1,720,954 research outputs found
A first look at ad-block detection : a new arms race on the Web
No full textThe rise of ad-blockers is viewed as an economic threat by online publishers, especially those who primarily rely on advertising to support their services. To address this threat, publishers have started retaliating by employing ad-block detectors, which scout for ad-blocker users and react to them by restricting their content access and pushing them to whitelist the website or disabling ad-blockers altogether. The clash between ad-blockers and ad-block detectors has resulted in a new arms race on the web. In this thesis, we present the first systematic measurement and analysis of ad-block detection on the web. We have designed and implemented a machine learning based technique to automatically detect ad-block detection, and use it to study the deployment of ad-block detectors on Alexa top-100K websites. The approach is promising with precision of 94.8% and recall of 93.1%. We characterize the spectrum of different strategies used by websites for ad-block detection. We find that a vast majority of publishers on the web use fairly simple passive approaches for ad-block detection. However, we also note that a few websites use third-party services, e.g. PageFair, for ad-block detection and response. The third-party services use active deception and other sophisticated tactics to detect ad-blockers. We also find that the third-party services can successfully circumvent ad-blockers and display ads on publisher websites. Finally, we design and implement a proof-of-concept stealthy ad-blocker that can circumvent state-of-the-art ad-block detectors.</p
Practical protocols for private information retrieval
No full textSubmission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2026-05-01The student, Muhammad Haris Mughees, accepted the attached license on 2024-04-21 at 14:51.The student, Muhammad Haris Mughees, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2024-04-21 at 14:57.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2024-04-22 at 11:09.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #20522 on 2024-09-16 at 00:49:37The privacy of user queries is a critical problem that affects many cloud-based applications, such as location services, DNS lookups, and online messaging. This thesis studies a cryptographic primitive called Private Information Retrieval (PIR), which hides a client's query from the database server. While PIR is very compelling from a privacy standpoint, current protocols incur a significant performance overhead. In particular, current practical PIR protocols, which leverage somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE), have high communication overhead due to aggressive noise growth in the underlying homomorphic encryption operations and high server computation due to a linear number of complex homomorphic encryption operations. Two variants of PIR, BatchPIR and Stateful PIR, have been proposed, both aimed at improving the computation when the client has multiple queries. Unfortunately, even the protocols for these variants have several practical limitations. In previous BatchPIR schemes, communication does not get amortized, resulting in high communication overhead, especially when dealing with small entries. Meanwhile, in Stateful PIR, among other challenges, the client must store hints of substantial size, which can be a hurdle for devices with limited storage capacity. This thesis proposes three new practical PIR protocols to overcome these limitations. Our first protocol, OnionPIR, utilizes recent advances in SHE and carefully composes two lattice-based SHE schemes and homomorphic operations to control the noise growth and response size. OnionPIR achieves a response overhead of just 4.2x over the insecure baseline, in contrast to the 100x response overhead of previous protocols. We also presented an updated version of OnionPIR v2, in which response overhead is only 3x. Additionally, server computation is 2x better in this version than in the previous version and the best PIR schemes. We also demonstrate the practicality of OnionPIR by incorporating it into privacy-preserving ad delivery. We have utilized it to design a highly efficient and privacy-oriented ad delivery system, PrivateFetch. This system can deliver ads within a second, even when the ads database includes millions of ads. We then present the BatchPIR protocol, Vectorized BatchPIR, in which computation and communication are amortized, resulting in efficient overall performance for various database configurations. This protocol uses vectorized homomorphic encryption that allows oblivious merging of PIR responses. Our protocol's communication cost is 7.5x to 98.5x better than previous solutions for retrieving 256 entries from a database with one million entries of 256 bytes each. Finally, we design a new stateful PIR protocol, RingPIR, in which the client storage is significantly smaller than the previous schemes. Concretely, to fetch an entry from a database with 32 bytes and 16 million entries, the client storage is only 290 KB, 100 times smaller than the previous protocols. Additionally, the amortized computation is comparable to other stateful protocols and around 79x cheaper than the stateless protocol. Most stateful PIR protocols, including RingPIR, require the client to fetch the hint from the server privately in the offline phase. However, to fetch this hint, all the previous protocols require the server to download an entire database. We, therefore, propose an efficient hint retrieval protocol that uses a technique based on the homomorphic evaluation of copy networks. The proposed approach drastically reduces its response overhead by avoiding downloading the entire database in the offline stage. Specifically, for an entry size of 30 KB, the response size is reduced by 27 to 3,900x
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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