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The article focuses on how large language models (LLMs) are influencing online communities. The authors offer their opinions, stating that generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT, are causing a decrease in user participation of knowledge communities and degrading the quality of answers the community provides.

The article explores data, artificial intelligence and Web3, noting how they may help to build "a new economy." Particular focus is given to the need to develop standards that guarantee a Web3 economy that provides global interoperability and adequate protection for individuals and communities. Other topics discussed include the unethical use of data that has occurred since 2012, questions about the concentration of power, and privacy concerns that have arisen since the start of the 21st century.

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the Corona Virus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. As a result, billions of people were either encouraged or forced by their governments to stay home to reduce the spread of the virus. This caused many to turn to the Internet for work, education, social interaction, and entertainment. With the Internet demand rising at an unprecedented rate, the question of whether the Internet could sustain this additional load emerged. To answer this question, this paper will review the impact of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on Internet traffic in order to analyze its performance. In order to keep our study broad, we collect and analyze Internet traffic data from multiple locations at the core and edge of the Internet. From this, we characterize how traffic and application demands change, to describe the "new normal," and explain how the Internet reacted during these unprecedented times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article criticizes the implementation of online cookie warnings required under European internet privacy law. A study comparing the impact of various cookie banners on the internet browsing behavior of 1,000 U.S. users is described with a focus on informed consent and the website of the ACM itself.

The authors discuss the issue of site reliability engineering (SRE) and its use by Google. They mention the importance of measuring the right aspects of service, the question of studying internet speed from the users' perspective, and the need to accurately forecast future load based on these metrics.

The article discusses user interface designs created to guide users' behavior towards more desirable options in digital choice environments. Topics include the influence of heuristics and biases on online decision making, the lack of guidelines for digital nudging in online contexts, and the importance of developers to understand the online users it is targeting.

The article looks at the potential effects of bias present in internet use and content as well as how this can be considered and addressed in the design of Web systems. It discusses how social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can lead to activity bias as users follow only the most popular influencers. Other topics covered include data bias, algorithmic bias, and bias on user interaction.

The article discusses contest theory, a set of theories for better understanding and informed design of contests. It looks at how the operation of online platforms rely on incentive mechanisms for getting user contributions. The author details how the theory offers insight on user behavior and algorithms for estimating skills of individuals based on observed contest outcomes.

The article examines legal issues regarding online user-contributed content such as photographs and videos. Particular attention is given to intellectual property law and social norms related to content ownership. Other topics covered include managing rights, social media, and fair use laws.

The article discusses the use of recommender systems (RS) by various major companies. Topics include the role of recommender systems as part of daily online user experience and to support users in various domains, the tendency for recommender systems to predict the past rather than the future, and the impact of human-computer interaction on the success of an RS.

The article provides information on an approach used by the programming language JavaScript engine V8 in the Chrome internet browser to schedule garbage-collection pauses when Chrome is idle. It details how this approach can reduce user-visable dropped frames, or jank, on real-world websites and result in fewer dropped frames and memory consumption.

The article discusses the psychological well-being of Internet users, focusing on the effects of their particular activities and audiences online. Findings highlighted include how online communication with friends has more positive associations with well-being than strangers, divergences in the reliability of different research methods in this area, and how human agency is a major factor when evaluating the subjective effects of the Internet.

The article provides details on a study which looked at the motivation behind comments posted online, focusing on factors that determine whether Internet uses are benevolent or malicious. It discusses how the anonymity of online comments leads to a lack of responsibility. To address these issues, the author suggest ethical education, required use of real identities, or text filters used by developers to detect malicious texts.

The article looks at exploratory search, or the exploration of information in situations where the user cannot initially frame a specific query or where the process of exploration itself will modify the direction of the search. The authors introduce the interactive intent modeling approach as a way of facilitating exploratory search that goes beyond that enabled by typical search engines. Topics include the use of a visual model of search intent, the SciNet scientific literature search system, the role of user feedback in the evolution of a search, and wearable computers. INSET: Background.

The article looks at the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet on people's cognition and mental functioning. The author cites concerns expressed about Internet and ICT use possibly having negative effects on memory, mental concentration, and attention span. He says it is not necessarily a problem for new technologies to substitute for some human mental functions but expresses concern about their effect on creativity.

