Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures. In response this, "Decentralized Web" attempts distribute ownership operation services more evenly. This paper describes design implementation largest most widely used Decentralized Web platform --- InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) an open-source,...

The importance of IXPs to interconnect different networks and exchange traffic locally has been well studied over the last few years. However, far less is known about role play as a platform enable large-scale content delivery reach world-wide customer base. In this paper, we study infrastructure deployment hypergiant, Netflix, show that combined worldwide IXP substrate major corner stone its Content Delivery Network. This highlights additional in Internet ecosystem, not just terms...

DNS is a vital component for almost every networked application. Originally it was designed as an unencrypted protocol, making user security concern. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) the latest proposal to make name resolution more secure.

The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has spurred controversy and uncertainty among users. move raised both praise concerns, particularly regarding Musk's views on free speech. As a result, large number users have looked for alternatives to Twitter. Mastodon, decentralized micro-blogging social network, attracted the attention many general media. In this paper, we analyze migration 136,009 from Mastodon. We inspect impact that wider Mastodon ecosystem, in terms user-driven pressure towards...

The trend toward more peering between networks is commonly conflated with the of Internet flattening, i.e., reduction in number intermediary organizations on paths. Indeed, direct interconnections bypass layer-3 transit providers and make flatter. This paper studies an emerging phenomenon that separates two trends: we present first systematic study remote peering, interconnection where peer via a layer-2 provider. Our measurements reveal significant presence at IXPs (Internet eXchange...

As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, polemical, takeover of by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. includes a number decentralized such as Pleroma or Mastodon, that share same subscription protocol (ActivityPub). Each these networks composed independent instances are run different administrators. Users, however, can interact with users across regardless instance they signed up to. user base creates key...

The Fediverse, a group of interconnected servers providing variety interoperable services (e.g. micro-blogging in Mastodon) has gained rapid popularity. This sudden growth, partly driven by Elon Musk's acquisition Twitter, created challenges for administrators though. paper focuses on one particular challenge: content moderation, e.g. the need to remove spam or hate speech. While centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter rely automated tools their dependence massive labeled datasets...

Microblogging is a crucial mode of online communication. However, launching new microblogging platform remains challenging, largely due to network effects. This has resulted in entrenched (and undesirable) dominance by established players, such as X/Twitter. To overcome these effects, Bluesky, an emerging platform, introduced starter packs -- curated lists accounts that users can follow with single click. We ask if have the potential tackle critical problem social bootstrapping networks?...

Domain squatting, the adversarial tactic where attackers register domain names that mimic popular ones, has been observed for decades. However, there growing anecdotal evidence this style of attack spread to other domains. In paper, we explore presence squatting attacks in mobile app ecosystem. "App Squatting", release apps with identifiers (e.g., name or package name) are confusingly similar those well-known Internet brands. This paper presents first in-depth measurement study showing its...

Hate speech has proliferated on social media platforms in recent years. While this been the focus of many studies, most works have exclusively focused a single language, generally English. Low-resourced languages neglected due to dearth labeled resources. These languages, however, represent an important portion data multilingual nature media. This work presents novel zero-shot, cross-lingual transfer learning pipeline based pseudo-label fine-tuning Transformer Language Models for automatic...

A majority of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) support connectivity to the entire Internet by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although transit prices per Mbps decline steadily, overall costs these remain high or even increase, due growth. The discontent with has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization. While above solutions tackle problem reducing traffic, this paper explores a novel approach that...

While innovation in inter-domain routing has remained stagnant for over a decade, Internet exchange points (IXPs) are consolidating their role as economically advantageous interconnection reducing path latencies and exchanging ever increasing amounts of traffic. As such, IXPs appear natural place to foster network assess the benefits SDN, recent technological trend that already boosted within data center networks. In this article, we give comprehensive overview use cases SDN at IXPs, which...

The importance of IXPs to interconnect different networks and exchange traffic locally has been well studied over the last few years. However, far less is known about role play as a platform enable large-scale content delivery reach world-wide customer base. In this paper, we study infrastructure deployment hypergiant, Netflix, show that combined worldwide IXP substrate major corner stone its Content Delivery Network. To meet demand for high-quality video delivery, Netflix built dedicated...

The worldwide spread of COVID-19 has prompted extensive online discussions, creating an 'infodemic' on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Twitter. However, the information shared these is prone to be unreliable and/or misleading. In this paper, we present first analysis discourse public groups from Pakistan. Building a large scale annotation thousands messages containing text images, identify main categories discussion. We focus understand different types images/text being...

Memes are the combinations of text and images that often humorous in nature. But, may not always be case, certain texts depict hate, referred to as hateful memes. This work presents a multimodal pipeline takes both visual textual features from memes into account (1) identify protected category (e.g. race, sex etc.) has been attacked; (2) detect type attack contempt, slurs etc.). Our uses state-of-the-art pre-trained representations, followed by simple logistic regression classifier. We...

A majority of Internet service providers (ISPs) support connectivity to the entire by transiting their traffic via other providers. Although transit prices per megabit second (Mbps) decline steadily, overall costs these ISPs remain high or even increase due growth. The discontent with has yielded notable innovations such as peering, content distribution networks, multicast, and peer-to-peer localization. While above solutions tackle problem reducing traffic, this paper explores a novel...

Headers are a critical part of HTTP, and it has been shown that they increasingly subject to middlebox manipulation. Although this is well known, little understood about the general regional network trends underpin these manipulations. In paper, we collect data on thousands networks understand how intercept HTTP headers in-the-wild. Our analysis reveals 25% measured ASes modify headers. Beyond this, witness distinct among different regions AS types; e.g., observe high numbers cache in poorly...

Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge achieving decentralised content moderation in face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised (DW) implementations rely on federation policies. Administrators use these policies to create rules that ban or modify matches specific rules. This, however, can have unintended consequences for users. In paper, we present first study DW, their in-the-wild usage, and impact...