A Bestiary of Blocking The Motivations and Modes behind Website Unavailability

TitleA Bestiary of Blocking The Motivations and Modes behind Website Unavailability
Publication TypeTechnical Report
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsAfroz, S., Javed M., Paxson V., Qazi S. Asif, Sajid S., & Tschantz M. Carl
Abstract

This paper examines different reasons the websites may vary in their availability by location. Prior works on availability mostly focus on censorship by nation states. We look at three forms of server-side blocking: blocking visitors from the EU to avoid GDPR compliance, blocking based upon the visitor’s country, and blocking due to security concerns. We argue that these and other forms of blocking warrant more research.

Acknowledgment

We thank David Fifield for allowing us to use his code for categorizing block pages. We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the National Science Foundation (Grants 1518918 and 1651857) and UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. The opinions in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any funding sponsor or the United States Government

URLhttps://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.00459.pdf
ICSI Research Group

Networking and Security