Search

Modern mobile operating systems support displaying Web pages in native mobile applications. When an app user navigates to a specific location containing a Web page, the Web page will be loaded and rendered from within the app. Such kind of Web browsing, as we call embedded Web browsing, is different from traditional Web browsing, which involves typing a URL on a browser and loading the Web page. However, little has been known about the prevalence or performance of such embedded Web pages. In this paper, we conduct, to the best of our knowledge, the first measurement study on embedded Web browsing on Android. Our study on 22,521 popular Android apps shows that 57.9 and 73.8 percent of apps embed Web pages on two popular app markets, that is, Google Play and Wandoujia, respectively. We design and implement EWProfiler, a tool that can automatically search for embedded Web pages inside apps, trigger page loads, and retrieve performance metrics to analyze the embedded Web browsing performance at scale. Based on 445 embedded Web pages obtained by EWProfiler in 99 popular apps from the two app markets, we investigate the characteristics and performance of embedded Web pages, and find that embedded Web pages significantly impede the app user experience. We investigate the effectiveness of three techniques, i.e., separating the browser kernel to a different process, loading pages from the local storage, and pre-rendering, to optimize the performance of embedded Web browsing. We believe that our findings could draw the attention of Web developers, browser vendors, app developers, and mobile OS vendors together toward a better performance of embedded Web browsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interrupting the web tracking kill chain is enough to disrupt the tracker's ability to leverage the collected information; however, this may disrupt the personalized services enjoyed by many. Empowering the user to select which domains can be co-tracked gives him/her the upper hand over web trackers. This allows the user to enjoy the personalized services without fearing full inter-domain tracking. To achieve this, we propose a solution that attempts to introduce layers of anonymization serving as temporary identities to be used by the user while browsing. Those identities will be used for limited time (to sustain the customization and user experience resulting from tracking), and then discarded for a new identity. This approach allows the user to divide the activity into profiles which eliminates browsing history spilling over to other sessions. We proved the security of this approach mathematically and we demonstrated its usability using an open-source Proof-of-Concept built on top of blockchain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We formulate and study the problem of ON-OFF privacy. ON-OFF privacy algorithms enable a user to continuously switch his privacy between ON and OFF. An obvious example is the incognito mode in internet browsers. But beyond internet browsing, ON-OFF privacy can be a desired feature in most online applications. The challenge is that the statistical correlation over time of a user’s online behavior can lead to leakage of information. We consider the setting in which a user is interested in retrieving the latest message generated by one of $N$ sources. The user’s privacy status can change between ON and OFF over time. When privacy is ON the user wants to hide his request. Moreover, since the user’s requests depend on personal attributes such as age, gender, and political views, they are typically correlated over time. As a consequence, the user cannot simply ignore privacy when privacy is OFF. We model the correlation between user’s requests by an $N$ state Markov chain. The goal is to design query schemes with optimal download rate, that preserve privacy in an ON-OFF privacy setting. In this paper, we present inner and outer bounds on the achievable download rate for $N$ sources. We also devise an efficient algorithm to construct an ON-OFF privacy scheme achieving the inner bound and prove its optimality in the case $N=2$ sources. For $N > 2$ , finding tighter outer bounds and efficient constructions of ON-OFF privacy schemes that would achieve them remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to their heavy reliance on server infrastructure, the current computation-intensive SaaS suffer from scalability issues compared to the existing data-intensive commercial SaaS. Offloading certain computations to the client browser can resolve these scalability issues but the current Browser APIs are complex to use and integrate in a single software. We propose in this paper four high level APIs that harness existing browser-based paradigms and proven software architectures to reduce the complexity of parallel computing and device-agnostic interactive rendering in the web browser. To allow experimental results, we have developed a proof-of-concept browser-based and interactive diffusion MRI where we have particularly deployed a parallel Diffusion Tensor Estimation. Our platform provides us easy APIs achieving up to 4 times speedup in parallel computation and real-time interactive rendering performances across different Browsers and Devices in comparison to other existing solutions in the Diffusion MRI Community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based DNNs provide accurate object recognition to the mobile Web AR, which is newly emerging as a lightweight mobile AR solution. Webbased DNNs are attracting a great deal of attention. However, balancing the UX against the computing cost for DNN-based object recognition on the Web is difficult for both self-contained and cloud-based offloading approaches, as it is a latency-sensitive service but also has high requirements in terms of computing and networking abilities. Fortunately, the emerging 5G networks promise not only bandwidth and latency improvement but also the pervasive deployment of edge servers which are closer to the users. In this article, we propose