictory values and meanings. Using social worlds theory, I distil this into three internally-coherent social worlds, each of which makes sense of the work Tor does differently, rooted in differing practices, sensibilities and understandings of the political salience of privacy technology. These are: the engineer social world, which views privacy as a structure, understanding privacy technologies as reshaping the topologies of power in information systems; the activist social world, which views privacy as a struggle and privacy technologies as part of a political movement; and finally, the infrastructuralist social world, which views privacy as a service and privacy technologies as the neutral facilitators of their users’ action. I explore the relationships between these three social worlds, how they have come into contact and conflict with one another, and how they have changed over the years. These each shape Tor’s material form, its attempts to cultivate resilience against disruption by powerful actors, and how it navigates its implications in crime, harm, and power in different ways, each of which I explore in detail. Although Tor represents an attempt to act in the domain of infrastructural power, it has found that doing politics through design and engineering relies on a lot of hidden work and complex negotiation in practice, spilling out into the domains of politics, administration, and governance and becoming caught up in the very technologies of control which it tries to subvert. I end the thesis with a discussion, drawing from my empirical research, of Tor’s place in the wider landscape of geopolitics and online power and how it makes sense of this. I argue that the challenges Tor faces are reflective of deeper tensions between freedom and control at the heart of liberal societies and how they are governed

Public Policy and Technology: Advancing Civilization at the Expense of Individual Privacy

Technological advances have created a new existence, providing an unforeseen level of interaction and transaction between parties that have never physically met. Preliminary thinking was that these advances would create a previously unimaginable level of privacy and anonymity. While a surface examination suggests an abundance of privacy in modern society, a more thorough examination reveals different results. Advances in technology and changes in public policy have produced a world in which a startling amount of information is available regarding a given individual. Rather than experiencing an increase in individual privacy, modern societies suffer from rapidly decreasing individual privacy

Design and implementation of a network revenue management architecture for marginalised communities

Rural Internet connectivity projects aimed at bridging the digital divide have mushroomed across many developing countries. Most of the projects are deployed as community centred projects. In most of the cases the initial deployment of these projects is funded by governments, multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations. After the initial deployment, financial sustainability remains one of the greatest challenges facing these projects. In the light of this, externally funded ICT4D interventions should just be used for “bootstrapping” purposes. The communities should be “groomed” to take care of and sustain these projects, eliminating as soon as possible a dependency on external funding. This master thesis presents the design and the implementation of a generic architecture for the management of the costs associated with running a computer network connected to the Internet, The proposed system, called the Network Revenue Management System, enables a network to generate revenue, by charging users for the utilization of network resources. The novelty of the system resides in its flexibility and adaptability, which allow the exploration of both conventional and non-conventional billing options, via the use of suitable ‘adapters’. The final goal of the exploration made possible by this system is the establishment of what is regarded as equitable charging in rural, marginalized communities - such as the community in Dwesa, South Africa

Cybersecurity of Digital Service Chains

This open access book presents the main scientific results from the H2020 GUARD project. The GUARD project aims at filling the current technological gap between software management paradigms and cybersecurity models, the latter still lacking orchestration and agility to effectively address the dynamicity of the former. This book provides a comprehensive review of the main concepts, architectures, algorithms, and non-technical aspects developed during three years of investigation; the description of the Smart Mobility use case developed at the end of the project gives a practical example of how the GUARD platform and related technologies can be deployed in practical scenarios. We expect the book to be interesting for the broad group of researchers, engineers, and professionals daily experiencing the inadequacy of outdated cybersecurity models for modern computing environments and cyber-physical systems

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation establishes a new visualization design process model devised to guide visualization designers in building more effective and useful visualization systems and tools. The novelty of this framework includes its flexibility for iteration, actionability for guiding visualization designers with concrete steps, concise yet methodical definitions, and connections to other visualization design models commonly used in the field of data visualization. In summary, the design activity framework breaks down the visualization design process into a series of four design activities: understand, ideate, make, and deploy. For each activity, the framework prescribes a descriptive motivation, list of design methods, and expected visualization artifacts. To elucidate the framework, two case studies for visualization design illustrate these concepts, methods, and artifacts in real-world projects in the field of cybersecurity. For example, these projects employ user-centered design methods, such as personas and data sketches, which emphasize our teams' motivations and visualization artifacts with respect to the design activity framework. These case studies also serve as examples for novice visualization designers, and we hypothesized that the framework could serve as a pedagogical tool for teaching and guiding novices through their own design process to create a visualization tool. To externally evaluate the efficacy of this framework, we created worksheets for each design activity, outlining a series of concrete, tangible steps for novices. In order to validate the design worksheets, we conducted 13 student observations over the course of two months, received 32 online survey responses, and performed a qualitative analysis of 11 in-depth interviews. Students found the worksheets both useful and effective for framing the visualization design process. Next, by applying the design activity framework to technique-driven and evaluation-based research projects, we brainstormed possible extensions to the design model. Lastly, we examined implications of the design activity framework and present future work in this space. The visualization community is challenged to consider how to more effectively describe, capture, and communicate the complex, iterative nature of data visualization design throughout research, design, development, and deployment of visualization systems and tools

Cybersecurity of Digital Service Chains

This open access book presents the main scientific results from the H2020 GUARD project. The GUARD project aims at filling the current technological gap between software management paradigms and cybersecurity models, the latter still lacking orchestration and agility to effectively address the dynamicity of the former. This book provides a comprehensive review of the main concepts, architectures, algorithms, and non-technical aspects developed during three years of investigation; the description of the Smart Mobility use case developed at the end of the project gives a practical example of how the GUARD platform and related technologies can be deployed in practical scenarios. We expect the book to be interesting for the broad group of researchers, engineers, and professionals daily experiencing the inadequacy of outdated cybersecurity models for modern computing environments and cyber-physical systems

The Evolution of Internet interconnections

In 1995, the NSF officially shut down the NSFNet backbone, thereby ending the nascent Internets early architecture as a single backbone network. Today, the Internet is a group of loosely interconnected networks run by many diverse companies. These interconnections are in no way controlled by any industry or government agency, and are therefore held together only by the market demands of the Internet community. Although the FCC has traditionally maintained a stance of unregulation of all information and computer networks, they have increasingly show interest in ensuring the rapid deployment of Internet access. In addition, as more and more critical elements of communication are implemented on the Internet, some safeguards ensuring end-to-end connectivity, and therefore on maintaining the interconnection between networks, are needed. This paper discusses the history and evolution of Internet interconnections, compares and contrasts them to traditional telephony interconnections, and explores the possibility of regulation over such connections. This paper covers events up to the end of 1999