The article offers the author's view on the fall of security in the hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) market. He mentions its role in web browsing security as well as the manifestation of Internet services and users through a certificate-based authentication protocol. He notes its criticality in protecting online activities of economy, society and politics. An overview of security breach at certificate authorities (CAs) such as DigiNotar BV, Comodo Group Inc. and Verisign Inc. is also presented.

The article reports on the free collaborative knowledgebase, Wikidata. It mentions its aim in addressing information contradictions through establishing methods for data management in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. It notes that both web resources allow users to edit and expand stored data in the absence of an account. It also points out its role as a valued resource used in all fields of culture, science and technology while devoting itself toward a world wherein people can share their knowledge.

The article discusses the development of the Argument Web, a URI-addressable structure of linked argument data. According to the authors, the Argument Web enables users to follow a line of argument across disparate forums, comments, editorials, and multimedia resources. They discuss the isolation of the Web's vocal communities such as blogs, Reddit and Twitter. Moreover, the article highlights several tools, systems and standards for linking argument data included in the Web and its objective to improve the quality of online argument and debate.

The article discusses crowdsourcing (CS) and its facilitation via systems on the Internet. The article defines and classifies CS systems with descriptions of examples, which include the web sites Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers. CS systems are defined as enduring entities that are collaboratively constructed by a crowd of users for the benefit of an entire user community. The authors also discuss challenges to using CS systems including recruiting and evaluating users and managing the information they contribute. Key insights offered by the article are presented.

The article presents methods for gauging and predicting the popularity of internet news stories and videos, drawing examples from the web sites Digg and YouTube. Evidence is presented that popularity prediction is possible because of definite regularities in the patterns of user attention, when internet users are focusing on content. In addition, early access patterns are said to provide key indicators of whether the content will hold its popularity. It is noted that groups such as web site administrators, online advertisers, and internet service providers all have a vested interest in becoming able to predict online content popularity accurately.

The article presents the results of a survey which investigated the psychological motivations behind online tagging, which involves attaching keywords to shared internet content, such as images, videos or blogs. The study focused on individuals who applied tags to their own digital photographs when posting them on flickr, a photo-sharing website. The reasons given by respondents for tagging their images are analyzed. These included helping themselves to remember details, and making it easier for other internet users to find and understand their photographs.

The article presents the results of a study which investigated computer security flaws in wireless networks. It focused on the problem of public internet access points known as hot spots. These are often unencrypted, or only weakly protected. The danger of malicious software targeting such vulnerable points, and subsequently spreading to other parts of a network, is noted. The study involved a college campus system, and the firewall and port vulnerabilities which were found are discussed. Recommendations on formulating security policies to prevent data security breaches are provided.

The article focuses on a study by researchers Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology regarding the impact of results from search engines' queries on how Internet users vote. Topics discussed include the potential impact of search egine companies on the outcome of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the biased rankings of search engines, and the shift in voter preferences.

The article discusses participation in online or Internet communities. There has been a large increase in online communities such as the picture sharing Web site Flickr.com, the video sharing Web site YouTube.com, and the news voting Web site Digg.com. The Web sites feature social interaction and exchange between users which is a direct contribution of their success and monetization. The exchange between Internet users on these online communities is termed Ballot Box Communication which is defined as an aggregation method reflecting the experience and opinions of the individuals within the community.

The article discusses the manner in which performance of the Internet may be improved by building scalable and fast content-delivery systems. The biggest bottleneck related to the performance of commercial-grade Web applications, the author states, is the "middle mile," or the amount of time data takes to travel the Internet between the origin server and the end user. Other topics include the middle mile as a heterogeneous infrastructure that is owned by competing entities and the peering and transit points where networks trade traffic.

The article discusses ways to educate motivate Internet users regarding safety and security measures. Many users have insufficient protection against computer viruses, spyware and hackers. The authors discuss how threat appraisals and risk assessments that emphasize fear regarding Internet security can fail to motivate users. Self-efficacy and efficacy of safety procedures are key elements to educating users about Internet safety. The rewards of safe Internet behavior should be emphasized over costs. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM), in which involvement affects critical thinking, is used an example of how to avoid fraudulent websites and phishing.