the first edge-based collaborative object recognition solution for mobile Web AR in the 5G era. First, we explore the finegrained and adaptive DNN partitioning for the collaboration between the cloud, the edge, and the mobile Web browser. Second, we propose a differentiated DNN computation scheduling approach specially designed for the edge platform. On one hand, performing part of DNN computations on mobile Web without decreasing the UX (i.e., keep response latency below a specific threshold) will effectively reduce the computing cost of the cloud system; on the other hand, performing the remaining DNN computations on the cloud (including remote and edge cloud) will also improve the inference latency and thus UX when compared to the self-contained solution. Obviously, our collaborative solution will balance the interests of both users and service providers. Experiments have been conducted in an actually deployed 5G trial network, and the results show the superiority of our proposed collaborative solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web browsing is the main Internet service, and every customer wants the minimum web page loading times. To satisfy this perpetual need, web browsers offer new processing engines and increased functionalities. Web developers make use of new programming languages and paradigms, new transport protocols have been introduced, network operators offer increased bandwidth, and CDN providers deploy web servers closest to end users. To assess the efficiency of these evolutions, delivered performance is often evaluated in a standalone manner, without considering the whole chain of web browsing. We propose Web View, a measurement platform that performs automated web browsing sessions on popular websites in a user-representative environment. Through different configurable parameters, Web View measures a wide set of information in order to evaluate the impact of the different parameters (transport protocols, web browsers, CDN, access networks, etc.). Based on those measurements, to ease the understanding of web browsing and the corresponding evolutions, Web View offers a public visualization website (https://webview. orange.com). For instance, with Web View, we were able to detect that the use of different CDNs at different times of the day can decrease loading times up to 400 percent and that the delivery of content through different transport protocols can decrease loading times up to 79 percent. This article presents the Web View measurement platform as well as remarkable events we noticed during more than one year of measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web is now capable of running computationally intensive code at near-native speed, enabling new types of content such as physics simulations to be easily shared online. In this article, the author shows how to do just that by writing code in C++ and compiling it to the web with the open-source Emscripten tool, which generates asm.js, a fast subset of JavaScript that runs in all web browsers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile specific webpages differ significantly from their desktop counterparts in content, layout, and functionality. Accordingly, existing techniques to detect malicious websites are unlikely to work for such webpages. In this paper, we design and implement kAYO, a mechanism that distinguishes between malicious and benign mobile webpages. kAYO makes this determination based on static features of a webpage ranging from the number of iframes to the presence of known fraudulent phone numbers. First, we experimentally demonstrate the need for mobile specific techniques and then identify a range of new static features that highly correlate with mobile malicious webpages. We then apply kAYO to a dataset of over 350,000 known benign and malicious mobile webpages and demonstrate 90 percent accuracy in classification. Moreover, we discover, characterize, and report a number of webpages missed by Google Safe Browsing and VirusTotal, but detected by kAYO. Finally, we build a browser extension using kAYO to protect users from malicious mobile websites in real-time. In doing so, we provide the first static analysis technique to detect malicious mobile webpages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privacy seems to be the Achilles’ heel of today’s web. Most web services make continuous efforts to track their users and to obtain as much personal information as they can from the things they search, the sites they visit, the people they contact, and the products they buy. This information is mostly used for commercial purposes, which go far beyond targeted advertising. Although many users are already aware of the privacy risks involved in the use of internet services, the particular methods and technologies used for tracking them are much less known. In this survey, we review the existing literature on the methods used by web services to track the users online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user’s defenses. We present five main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, and other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users. For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Some of them are specific to a particular tracking approach, while others are more universal (block more than one threat). Finally, we present the future trends in user tracking and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users’ privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our society increasingly relies on web-based services like online banking, shopping, and socializing. Many of these services heavily depend on secure end-to-end transactions to transfer personal, financial, and other sensitive information. At the core of ensuring secure transactions are the HTTPS protocol and the "trust" relationships between many involved parties, including users, browsers, servers, domain owners, and the third-party CAs that issue certificates binding ownership of public keys with servers and