A Network Topology Approach to Bot Classification

Automated social agents, or bots, are increasingly becoming a problem on social media platforms. There is a growing body of literature and multiple tools to aid in the detection of such agents on online social networking platforms. We propose that the social network topology of a user would be sufficient to determine whether the user is a automated agent or a human. To test this, we use a publicly available dataset containing users on Twitter labelled as either automated social agent or human. Using an unsupervised machine learning approach, we obtain a detection accuracy rate of 70%

How to run POSIX apps in a minimal picoprocess

Abstract We envision a future where Web, mobile, and desktop applications are delivered as isolated, complete software stacks to a minimal, secure client host. This shift imbues app vendors with full autonomy to maintain their apps' integrity. Achieving this goal requires shifting complex behavior out of the client platform and into the vendors' isolated apps. We ported rich, interactive POSIX apps, such as Gimp and Inkscape, to a spartan host platform. We describe this effort in sufficient detail to support reproducibility

How to run POSIX apps in a minimal picoprocess

Abstract We envision a future where Web, mobile, and desktop applications are delivered as isolated, complete software stacks to a minimal, secure client host. This shift imbues app vendors with full autonomy to maintain their apps' integrity. Achieving this goal requires shifting complex behavior out of the client platform and into the vendors' isolated apps. We ported rich, interactive POSIX apps, such as Gimp and Inkscape, to a spartan host platform. We describe this effort in sufficient detail to support reproducibility

How to run POSIX apps in a minimal picoprocess

Abstract We envision a future where Web, mobile, and desktop applications are delivered as isolated, complete software stacks to a minimal, secure client host. This shift imbues app vendors with full autonomy to maintain their apps' integrity. Achieving this goal requires shifting complexity out of the client platform and replacing the required behavior inside the vendors' isolated apps. We ported rich, interactive POSIX apps, such as Gimp and Inkscape, to a spartan host platform. We describe this effort in sufficient detail to support reproducibility

Lottery trees: motivational deployment of networked systems

We address a critical deployment issue for network systems, namely motivating people to install and run a distributed service. This work is aimed primarily at peer-to-peer systems, in which the decision and effort to install a service falls to individuals rather than to a central planner. This problem is relevant for bootstrapping systems that rely on the network effect, wherein the benefits are not felt until deployment reaches a significant scale, and also for deploying asymmetric systems, wherein the set of contributors is different than the set of beneficiaries. Our solution is the lottery tree (lottree), a mechanism that probabilistically encourages both participation in the system and also solicitation of new participants. We define the lottree mechanism and formally state seven properties that encourage contribution, solicitation, and fair play. We then present the Pachira lottree scheme, which satisfies five of these seven properties, and we prove this to be a maximal satisfiable subset. Using simulation, we determine optimal parameters for the Pachira lottree scheme, and we determine how to configure a lottree system for achieving various deployment scales based on expected installation effort. We also present extensive sensitivity analyses, which bolster the generality of our conclusions

Maximizing Total Upload in Latency-Sensitive P2P Applications

Motivated by an application in distributed gaming, we define and study the latency-constrained total upload maximization problem. In this problem, a peer-to-peer overlay network is modeled as a complete graph and each node vi has an upload bandwidth capacity ci and a set of receivers R(i). Each sender-receiver pair (vi, vj), where vj ∈ R(i), is a request that should be satisfied, i.e., vi should send a data packet to each vj ∈ R(i). The goal is to find a set of at most n multicast-trees Ti of depth at most 2, such that each node can be part of multiple trees, all capacity constraints are met, and the number of satisfied requests is maximized. In this paper, we prove that the problem is NP-complete, and we present an algorithm with approximation ratio 1 − 2 / √ cmin, where cmin is the minimum upload capacity. Finally, we also study the impact of network coding on the quality and approximability of the solution