This article discusses the need for better wireless security. Increased wireless security requires corporations, manufacturers, employers, and users to work together for a single goal. In most systems, the weakest components of a computer system's security are the end users, particularly when they are accessing the corporation's databases with wireless facilities at home. Most end users do not have a proper understanding of the security features of their wireless network. Connections from employees' homes often are not protected by trained computer experts.

The article discusses the unauthorized use of wireless Internet by users that are external to an organization. The use is problematic for both sides of the organization, since unauthorized users risk civil and criminal liability and network providers risk system intrusion and disruption. The authors examine the motivation for roaming use outside of the network as well as an organization's justification for Wi-Fi networks, which include operational benefits, lower economic costs, and convenient Internet access.

The article discusses the classification of product comparison agents. Because comparison-shopping is such a popular activity among consumers due to lower search costs when using the Internet, it has become extremely important for businesses to allow consumers to easily compare products. This situation can often be daunting for consumers who have a potentially unlimited availability of choice alternatives in online shopping. The authors examine product comparison agents that assist consumers.

The article discusses the connection between online privacy and personalized Web sites. Because consumers have been shown to value personalized content, and personalization on Web sites also is profitable for Web vendors, Internet providers often place an emphasis on this personalization. However, the practice is deterred by the fact that personalization often entails gathering extensive amounts of data about consumers, leading many to be concerned about their online privacy and how much they are tracked.

This article discusses the exploration of mobile device user adoption patterns and market segmentation. Mobile phones are now multipurpose devices that transmit voice communication, provide short text messaging service (SMS), facilitate mobile banking, take and share pictures and videos, and use the Internet. Academics and practitioners emphasize that technological innovation and service ability do not automatically lead to widespread adoption and use. Mobile market research calls for investigating factors that predict or explain adoption, acceptance, and use of mobile services.

This article describes Domain Name System Security Protocol (DNSSEC) and its role as an ecology of security protocols and measures. Most U.S. Internet users cite privacy and data confidentiality as their main security concerns. Experts, however, remain more uneasy about infrastructure, with many predicting a catastrophic event being executed through the networked information infrastructure or the country's power grid. Infrastructure attacks occur outside their normal frame of reference and control.

The article discusses an online recommender system that builds profiling models to dynamically personalize web sites without user intervention. One of the most useful applications of Web Usage Mining, which extracts knowledge about Internet users through an analysis of Web server access logs and browser caches, is Web Personalization, or recommender systems, which can improve the usability of and customize a web site with no direct intervention required from the user. Methods to implement Web personalization are examined.

The article focuses on how online computer game players respond to poor computer network connections. According to the article, slow Internet connections and long delays, called high "ping times" and "lags" are frequently complained about by game players. However, online computer games continue to be popular; the article studies whether computer game users quit playing games sooner than they would have had the network connection been better. The authors found evidence that the length of time that players stayed online was related to perceived network quality. The design of individual games can be a factor in the perception of the network quality.

The streaming of live video content from a home Internet user to others over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is discussed. Innovations in P2P networking may allow Internet users to host live television broadcasts from their homes with improved quality and reliability. The article describes BitTorrent, which uses a protocol called mesh-based P2P streaming to improve Internet video delivery. The possible use of this method to mitigate Internet video problems such as: bandwidth heterogeneity, peer dynamics, and resource utilization, is discussed.

Network latency affects the outcome of different online computer gaming actions differently depending on the gaming action. The article describes many of the reasons for latency, or network delays, such as reduced network capacity, bottlenecks, and lost packet repair techniques. The author describes several online games and describes the effect of latency depending on the game design. For example, a game that uses a machine gun to shoot a player, versus a pistol, can mitigate the impact of latency; with a machine gun a player can still hit a target even with a minor network delay.

The article focuses on Web site spoofing frauds. According to the article, identity theft is a growing crime. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission reports that almost 10 million Americans are affected by the crime on an annual basis. The article presents examples of Web spoofing attacks that affected PayPal and Citibank. The article describes the methods that are used in Web spoofing attacks and provides methods that Internet users can protect themselves from fraud through diligence and education.