domains. This article presents an overview of the current trust landscape and provides statistics to illustrate and quantify some of the risks facing typical users. Using measurement results obtained through passive monitoring of the HTTPS traffic between a campus network and the Internet, we provide concrete examples and characterize the certificate usage and trust relationships in this complex landscape. By comparing our observations against known vulnerabilities and problems, we highlight and discuss the actual security that typical Internet users (e.g., the people on campus) experience. Our measurements cover both mobile and stationary users, consider the involved trust relationships, and provide insights into how the HTTPS protocol is used and the weaknesses observed in practice. While the security properties vary significantly between sessions, out of the 232 million HTTPS sessions we observed, more than 25 percent had weak security properties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Real-time communication between browsers has represented an unprecedented standardization effort involving both the IETF and the W3C. These activities have involved both the real-time protocol suite and the application-level JavaScript APIs to be offered to developers in order to allow them to easily implement interoperable real-time multimedia applications in the web. This article sheds light on the current status of standardization, with special focus on the upcoming final release of the so-called WebRTC-1.0 standard ecosystem. It takes stock of the situation with respect to hot topics such as codecs, session description and stream multiplexing. It also briefly discusses how standard bodies are dealing with seamless integration of the initially competing effort known as "Object Real Time Communications." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The huge amount of data on the Internet and the diverse list of strategies used to try to link this information with relevant searches through Linked Data have generated a revolution in data treatment and its representation. Nevertheless, the conventional search engines like Google are kept as strategies with good reception to do search processes. The following article presents a study of the development and evolution of search engines, more specifically, to analyze the relevance of findings based on the number of results displayed in paging systems with Google as a case study. Finally, it is intended to contribute to indexing criteria in search results, based on an approach to Semantic Web as a stage in the evolution of the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its widespread adoption and popularity, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) suffers from fundamental performance limitations. SPDY, a recently proposed alternative to HTTP, tries to address many of the limitations of HTTP (e.g., multiple connections, setup latency). In this paper, we perform a detailed measurement study to understand the benefits of using SPDY over cellular networks. Through careful measurements conducted over 4 months, we provide a detailed analysis of the performance of HTTP and SPDY, how they interact with the various layers, and their implications on Web design. Our results show that unlike in wired and 802.11 networks, SPDY does not clearly outperform HTTP over cellular networks. We identify negative interactions between the protocols used for Web access (HTTP/SPDY over TCP) and cellular radio resource management as the underlying cause. Overall performance suffers when devices go through a cellular radio state promotion after an idle period, and the consequent increase in latency. This impacts SPDY more because of the use of a single TCP connection. We conclude that a viable solution has to account for these unique cross-layer dependencies to achieve improved Web performance over cellular networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web browsers are one of the most pervasive applications for an entire range of personal computing platforms--from mobile devices to desktops. Using Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to build "Web apps" has the promise of creating portable applications for all platforms. Thus browsers become application containers, requiring increased performance from browser engines. Here, the authors discuss advances in browser technologies that exploit multicore processing. They use the Zoomm browser and the MuscalietJS JavaScript engine as running examples of highly concurrent Web browser and JavaScript engines. They show how concurrency is effectively exploited at different levels: to speed up computation performance, preload network resources, and preprocess resources outside the critical path to speed up page loading and Web workloads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile browsers are increasingly being relied upon to perform security sensitive operations. Like their desktop counterparts, these applications can enable SSL/TLS to provide strong security guarantees for communications over the web. However, the drastic reduction in screen size and the accompanying reorganization of screen real-estate significantly changes the use and consistency of the security indicators and certificate information that alert users of site identity and the presence of strong cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we perform the first measurement of the state of critical security indicators in mobile browsers. We evaluate ten mobile and two tablet browsers, representing over 90% of the market share, against the recommended guidelines for web user interface to convey security set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While desktop browsers follow the majority of guidelines, our analysis shows that mobile browsers fall significantly short. We also observe notable inconsistencies across mobile browsers when such mechanisms actually are implemented. We show where and how these failures on mobile browsers eliminate clues previously designed for, and still present in, desktop browsers to detect attacks such as phishing and man-in-the-middle. Finally, we offer advice on where current standards are unclear or incomplete. