Characterization of ISP Traffic: Trends, User Habits, and Access Technology Impact

In the recent years, the research community has increased its focus on network monitoring which is seen as a key tool to understand the Internet and the Internet users. Several studies have presented a deep characterization of a particular application, or a particular network, considering the point of view of either the ISP, or the Internet user. In this paper, we take a different perspective. We focus on three European countries where we have been collecting traffic for more than a year and a half through 5 vantage points with different access technologies. This humongous amount of information allows us not only to provide precise, multiple, and quantitative measurements of "What the user do with the Internet" in each country but also to identify common/uncommon patterns and habits across different countries and nations. Considering different time scales, we start presenting the trend of application popularity; then we focus our attention to a one-month long period, and further drill into a typical daily characterization of users activity. Results depict an evolving scenario due to the consolidation of new services as Video Streaming and File Hosting and to the adoption of new P2P technologies. Despite the heterogeneity of the users, some common tendencies emerge that can be leveraged by the ISPs to improve their servic

Orchestrating Forest Policy in Italy: Mission Impossible?

In the Italian political and economic agenda the forest sector occupies a marginal role. The forest sector in Italy is characterized by a high institutional fragmentation and centralized decision-making processes dominated by Public Forest Administrations. Public participation in forest policy processes has been implemented since the 1990s at national, regional and local levels in several cases. However, today no significant changes have been observed in the overall governance of the forest sector and stakeholders' involvement in Italian forest policy decision-making is still rather limited. The aims of this paper are to describe the state of forest-related participatory processes in Italy at various levels (national, regional and local) and identify which factors and actors hinder or support the establishment and implementation of participatory forest-related processes in the country. The forest-related participatory processes are analyzed adopting a qualitative-based approach and interpreting interactive, complex and non-linear participatory processes through the lens of panarchy theory

Strengthening measurements from the edges: application-level packet loss rate estimation

Network users know much less than ISPs, Internet exchanges and content providers about what happens inside the network. Consequently users cannot either easily detect network neutrality violations or readily exercise their market power by knowledgeably switching ISPs. This paper contributes to the ongoing efforts to empower users by proposing two models to estimate -- via application-level measurements -- a key network indicator, i.e., the packet loss rate (PLR) experienced by FTP-like TCP downloads. Controlled, testbed, and large-scale experiments show that the Inverse Mathis model is simpler and more consistent across the whole PLR range, but less accurate than the more advanced Likely Rexmit model for landline connections and moderate PL

A Formal Approach to Exploiting Multi-Stage Attacks based on File-System Vulnerabilities of Web Applications (Extended Version)

Web applications require access to the file-system for many different tasks. When analyzing the security of a web application, secu- rity analysts should thus consider the impact that file-system operations have on the security of the whole application. Moreover, the analysis should take into consideration how file-system vulnerabilities might in- teract with other vulnerabilities leading an attacker to breach into the web application. In this paper, we first propose a classification of file- system vulnerabilities, and then, based on this classification, we present a formal approach that allows one to exploit file-system vulnerabilities. We give a formal representation of web applications, databases and file- systems, and show how to reason about file-system vulnerabilities. We also show how to combine file-system vulnerabilities and SQL-Injection vulnerabilities for the identification of complex, multi-stage attacks. We have developed an automatic tool that implements our approach and we show its efficiency by discussing several real-world case studies, which are witness to the fact that our tool can generate, and exploit, complex attacks that, to the best of our knowledge, no other state-of-the-art-tool for the security of web applications can find

A Fast and Efficient Incremental Approach toward Dynamic Community Detection

Community detection is a discovery tool used by network scientists to analyze the structure of real-world networks. It seeks to identify natural divisions that may exist in the input networks that partition the vertices into coherent modules (or communities). While this problem space is rich with efficient algorithms and software, most of this literature caters to the static use-case where the underlying network does not change. However, many emerging real-world use-cases give rise to a need to incorporate dynamic graphs as inputs. In this paper, we present a fast and efficient incremental approach toward dynamic community detection. The key contribution is a generic technique called $\Delta-screening$, which examines the most recent batch of changes made to an input graph and selects a subset of vertices to reevaluate for potential community (re)assignment. This technique can be incorporated into any of the community detection methods that use modularity as its objective function for clustering. For demonstration purposes, we incorporated the technique into two well-known community detection tools. Our experiments demonstrate that our new incremental approach is able to generate performance speedups without compromising on the output quality (despite its heuristic nature). For instance, on a real-world network with 63M temporal edges (over 12 time steps), our approach was able to complete in 1056 seconds, yielding a 3x speedup over a baseline implementation. In addition to demonstrating the performance benefits, we also show how to use our approach to delineate appropriate intervals of temporal resolutions at which to analyze an input network

Designing Listening Material Samples Based On Contextual Teaching And Learning Approach

This research is aimed at answering the problem about the listening materials are needed by the second semester of eleventh grader of SMA Negeri 5 Pontianak. It was also about the materials are appropriate based on Contextual Teaching and Learning Approach. An interview conducted for the teacher and textbooks analysis based on the criterion Contextual Teaching and Learning Approach. The information sources for this research are the teacher of English in SMA Negeri 5 Pontianak and the textbooks which are used by the teacher. The result of the interview and the textbook analysis indicate that listening materials that are used by the teacher and the students, do not fulfill all aspects Contextual Teaching and Learning Approach. Hence, the researcher tried to design contextual listening materials in term of the text and the activities. The activities in the listening materials are designed based on all aspects of contextual teaching and learning approach. From the checklist, we conclude that listening material samples designed fulfill the approach of Contextual Teaching and Learning

Fractal Spectrum of a Quasi_periodically Driven Spin System

We numerically perform a spectral analysis of a quasi-periodically driven spin 1/2 system, the spectrum of which is Singular Continuous. We compute fractal dimensions of spectral measures and discuss their connections with the time behaviour of various dynamical quantities, such as the moments of the distribution of the wave packet. Our data suggest a close similarity between the information dimension of the spectrum and the exponent ruling the algebraic growth of the 'entropic width' of wavepackets.Comment: 17 pages, RevTex, 5 figs. available on request from [email protected]