FOCI 2012 - 2nd USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet

Website www.usenix.org | Edit Freely

Category FOCI 2012

Deadline: April 26, 2012 | Date: August 06, 2012

Venue/Country: Bellevue, U.S.A

Updated: 2012-03-08 18:54:15 (GMT+9)

Call For Papers - CFP

The Internet offers great promise for improving the communication capabilities of citizens, but our increasing dependence on networked communications also makes it easier for organizations to control, monitor, and block communications. ISPs and governments routinely restrict access to Internet content and services, either by censoring access to information or by degrading the performance of services or blocking them entirely. Similarly, ISPs can degrade network performance for certain sets of users for some or all services, for arbitrary purposes. ISPs have been found to block or throttle certain application traffic routinely. This growing trend toward blocking, tampering, or otherwise restricting communications on the Internet calls for improved techniques both for monitoring the state of restrictions on Internet content and communications, in order to inform users, and for circumventing attempts to censor, degrade, or otherwise tamper with Internet communications.

The broadening scope of attacks on Internet freedom is forcing more disciplines to address the issue. Last year's workshop brought together four research communities:

Those studying network neutrality and performance degradation

Those measuring content censorship and blocking of resources and services

Those designing and evaluating censorship circumvention tools

Those who work on the wider implications of censorship, bringing perspectives from the worlds of policy, law, ethics, and political and social sciences

This second workshop aims to repeat and promote this critical interdisciplinary approach.

Topics

We encourage submission of new, interesting work on a wide variety of topics of interest, including but not limited to the following areas:

Evaluation or analysis of existing anti-censorship systems

Comparisons of existing performance-measurement tools that might be used to detect tampering, blocking, or violations of net neutrality

Studies and findings on real-world censorship or tampering from field deployments or other methods, such as the content that states censor or the extent to which ISPs are degrading certain types of content or service

Metrics and analysis of plausible deniability and robustness

Metrics and benchmarks for content tampering or performance degradation

Detection, measuring, and analysis of the censorship of search results

Design of network protocols and topologies that resist tampering or censorship

Techniques to counter mass surveillance or its effects

The role of private corporations in spreading or enabling surveillance and censorship

Capabilities of deep packet inspection (DPI) and robust mechanisms to circumvent DPI

Legality of censorship-resistant systems or bypassing censorship

Economic considerations in the design and deployment of censorship-resistant systems

Analysis of the economic impact of censorship

Usability in censorship-resistant systems

Effects of censorship on society, business, or political processes