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mozilla's decision to release a new version of its products every six weeks (instead of every year) profoundly affected developers and users and was accompanied by significant changes in the release process. Were such changes enough to allow Mozilla to move faster without breaking things? What lessons can be learned from Mozilla's adoption of rapid releases? To answer these questions, researchers analyzed tens of thousands of commits and bug reports from Firefox and talked to its developers. The results show that, because of integration repositories, build sheriffs, and better testing tools, broken patches were backed out (reverted) earlier, rendering the release process more stable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To provide more relevant content and better responsiveness, many websites customize their services according to users' geolocations. However, if geo-oriented websites leave location-sensitive content in the browser cache, other sites can sniff that content via side channels. The authors' case studies demonstrate the reliability and power of geo-inference attacks, which can measure the timing of browser cache queries and track a victim's country, city, and neighborhood. Existing defenses cannot effectively prevent such attacks, and additional support is required for a better defense deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For several years, browsers have been able to assure users that they are talking to a specific, identified website, protected from network-based attackers. In email, messaging, and other applications where sites act as intermediaries, there is a need for additional protections to provide end-to-end security. This article describes the approach that WebRTC takes to providing end-to-end security, leveraging both the flexibility of JavaScript and the ability of browsers to create constraints through JavaScript APIs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Web identity and resolution identifies, authenticates, and locates users on the Web. It's a critical aspect of Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC), a joint W3C and IETF effort to develop standards for secure real-time communication over the Web. Although WebRTC proposes a security architecture to integrate with federated Web identity systems, the architecture isn't compatible with identity protocols that don't satisfy WebRTC requirements. To fill the gap, the authors describe two alternative architectures to adapt incompatible identity protocols to the WebRTC security architecture. They also describe a Web-of-trust model to address hierarchical identity systems' limitations, and a mirror-presence system to locate users on the Web in real time while they are moving between websites. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Video Browser Showdown is an international competition in the field of interactive video search and retrieval. It is held annually as a special session at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM). The Video Browser Showdown evaluates the performance of exploratory tools for interactive content search in videos in direct competition and in front of an audience. Its goal is to push research on user-centric video search tools including video navigation, content browsing, content interaction, and video content visualization. This article summarizes the first three VBS competitions (2012-2014). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As low-level hardware will soon allow us to visualize virtual content anywhere in the real world, managing it in a more structured manner still needs to be addressed. Augmented reality (AR) browser technology is the gateway to such structured software platform and an anywhere AR user experience. AR browsers are the substitute of Web browsers in the real world, permitting overlay of interactive multimedia content on the physical world or objects they refer to. As the current generation allows us to barely see floating virtual items in the physical world, a tighter coupling with our reality has not yet been explored. This paper presents our recent effort to create rich, seamless, and adaptive AR browsers. We discuss major challenges in the area and present an agenda on future research directions for an everyday augmented world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until recently, a major drawback of declarative-3D approaches for the Web was the encoding of scene-graph-related structured data along with a text-based description of unstructured vertex data. Loading times were long, and 3D Web content wasn't available until the full page had completely loaded. To overcome this limitation requires external mesh data containers that are referenced in the scene description. In particular, sequential image geometry containers and explicit binary containers align well with GPU buffer structures, thus enabling fast decoding and GPU uploads. Furthermore, progressive binary geometry enables simple, yet highly progressive transmission of arbitrary mesh data on the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the biggest created software platform is Web Browser. Today's platform is unique software used to access online data for lot of electronic transactions services such as e-mail, e-banking, e-commerce, and e-learning etc. Hackers know that browsers are installed into all computers, smart phones and tablets. Soon other devices such as TV, cars and others, can be used to compromise all these devices. All browsers have enabled or disabled features that define their behavior for executing good material and stopping malicious attacks. Unfortunately most of the users are unwilling to setup these features correctly to enhance their safety, because many of them still do not understand even basic security