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Where is the Web Closed?
Sadia Afroz International Computer Science Institute
Bank
Where is the Web Closed? Sadia Afroz International Computer Science - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Where is the Web Closed? Sadia Afroz International Computer Science - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
Where is the Web Closed? Sadia Afroz International Computer Science Institute Bank Internet is going dark Internet is going dark but not because of repressive governments, because of developers and website owners Fragmentation
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Internet is going dark
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Internet is going dark
… but not because of repressive governments,
because of developers and website owners
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“Fragmentation … encompasses the appearance of diverse pressures in the networked environment that lead to diverse outcomes that are no longer coherent or consistent.”
Geoff Huston, “Thoughts on the Open Internet”
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Measuring Regional Blocking
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Websites can be inaccessible for many reasons
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List of unavailable websites Traceroute Manual Analysis
How to measure regional blocking?
Afroz, Sadia, Michael Carl Tschantz, Shaarif Sajid, Shoaib Asif Qazi, Mobin Javed, and Vern Paxson. "Exploring Server-side Blocking of Regions." arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.11606 (2018).
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How to measure regional blocking?
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How to measure regional blocking?
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How to measure regional blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
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How to verify blocking?
Inside the country?
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- 1. 85,421 Cloudflare-hosted URLs from Alexa top 1M domains
- 2. 7081 URLs containing top URLs in different topics
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UK
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Websites blocking African countries
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Websites blocking Pakistan
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Websites blocking USA
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Blocking mechanisms: GEO blocking
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Blocking mechanisms: GEO blocking
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Blocking mechanisms: GEO blocking
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Types of geo-blocking
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Blocking mechanisms: Security
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Types of security-motivated blocking
UK
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Different mechanisms for different countries
publix.com: blocks all countries except the USA williams-sonoma.com: blocks most African countries safeway.com: blocks all countries except the USA and IND cgg.gov.in: blocks all countries except the USA, UK and IND
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7081 websites from various Alexa lists before and after GDPR went into effect. Count:
- always worked before,
- still works from the US after, but
- from none of the EU vantages after
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All 47 are newspaper websites 27 Misc 40 HTTP error 403 mentioning GDPR 7 error 451
GDPR caused ~1% blocking
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Websites blocked due to GDPR
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Blocking mechanisms: ?
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Blocking mechanisms: ?
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Why Blocking Happens?
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Security-Motivated Blocking
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“I can’t imagine any reason someone in Nigeria needs to even see my website, let alone place an order
- n it.”
Security-Motivated Blocking
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“I can’t imagine any reason someone in Nigeria needs to even see my website, let alone place an order
- n it.”
“We do block by region, I block everything I can, I say block everything that isn't required for business if management will let you. Just remember that doing so makes you safer, not safe.”
Security-Motivated Blocking
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Jenna Burrell, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana
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Jenna Burrell, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana
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TOOLS FOR BLOCKING
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TOOLS FOR BLOCKING
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TOOLS FOR BLOCKING
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“Maybe Macy’s would like to build a wall too?”
Photo credit: taedc (Flickr);
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- IP address ≠ person
- Test your website from different locations
- Improve transparency:
- If you are going to block people, tell them why
- Provide ways to bypass the block
How to make the web more accessible?
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