This article focuses on the use of writeprint--the features, such as vocabulary richness, length of sentence, layout of paragraphs, and keywords, that represent a particular author's writing style--as a way of "fingerprinting" criminals who use the Internet anonymously. Authorship analysis is the process of categorizing articles by an author's writing style, often viewed as a form of stylometric research. The author discusses various software that can be used for authorship identification.

This article focuses on phishing scams deployed in such a way that they stand a chance of success against a reasonably intelligent and enlightened end user. The author defines phishing as an attach using both social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal consumers' personal identity data and financial account credentials. The requirements of an effective phishing require that the scams looks real, present themselves to a target-of-opportunity, satisfy the reasonableness condition, cause the unwary to suspend disbelief, and clean up after the catch.

This article reports on the Universal Law of Web Surfing, which maintains that Web surfing patterns for users are quite regular, manifesting a preference for shorter surfing sessions over longer ones. The authors assess whether these regularities apply to surfing on the mobile Web, specifically through Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) portals, where many aspects of the user environment are quite different from the conventional Web. The article analyzes a large sample of mobile Web user data.

This article reports on the extraordinarily rapid development of Internet technologies, especially Web technologies, which has resulted in Internet/Web systems that differ significantly from traditional systems. The authors define Internet/Web systems as systems that business, government, or consumer clients of a company can interact with through Internet connections, or that a company's own functional areas can interact with through intranets. While most common Internet systems are those with Web interfaces, the article defines traditional systems as those without such interfaces.

The article discusses online communities in relation to health care in the U.S. Almost 30% of Internet users in the country participate in medical or health-related groups. Such a large scale participation in online health care groups is motivated by the inability of contemporary medical practice to meet the needs of patients that go beyond their physical-medical treatment. The widespread popularity of online patient communities has emerged because of the ability of technology to satisfy these needs. An online community is composed of four essential elements consisting of people, purposes, protocols and technology. The members of such a community have shared purposes, and they interact socially by sticking to explicit protocols, rituals, and roles using Internet technologies that support interaction. The technology required in this case is not complex. A simple email-based online community can be created by setting up a listserv for a group of users. Similarly, others can be built using some combination of Web pages, chats, bulletin boards, email, instant messengers and databases.

The article presents information about NewsInEssence (NIE; www.newsinessence.com), a news delivery and summarization system under development at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. NIE acts as the user's agent to gather and summarize related online news articles. Given a user's topic specification, NIE searches across dozens of news sites to collect a group, or cluster, of related stories. It then generates a summary of the entire cluster, highlighting its most important content. NIE retrieves news articles from online news sources around the globe. In addition to nearly 20 U.S. sources, NIE retrieves news from the online versions of British, Canadian, South African, and Australian newspapers, as well as English language versions of online newspapers from India, Singapore, and China, among others. The central object in NIE is the cluster, which consists of a number of topically related news articles. For each document in a cluster, NIE displays the article's title, source, publication date, and original universal resource locator.

The article presents a discussion on personalization technologies. It describes the process-oriented approach to personalization, particularly the importance of vertical personalization research and the need for solid design principles for integrating all stages of the personalization process leading to the virtuous cycle of personalization. Personalization takes place between one or several providers of personalized offerings and one or several consumers. Personalized offerings are delivered from providers to consumers through personalization engines by adapting one of three architectural approaches: provider-centric, consumer-centric, and market-centric. The personalization engine is the infomediary, knowing the needs of the consumer and the provider's offerings and trying to match them in the best ways possible according to their internal goals. Personalization objectives generally range from simply improving the consumer's browsing and shopping experience to much more complex objectives. Successful personalization applications depend on knowledge about consumers' personal preferences and behavior typically distilled from volumes of granular information about them and stored in the form of consumer profiles.

This article investigates factors affecting Internet users' adoption of anti-spyware systems. An anti-spyware system is the most widely recommended solution, which implements features that prevent, detect, and remedy the problems caused by spyware. The system monitors spyware attacks and automatically identifies and cleanses a system. Studies have identified that more than 80% of current spyware problems could be identified and resolved by using anti-spyware systems. The study seeks to provide a better understanding of an individual's decision to adopt an anti-spyware system, as well as provide a useful guideline on how to increase the adoption rate. The anti-spyware system adoption model was developed based on the theory of planned behavior and previous studies of information technology innovation adoption. As this model has been effective in explaining and predicting the adoption of new information technologies, it was fitting to use it to examine the adoption of anti-spyware systems. The adoption factor indicates that people are inclined to adopt an anti-spyware system when they perceive it as a useful, effective means for keeping their computing environment safe and thus enhancing their task performance.