concepts. This paper presents Web Browsers Security Web-Lab where student can practice and test online the real security threat and risk that he was. Also could be exposed to with his browser, and describe two part outline for achieving this work. First an application launched at student side that will automatically detect all installed browsers and check their features configuration setting, and based on the finding prepare to student tailored work programs for practicing browser security online. Second parts Web-Lab platform, where student simulates and consolidates his knowledge in the field of information security in modern's browsers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Browser-to-browser communication is a hot topic in the network research community. The goal of developing and standardizing RTCWeb for real-time communication is to enhance the communication experience over the Internet. The RTCWeb protocol stack provides a service for several use cases, which includes media as well as non-media data transfer. Therefore, it adapts some established protocols like SCTP for a new common goal. Since real-time communication comes with the inherent need for low end-to-end delay, this article will discuss possible enhancements to SCTP that will improve the RTCWeb service in that regard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growing interest in integrating interactive multimedia features into web applications has recently led to the creation of the W3C WebRTC and the IETF RTCWEB working groups. Such groups are jointly defining both the application programming interfaces and the underlying communication protocols for the setup and management of a reliable communication path between any pair of next-generation web browsers. While the ongoing work is focusing on peer-to-peer communication between browsers, engineers are also facing a new issue, associated with the coexistence of legacy SIPbased systems with the upcoming browserenabled architectures. We herein discuss how we tackled such an issue, by first identifying interoperability requirements and then presenting a real-world interoperability example dealing with the integration of RTCWEB clients into an existing standards-based collaboration platform. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an overview of the work that W3C and IETF are doing toward defining a framework, protocols, and application programming interfaces that will provide real-time interactive voice, video, and data in web browsers and other applications. The article explains how media and data will flow in a peer-to-peer style directly between two web browsers. This explains the protocols used to transport and secure the encrypted media, traverse NATs and firewalls, negotiate media capabilities, and provide identity for the media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current security tools, using “signature-based” detection, do not handle compressed traffic, whose market-share is constantly increasing. This paper focuses on compressed HTTP traffic. HTTP uses GZIP compression and requires some kind of decompression phase before performing a string matching. We present a novel algorithm, Aho–Corasick-based algorithm for Compressed HTTP (ACCH), that takes advantage of information gathered by the decompression phase in order to accelerate the commonly used Aho–Corasick pattern-matching algorithm. By analyzing real HTTP traffic and real Web application firewall signatures, we show that up to 84% of the data can be skipped in its scan. Surprisingly, we show that it is faster to perform pattern matching on the compressed data, with the penalty of decompression, than on regular traffic. As far as we know, we are the first paper that analyzes the problem of “on-the-fly” multipattern matching on compressed HTTP traffic and suggest a solution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, an application that allows a mobile phone to be used as a biometric-capture device is shown. The main contribution of our proposal is that this capture, and later recognition, can be performed during a standard web session, using the same architecture that is used in a personal computer (PC), thus allowing a multiplatform (PC, personal digital assistant (PDA), mobile phone, etc.) biometric web access. The review, which is from both an academic and commercial point of view, of the biometry and mobile device state of the art shows that in other related works, the biometric capture and recognition is either performed locally in the mobile or remotely but using special communication protocols and/or connection ports with the server. The second main contribution of this study is an in-depth analysis of the present mobile web-browser limitations; thus, it is concluded that, in general, it is impossible to use the same technologies that can be used to capture biometrics in PC platforms (i.e., Applet Java, ActiveX Control, JavaScript, or Flash); therefore, new solutions, as shown here, are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing request for converged multimedia services have motivated relevant standardization efforts, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to support session control, mobility, and interoperability in all-IP next generation wireless networks. Notwithstanding the central role of SIP in novel converged multimedia, the potential of SIP-based service composition for the development of new classes of Web 2.0 services able to interoperate with existing HTTP-based services is still widely unexplored. The paper proposes an original solution to improve online user experience by integrating a SIP stack into the Web browser, thus enabling the execution of novel SIP-based applications directly at the client endpoint. In particular, our browser extension coordinates with our novel SIP-based Converged Application Server to enable session mobility and prevent abuses of the services available in the client. Experimental results show that our SIP-based solution is feasible in most common Internet