Deconstructing Internet Censorship and its Consequences

Abstract

Internet censorship is on the rise, with over 70 countries restricting Internet access to their citizens. Some recent examples include the censorship of YouTube in Pakistan, blocking of Twitter in Turkey, and the filtering of Google in China. Internet censorship has a substantial impact on different stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem (e.g., users, content providers, and advertisers). In this talk, I will discuss two projects that my research group has recently worked on related to Internet censorship.

In the first half of my talk, I will describe C-Saw, a system that provides incentives to users for measuring Internet censorship. C-Saw offers data-driven circumvention as an incentive in exchange for measurements. As more users crowdsource, the censorship data gets richer. This helps in adapting the circumvention approach based on the deployed censorship mechanism for improving page load times. (This work appeared in ACM SIGCOMM 2018.)

In the second half of my talk, I’ll discuss the impact of Internet censorship on the online advertising ecosystem. To this end, I will describe Advention, a system that services relevant ads while allowing users to receive the benefits of circumvention/anonymity tools (e.g., Tor). Our results show that ADVENTION not only offers high ad relevance compared to other popular circumvention tools, it also offers smaller page load times. (This work appeared in ACM HotNets 2017.)

Bio

Ihsan Ayyub Qazi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA in 2010 and the BSc. (Hons) degree from LUMS with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics in 2005. He was a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, USA in 2017. Previously, he has also held positions at the Center for Advanced Internet Architectures, Australia and BBN Technologies, USA. His research interests are in computer networks and distributed systems and span cloud computing and datacenters, mobile/wireless networks, ICT for developing regions, and Internet censorship. He has published papers in premier networking conferences, such as ACM SIGCOMM, and journals including IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. My work was selected as a best ACM SIGCOMM CCR paper in 2018. He is a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award and the Andrew Mellon Fellowship. More information can be found at http://web.lums.edu.pk/~ihsan/.