The next live reading group discussion will have a twist: this time we'll read a paper that has a pro-censorship point of view, coauthored by one of the creators of the Great Firewall.
Sunday, 2023-06-04 13:00–14:00
"Information content security on the Internet: the control model and its evaluation"
方滨兴 (Fang Binxing), 郭云川 (Guo Yunchuan), 周渊 (Zhou Yuan)
PDF
The paper is basically a modeling paper. It studies network filtering (which the authors call "information content security") as an access control problem. There is a lot of math notation, but don't let that scare you: it is not as sophisticated as it is trying to appear. A lot of the formalism is gratuitous and not very significant, and there are minor notational inconsistencies throughout. The three subsections of Section 3.2 are basically the same information copied three times. The big ideas to look out for are the division into three sub-models: content-based ("what is the content of the communication"), identity-based ("who communicates with whom"), and behavior-based ("how do they communicate"); and the evaluation in terms of false positive and false negative rates on the axes of technology and society.
The first author Fang Binxing's name should be familiar to anyone who has studied Internet censorship in China. He helped lead the initial development of the Great Firewall and continues to be involved with its maintenance. But don't be intimidated by his distinguished record: Fang is a VPN user just like the rest of us.
The next live reading group discussion will have a twist: this time we'll read a paper that has a pro-censorship point of view, coauthored by one of the creators of the Great Firewall.
Sunday, 2023-06-04 13:00–14:00
"Information content security on the Internet: the control model and its evaluation"
方滨兴 (Fang Binxing), 郭云川 (Guo Yunchuan), 周渊 (Zhou Yuan)
PDF
The paper is basically a modeling paper. It studies network filtering (which the authors call "information content security") as an access control problem. There is a lot of math notation, but don't let that scare you: it is not as sophisticated as it is trying to appear. A lot of the formalism is gratuitous and not very significant, and there are minor notational inconsistencies throughout. The three subsections of Section 3.2 are basically the same information copied three times. The big ideas to look out for are the division into three sub-models: content-based ("what is the content of the communication"), identity-based ("who communicates with whom"), and behavior-based ("how do they communicate"); and the evaluation in terms of false positive and false negative rates on the axes of technology and society.
The first author Fang Binxing's name should be familiar to anyone who has studied Internet censorship in China. He helped lead the initial development of the Great Firewall and continues to be involved with its maintenance. But don't be intimidated by his distinguished record: Fang is a VPN user just like the rest of us.