deployment scenarios and enables session mobility with limited management cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lightweight Web Service and a Web site interface have been developed, which enable remote measurements of electronic devices as a “virtual laboratory” for undergraduate engineering classes. Using standard browsers without additional plugins (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, or even Safari on an iPhone), remote users can control a Keithley source-measurement unit and monitor results in real time from anywhere on the Internet. As an in-class example, students in a solid-state electronics course used the Web site interface to make real-time transistor measurements. Recommendations are made on how to best integrate the interface into electronics classes based on the student assignment responses. The present interface is flexible and could be expanded to many other devices and instruments. The source code has been openly posted online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following research published in 1996, a survey was conducted to investigate the likes, dislikes and areas of difficulty on the World-Wide Web. Findings of the pilot survey indicate that the amount of information online was most liked, advertisements were the least liked and searching presented the most difficulty. A follow-up questionnaire similar to that used in 1995 was administered and 301 responses were obtained. The comparison of the two surveys, conducted more than a decade apart, indicates that some users are not aware of features of search engines and browsers that would aid them in their searching efforts. However, better instructions on the search process or search tools were not considered enhancements. Unlike the 1996 survey, this survey contained questions concerning online advertising. Respondents indicated that easy to ignore or potentially interesting forms of advertising are less annoying than pop-ups, spam and those that animate in the screen foreground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most emergency situations, health professionals rely on patients to provide information about their medical history. However, in some cases patients might not be able to communicate this information, and in most countries an online integrated patient record system has not been adopted yet. Therefore, in order to address this issue the ongoing project MyCare Card (MyC^2, www.myc2.org) has been established. The aim of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a prototype patient held electronic health record device. Due to the wide range of user requirements, the device, its communication interface, and its software have to be compatible with many common platforms and operating systems. Thus, this paper is addressing one of the software compatibility matters—the cross-platform GUI implementation. It introduces a portable object-oriented GUI framework, suitable for a declarative layout definition, components customization, and fine model-view code separation. It also rationalizes the hardware and software solutions selected for this project implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An electroencephalographic (EEG) brain–computer interface (BCI) internet browser was designed and evaluated with 10 healthy volunteers and three individuals with advanced amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), all of whom were given tasks to execute on the internet using the browser. Participants with ALS achieved an average accuracy of 73% and a subsequent information transfer rate (ITR) of 8.6 bits/min and healthy participants with no prior BCI experience over 90% accuracy and an ITR of 14.4 bits/min. We define additional criteria for unrestricted internet access for evaluation of the presented and future internet browsers, and we provide a review of the existing browsers in the literature. The P300-based browser provides unrestricted access and enables free web surfing for individuals with paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the free digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) browsers. It says that these browsers serve many functions such as in viewing DICOM images, in teaching, for use as mini-PACS servers and for research purposes. It states that basic image-processing functions are being offered by DICOM browsers for basic viewing of DICOM images.

We propose a scalable Web document sharing infrastructure model called Browsers-Aware Proxy Server. In this design, a proxy server connecting to a group of networked clients maintains an index file of data objects of all clients’ browser caches. If a user request misses in its local browser cache and the proxy cache, the browsers-aware proxy server will search the index file attempting to find it in another client''s browser cache before sending the request to an upper level proxy or the Web server. If such a request does hit in a remote client, this client will directly forward the data object to the requesting client; or the proxy server fetches the data object from this client and then forwards it to the requesting client. The contributions of this caching model are twofold. First, we show that the amount of sharable data in browser caches is significant and can be utilized for document sharing among clients to improve Web caching performance and scalability. Second, the browsers-aware model can effectively and further improve Web prefetching performance. The browsers-aware model and its supported prefetching technique build a strong locality-aware Internet environment to make Web accesses fast with low communication costs. Conducting trace-driven simulations, we show the effectiveness of the browsers-aware model, and its unique advantages to facilitate prefetching. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Joseph Hardin describes the emergence of Mosaic and the rise of the browser. