The Battle for Control of Online Communications

Опубликовано 12 августа 2016, 0:41

The Internet offers users many opportunities for communicating and exchanging ideas, but abuse, censorship, and the manipulation of Internet traffic have put free and open communication at risk. Recent estimates suggest that spam constitutes about 95 of all email traffic; hundreds of thousands of online scam domains emerge every day; online social networks may be used to spread propaganda; and more than 60 countries around the world censor Internet traffic. In this talk, I will present approaches that we have developed to preserve free and open communication on the Internet in the face of these threats. First, I will describe the threat of message abuse (e.g., spam) and describe methods we have developed for mitigating it. I will briefly discuss a 13-month study of the network-level behavior of spammers, and present SNARE, a spam filtering system we developed that classifies email messages based on the network-level traffic characteristics of the email messages, rather than their contents. Next, I will turn to information censorship, and describe Collage, a system that circumvents censorship without arousing the suspicion of the censor. Finally, I will discuss the various forms of information manipulation, including the spread of propaganda in social networks and online 'filter bubbles'. Although it is difficult to prevent all forms of manipulation, our goal is to make it more transparent to users. Towards this goal, I will describe my broader research agenda and plans, which aim to improve Internet transparency for aspects of Internet communication ranging from network performance to social media to search results using the aggregation of data from a wide variety of vantage points.