<p>Abstract</p><p>This essay deals with the creation and usage of nicknames in synchronous CMC. Nicknames from four different IRC chat conversations related to three different topic groups have been examined. The method draws on Bechar-Israeli’s (1996) categorisation of nicknames, which has been adapted to suit the type of data sampled. Three research questions have been posed, which, in view of other studies related to this field of research (e.g. Ellison et al. 2006, Scheidt 2001, Chester & Gwynne 1998, etc.) have been examined to obtain information about the degree of anonymity and the topic-relatedness of nicknames used in chatrooms. The results show that users participating in synchronous CMC indeed follow topic-related rules for self-presentation and that anonymity has varying importance in different chatrooms.</p>

Data is increasingly represented in annotated graphs, but graphs pose novel security and privacy challenges that at present lack solutions. We begin by identifying the new challenges graphs introduce and explain why existing security approaches are insufficient. / Engineering and Applied Sciences

This paper uses blogs as a starting point for an examination of how identity is constructed collaboratively through a series of linguistically mediated social processes. The goal is to establish a theoretical framework for understanding individual identity as rooted in media, language, and society and the result of collective social processes as opposed to their genesis. It draws together conceptual models from theorists in sociology, media studies, and genre theory to explore how selves are created in the online contexts of blogs and how those concepts relate to wider cultural concerns and anxieties related to the construction of individual identity. By examining issues of privacy, anonymity, and authenticity as they relate to blogs and bloggers, this paper aims to provide a view of individual identity as contextually situated yet continuous across social contexts and which is the result of collaborative, collective social processes.

While advances to the Internet have enabled users to easily interact and exchange information online, they have also created several opportunities for adversaries to prey on users’ private information. Whether the motivation for data collection is commercial, where service providers sell data for marketers, or political, where a government censors, blocks and tracks its people, or even personal, for cyberstalking purposes, there is no doubt that the consequences of personal information leaks can be severe. Low-latency anonymity networks have thus emerged as a solution to allow people to surf the Internet without the fear of revealing their identities or locations. In order to provide anonymity to users, anonymity networks route users’ traffic through several intermediate relays, which causes unavoidable extra delays. However, although these networks have been originally designed to support interactive applications, due to a variety of design weaknesses, these networks offer anonymity at the expense of further intolerable performance costs, which disincentivize users from adopting these systems. In this thesis, we seek to improve the network performance of low-latency anonymity networks while maintaining the anonymity guarantees they provide to users today. As an experimentation platform, we use Tor, the most widely used privacy-preserving network that empowers people with low-latency anonymous online access. Since its introduction in 2003, Tor has successfully evolved to support hundreds of thousands of users using thousands of volunteer-operated routers run all around the world. Incidents of sudden increases in Tor’s usage, coinciding with global political events, confirm the importance of the Tor network for Internet users today. We identify four key contributors to the performance problems in low-latency anonymity networks, exemplified by Tor, that significantly impact the experience of low-latency application users. We first consider the lack of resources problem due to the resource-constrained routers, and propose multipath routing and traffic splitting to increase throughput and improve load balancing. Second, we explore the poor quality of service problem, which is exacerbated by the existence of bandwidth-consuming greedy applications in the network. We propose online traffic classification as a means of enabling quality of service for every traffic class. Next, we investigate the poor transport design problem and propose a new transport layer design for anonymous communication networks which addresses the drawbacks of previous proposals. Finally, we address the problem of the lack of congestion control by proposing an ATM-style credit-based hop-by-hop flow control algorithm which caps the queue sizes and allows all relays to react to congestion in the network. Our experimental results confirm the significant performance benefits that can be obtained using our privacy-preserving approaches.

Reader comment forums of online newspapers, a relatively new feature of online journalism, have been called spaces of public deliberation. At their inception among large newspapers just five years ago, the forums were heralded as a new way for the public to advance public dialogue by sharing opinions in an unconstrained way, promoting the democratic principles of the newspaper institution itself. Rampant incivility, however, has since become one the forums' chief defining characteristics. By content analyzing comments from online newspapers that allow anonymity, this research confirms anecdotal evidence from journalists that Latinos are regularly debased in the forums by commenters following news on immigration. This study also compares the civility of anonymous comments following news on the Tea Party movement, a non-racialized but also controversial topic. Finally, civility is measured in the comments following news on immigration from online newspapers that have disallowed anonymity. In all, more than 22,000 comments from nearly 200 news stories in more than a dozen online newspapers were collected between 2010 and 2012, and a sample of 1,350 was coded. The analysis shows that online newspaper discussion boards that allow anonymity and that follow news about immigration predominantly contain comments by those who support tough immigration laws and who express themselves with emotionally laden, uncivil comments directed at Latinos. Similar discussion boards that disallow anonymity predominantly contain comments by those who support tough immigration laws and who express themselves with emotionally laden yet civil comments directed at Latinos. Overall, this research demonstrates that a racialized topic is apt to draw more uncivil anonymous comments than a non-racialized one and that removing anonymity elevates the level of dialogue. Building on the theories of the public sphere, reduced cues in anonymity and critical race theory, this paper demonstrates that in their new role in creating a new public square of open discussion, newspapers are sometimes creating forums for hate speech while also publishing content that is perpetuating negative portrayals of Latinos. Findings reveal that a new public sphere created by online newspapers, meant to promote democracy, is actually having the opposite effect for some minority groups.