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/-c8iWUh3Sv4 is a video interview in which author Charles Severance speaks with Joseph Hardin about the development of the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and how it introduced the World Wide Web to the general public. The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/3F4PZ_7EFWs is an audio recording of author Charles Severance reading his Computing Conversations column, in which he discusses his interview with Joseph Hardin about the development of the Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and how it introduced the World Wide Web to the general public. The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/gJ16VinDPY4 is a video interview with Larry Smarr about the birth and evolution of Mosaic at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The fourth Web extra at http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1994/10/rx049-abs.html is the article "Mosaic and the World Wide Web" from the October 1994 issue of Computer, in which Ronald J. Vetter, Chris Spell, and Charles Ward describe the state of the art as it was nearly 20 years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a traditional keyword-search system over XML data, a user composes a keyword query, submits it to the system, and retrieves relevant answers. In the case where the user has limited knowledge about the data, often the user feels “left in the dark” when issuing queries, and has to use a try-and-see approach for finding information. In this paper, we study fuzzy type-ahead search in XML data, a new information-access paradigm in which the system searches XML data on the fly as the user types in query keywords. It allows users to explore data as they type, even in the presence of minor errors of their keywords. Our proposed method has the following features: 1) Search as you type: It extends Autocomplete by supporting queries with multiple keywords in XML data. 2) Fuzzy: It can find high-quality answers that have keywords matching query keywords approximately. 3) Efficient: Our effective index structures and searching algorithms can achieve a very high interactive speed. We study research challenges in this new search framework. We propose effective index structures and top-k algorithms to achieve a high interactive speed. We examine effective ranking functions and early termination techniques to progressively identify the top-k relevant answers. We have implemented our method on real data sets, and the experimental results show that our method achieves high search efficiency and result quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The web is a primary means of information sharing for most organizations and people. Currently, a recipient of web content knows nothing about the environment in which that information was generated other than the specific server from whence it came (and even that information can be unreliable). In this paper, we develop and evaluate the Spork system that uses the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to tie the web server integrity state to the web content delivered to browsers, thus allowing a client to verify that the origin of the content was functioning properly when the received content was generated and/or delivered. We discuss the design and implementation of the Spork service and its browser-side Firefox validation extension. In particular, we explore the challenges and solutions of scaling the delivery of mixed static and dynamic content to a large number of clients using exceptionally slow TPM hardware. We perform an in-depth empirical analysis of the Spork system within Apache web servers. This analysis shows Spork can deliver nearly 8,000 static or over 6,500 dynamic integrity-measured web objects per second. More broadly, we identify how TPM-based content web services can scale to large client loads with manageable overheads and deliver integrity-measured content with manageable overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Displays based on organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology are appearing on many mobile devices. Unlike liquid crystal displays (LCD), OLED displays consume dramatically different power for showing different colors. In particular, OLED displays are inefficient for showing bright colors. This has made them undesirable for mobile devices because much of the web content is of bright colors. To tackle this problem, we present the motivational studies, design, and realization of Chameleon, a color adaptive web browser that renders webpages with power-optimized color schemes under user-supplied constraints. Driven by the findings from our motivational studies, Chameleon provides end users with important options, offloads tasks that are not absolutely needed in real time, and accomplishes real-time tasks by carefully enhancing the codebase of a browser engine. According to measurements with OLED smartphones, Chameleon is able to reduce average system power consumption for web browsing by 41 percent and is able to reduce display power consumption by 64 percent without introducing any noticeable delay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper surveys the work carried out within two large consortia, AMI and IM2, on improving access to records of human meetings using multimodal interfaces called meeting browsers. Their design has emerged as an important goal, with both theoretical interest and practical applications. Meeting browsers are assistance tools that help humans navigate through multimedia records (audio, video, documents, and metadata) in order to obtain a general idea about what happened in a meeting or to find specific pieces of information, for discovery or verification. To explain the importance that meeting browsers have gained in time, the paper summarizes findings of user studies, discusses features of meeting browser prototypes developed in AMI/IM2, and outlines the main evaluation protocol proposed (BET). Reference scores are provided for future benchmarking. These achievements in meeting browsing are the result of an iterative software process, from user studies