acm sigcomm

People everywhere are generating ever-increasing amounts of data, often without being fully aware of who is recording what about them. For example, initiatives such as mandated smart metering, expected to be widely deployed in the UK in the next few years and already attempted in countries such as the Netherlands, will generate vast quantities of detailed, personal data about huge segments of the population. Neither the impact nor the potential of this society-wide data gathering are well understood.

On numerous occasions, trips to the facilities coincide with an important mobile phone call. Due to the sleek and polished nature of modern phones, attempting to promptly deal with such calls can occasionally lead to the phone sliding through the owner’s hands, surrendering to the force of gravity and flying down the hole. This is a disaster, and often an expensive incident. It can also be a health and safety hazard, with the owner desperately attempting to retrieve their phone and re-using it.

Online advertising is currently the richest source of revenue for many Internet giants. The increased number of online businesses, specialized websites and modern profiling techniques have all contributed to an explosion of the income of ad brokers from online advertising. The single biggest threat to this growth, is however, click-fraud. Trained botnets and individuals are hired by click-fraud specialists in order to maximize the revenue of certain users from the ads they publish on their websites, or to launch an attack between competing businesses.

Despite the large number of papers on network topology modeling and inference, there still exists ambiguity about the real nature of the Internet AS and router level topology. While recent findings have illustrated the inaccuracies in maps inferred from BGP peering and traceroute measurements, existing topology models still produce static topologies, using simplistic assumptions about power law observations and preferential attachment.