From Version 1.0 to Version 2.0:A Brief History of the Web

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CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

How Do Tor Users Interact With Onion Services?

Onion services are anonymous network services that are exposed over the Tor network. In contrast to conventional Internet services, onion services are private, generally not indexed by search engines, and use self-certifying domain names that are long and difficult for humans to read. In this paper, we study how people perceive, understand, and use onion services based on data from 17 semi-structured interviews and an online survey of 517 users. We find that users have an incomplete mental model of onion services, use these services for anonymity and have varying trust in onion services in general. Users also have difficulty discovering and tracking onion sites and authenticating them. Finally, users want technical improvements to onion services and better information on how to use them. Our findings suggest various improvements for the security and usability of Tor onion services, including ways to automatically detect phishing of onion services, more clear security indicators, and ways to manage onion domain names that are difficult to remember.Comment: Appeared in USENIX Security Symposium 201

Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference

Web Content Delivery Optimization

Milliseconds matters, when they’re counted. If we consider the life of the universe into one single year, then on 31 December at 11:59:59.5 PM, “speed” was transportation’s concern, and now after 500 milliseconds it is web’s, and no one knows whose concern it would be in coming milliseconds, but at this very moment; this thesis proposes an optimization method, mainly for content delivery on slow connections. The method utilizes a proxy as a middle box to fetch the content; requested by a client, from a single or multiple web servers, and bundles all of the fetched image content types that fits into the bundling policy; inside a JavaScript file in Base64 format. This optimization method reduces the number of HTTP requests between the client and multiple web servers as a result of its proposed bundling solution, and at the same time optimizes the HTTP compression efficiency as a result of its proposed method of aggregative textual content compression. Page loading time results of the test web pages; which were specially designed and developed to capture the optimum benefits of the proposed method; proved up to 81% faster page loading time for all connection types. However, other tests in non-optimal situations such as webpages which use “Lazy Loading” techniques, showed just 35% to 50% benefits, that is only achievable on 2G and 3G connections (0.2 Mbps – 15 Mbps downlink) and not faster connections

RDF, the semantic web, Jordan, Jordan and Jordan

This collection is addressed to archivists and library professionals, and so has a slight focus on implications implications for them. This chapter is nonetheless intended to be a more-or-less generic introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF, which isn't specific to that domain

Beyond Search: A Technology Probe Investigation

Purpose — We assert that researchers developing new web interaction tools should consider an array of user motives beyond query-based information retrieval. This chapter reports on two probes used to investigate user activities that go beyond search as traditionally conceived. Design/methodology — This chapter reviews research on user experiences with search engines and general web use. It then describes the design and case study of cards and pebbles, two search engine-based probes developed to help elicit new concepts for web-based experiences. Findings — Participants reflect on their experiences with the probes and offer ideas regarding how to incrementally shift the traditional search paradigm and conceive of the web in new ways. Implications/value — This investigation serves as a starting point by offering criteria that should be considered when designing new ‘beyond search’ tools