to prototypes and then to products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, there has been significant interest in fault-localization techniques that are based on statistical analysis of program constructs executed by passing and failing executions. This paper shows how the Tarantula, Ochiai, and Jaccard fault-localization algorithms can be enhanced to localize faults effectively in web applications written in PHP by using an extended domain for conditional and function-call statements and by using a source mapping. We also propose several novel test-generation strategies that are geared toward producing test suites that have maximal fault-localization effectiveness. We implemented various fault-localization techniques and test-generation strategies in Apollo, and evaluated them on several open-source PHP applications. Our results indicate that a variant of the Ochiai algorithm that includes all our enhancements localizes 87.8 percent of all faults to within 1 percent of all executed statements, compared to only 37.4 percent for the unenhanced Ochiai algorithm. We also found that all the test-generation strategies that we considered are capable of generating test suites with maximal fault-localization effectiveness when given an infinite time budget for test generation. However, on average, a directed strategy based on path-constraint similarity achieves this maximal effectiveness after generating only 6.5 tests, compared to 46.8 tests for an undirected test-generation strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The same-origin policy, a fundamental security mechanism within Web browsers, overly restricts Web application development while creating an ever-growing list of security holes, reinforcing the argument that the SOP is not an appropriate security model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with an increasing user population of various web applications, browser-based drive-by-download attacks soon become one of the most common security threats to the cyber community. A user using a vulnerable browser or browser plug-ins may become a victim of a drive-by-download attack right after visiting a vicious web site. The end result of such attacks is that an attacker can download and execute any code on the victim's host. This paper proposes a runtime, behavior-based solution, BrowserGuard, to protect a browser against drive-by-download attacks. BrowserGuard records the download scenario of every file that is loaded into a host through a browser. Then based on the download scenario, BrowserGuard blocks the execution of any file that is loaded into a host without the consent of a browser user. Due to its behavior-based detection nature, BrowserGuard does not need to analyze the source file of any web page or the run-time states of any script code, such as Javascript. BrowserGuard also does not need to maintain any exploit code samples and does not need to query the reputation value of any web site. We utilize the standard BHO mechanism of Windows to implement BrowserGuard on IE 7.0. Experimental results show that BrowserGuard has low performance overhead (less than 2.5%) and no false positives and false negatives for the web pages used in our experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the traditional Internet, the emerging Internet of Things constitutes a mix of virtual and physical entities. A proposed IoT browser enables the exploration of augmented spaces by identifying smart objects, discovering any services they might provide, and interacting with them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes an interactive framework called LIME (Lightweight interactive multimedia environment). LIME provides a profile based on Web standards including XHTML, CSS and ECMAScript that addresses specific requirements and limitations of consumer electronics devices such as TV and IPTV. Since Web standards are typically developed for PC browsers, content rendering, navigation, and user interface considerations for TV require special attention. The LIME profile supports a subset of functions relevant to TV, as well as extensions to enable functions such as synchronized rendering of monomedia content including audio, video, graphics, and text, while providing interactivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most multimedia consumer electronics (CE) devices, such as smart phones, MP3 players, PMPs, and digital cameras, allow users to search and browse multimedia contents stored in the device. For multimedia CE devices, there are two important requirements: (1) the search results displayed in the browser screen must be restored when the device is turned off and later turned back on, and (2) the search results displayed in the browser screen must be updated dynamically to reflect data changes made by other applications. These two requirements have been handled in rather ad-hoc and inefficient manners until now. In this paper, we propose an efficient and systematic solution to meet the two requirements. The proposed solution enables us to save the current browsing state so that the search results displayed in the browser screen can be restored instantly at a later time. Furthermore, the proposed solution restores the browsing state adaptively to reflect data changes made after saving. Through performance evaluation in a real multimedia CE device, we show that the proposed method provides excellent performance compared to existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This evaluation of end-user PCs browsing the Web—and loading Flash plug-ins—measures power consumption by considering the hardware platform, operating system, browser, and website. It also reveals the unnecessary power expenditures of tabbed browsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programmers can quickly become overwhelmed with contradictory information and advice; this short article shares some of the online tools the authors uses every day to help him code more efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]