This article focuses on threats posed by spyware for Internet users. According to a 2004 WebSense survey, 92% of corporate IT managers at companies of 100 or more employees claim to have had a "major" spyware problem. The paradox of this situation, however, is that while most Internet users are familiar with slothful PC performance, the increased amount of pop-up advertisements, and the mysterious search results caused by spyware; most of these users are not aware of the presence of the underlying spyware application until well after the spyware has been installed on their computer. This hidden nature of spyware can be quite dangerous. The term "spyware" generally refers to software programs that act as data sensors and illicitly collect and transmit information about end users, and then send it back to a third party. Spyware poses several types of risk to computer owners, some more conspicuous than others. Spyware is classified into the following six categories: cookies and web bugs; browser hijackers; keyloggers; tracks/spybots; adware; and malware.

The article informs that in times of ubiquitous electronic communication and increasing industry pressure for standard electronic authentication, the maintenance of privacy, or "the right to be left alone" becomes a subject of increasing concern. As expected, disclosure rates increased from privacy fundamentalists to marginally concerned users. Identity concerned and profiling averse users showed intermediate disclosure rates and acted in relative accordance with their stated preferences: the former withheld their address more often, and the latter had lower PCIC index values. Inconsistencies between people's behavior and their self-reports are a well-known phenomenon, with explanations emphasizing cognitive and/or social aspects of decision making and behavior. Findings suggest that, given the right circumstances, online users easily forget about their privacy concerns and communicate even the most personal details without any compelling reason to do so. This holds true in particular when the online exchange is entertaining and appropriate benefits are offered in return for information revelation circumstances easily created by second-generation agent technologies and embodied interface agents.

This article reports that blogging is sometimes viewed as a new, grassroots form of journalism and a way to shape democracy outside the mass media and conventional party politics. Blog sites devoted to politics and punditry, as well as to sharing technical developments, receive thousands of hits a day. But the vast majority of blogs are written by ordinary people for much smaller audiences. This article reports the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. Researchers investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs. Blogs combine the immediacy of up-to-the-minute posts, latest first, with a strong sense of the author's personality, passions and point of view. They found tremendous diversity in blog content, even in their limited sample. On the serious side, a graduate student in genetics, posted commentaries on science and health, covering such topics as AIDS, heart disease, science education and health care policy.

This article reports that early self-published online journals, or Weblogs, has allowed "bloggers" to bypass the corporate media gatekeepers to say and show practically anything they could think of to tens of millions of computer users around the world. Having to please no one but themselves, these bloggers began enthusiastically linking and cross-linking to and referencing one another's sites and commentaries. These links drove development of blog technology, as well as user curiosity and ultimately creation of the worldwide blogosphere. In contrast, today's generation of bloggers mainly wants to be heard or seen — instantly, throughout the Internet — even as they tend to ignore everything else. Weblog-tracking company Technorati Inc., reports almost 4.2 million Weblogs worldwide as of October 2004, up from about one million a year earlier. And a 2003 Pew/Internet survey estimated that more than 53 American adults, or 44% of Internet users, had used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the content available online.

This article focuses on a system capable of aggregating, annotating, indexing and searching a community's snippets. Capturing the snippets should be easy at a useful level of detail while causing minimal disruption to users' normal activities. Though snippets are likely to be scattered throughout an organization in a variety of locations and stored in a variety of formats, it should be possible to integrate them and perform some global search over the result. Information consumers can add value by enriching snippets at the point of use by, say, adding ratings, annotations, relationships and categories. Snippets are polymorphic. Depending on the task, people may reasonably want to capture email, Web pages, documents, text fragments, and images. Blogging's greatest benefit is social, not technological. First, ease of use makes it likely that more people will publish and publish more often, and that more information will be communicated. The structure of the information is often different from more static home pages, more like online journals, or a series of snippets.