This thesis is aimed on internet security, gaining the anonymity and creating a guide to increase self defense of internet users. The goal of this paper is to describe the types of cyber attacks that can be done on internet users and to describe circular flow of information about users on internet and its use by third parties. Additional goal is to design the ways of reaching the anonymity on internet and to provide a guide to increase a self defense of the users. This thesis gradually describes creation of internet, world-wide-web and web standards, which is important for understanding the vulnerability of today's internet. Thesis is complemented by enumeration of relevant protocols of ISO/OSI model, which has share on user's everyday communication. Next part pass to attacks itself both technical based (e.g. Man-In-The-Middle) and social based (e.g. Phishing). This paper also aims on collecting the data of internet users by third parties and on the ways how to prevent it and reach the anonymity on the internet. End of this paper belongs to the list of security steps for standard internet users, by which they will be able to minimize the risk to minimum. Final chapter presents online blog that was created to enhance awareness of internet users.

abstract: The lack of fungibility in Bitcoin has forced its userbase to seek out tools that can heighten their anonymity. Third-party Bitcoin mixers utilize obfuscation techniques to protect participants from blockchain analysis. In recent years, various centralized and decentralized Bitcoin mixing implementations have been proposed in academic literature. Although these methods depict a threat-free environment for users to preserve their anonymity, public Bitcoin mixers continue to be associated with theft and poor implementation. This research explores the public Bitcoin mixer ecosystem to identify if today's mixing services have adopted academically proposed solutions. This is done through real-world interactions with publicly available mixers to analyze both implementation and resistance to common threats in the mixing landscape. First, proposed decentralized and centralized mixing protocols found in literature are outlined. Then, data is presented from 19 publicly announced mixing services available on the deep web and clearnet. The services are categorized based on popularity with the Bitcoin community and experiments are conducted on five public mixing services: ChipMixer, MixTum, Bitcoin Mixer, CryptoMixer, and Sudoku Wallet. The results of the experiments highlight a clear gap between public and proposed Bitcoin mixers in both implementation and security. Today's mixing services focus on presenting users with a false sense of control to gain their trust rather then employing secure mixing techniques. As a result, the five selected services lack implementation of academically proposed techniques and display poor resistance to common mixer-related threats. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2020

Privacy issues relating to having data made public is relevant with the introduction of the GDPR. To limit problems related to data becoming public, intentionally or via an event such as a security breach, anonymization of datasets can be employed. In this report, the impact of the application of 5-anonymity to the adult dataset on a classifier based on a neural network predicting whether people had an income exceeding $50,000 was investigated using precision, recall and accuracy. The classifier was trained using the non-anonymized data, the anonymized data, and the non-anonymized data with those attributes which were suppressed in the anonymized data removed. The result was that average accuracy dropped from 0.82 to 0.76, precision from 0.58 to 0.50, and recall increased from 0.82 to 0.87. The average values and distributions seem to support the estimation that the majority of the performance impact of anonymization in this case comes from the suppression of attributes.

This thesis analyzes the position of the author in the environment of internet. The main source of information for this thesis is the study of Roland Barthes - Death of the Author and the lecture of Michel Foucault - What is an author? After a thorough analysis of these two works, the thesis focuses on the description of the webpage www.pismak.cz, which has been selected as a suitable representative for environment of internet. This website allows us to study and explore the role and place of the author. I tried to describe the position of the author on this website. Mainly the fact, that every user of this website uses a pseudonym - nick. The work also presents new insights into the phenomenon of internet anonymity, based on the information gathered from current scientific articles. At the end I compare my own analysis with theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The thesis concludes, that works of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are still valid, even when compared with modern phenomenon - internet.

This thesis analyzes the position of the author in the environment of internet. The main source of information for this thesis is the study of Roland Barthes - Death of the Author and the lecture of Michel Foucault - What is an author? After a thorough analysis of these two works, the thesis focuses on the description of the webpage www.pismak.cz, which has been selected as a suitable representative for environment of internet. This website allows us to study and explore the role and place of the author. I tried to describe the position of the author on this website. Mainly the fact, that every user of this website uses a pseudonym - nick. The work also presents new insights into the phenomenon of internet anonymity, based on the information gathered from current scientific articles. At the end I compare my own analysis with theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The thesis concludes, that works of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are still valid, even when compared with modern phenomenon - internet.