When performing fingerprinting attacks against websites in a controlled environment astudy may achieve very promising results. However, these can be misleading as the closedworld setting may not accurately represent the real-world. This is a problem many priorworks have been critiqued for, the inability to transfer their results from the closed-worldsetting to the real-world. Being able to do so is of great importance to establish what thereal-world consequences would be of fingerprint attacks. If unable to apply one’s findingsoutside of a tightly controlled environment it is difficult to gauge if these attacks types posea real threat or not. Thereby, this thesis has, contrary to previous work, based its settingon a real-world scenario to provide tangible insights into vulnerabilities of news websites.Furthermore, it targeted internal pages of websites, something understudied by previousliterature. All of this while presenting a novel classifier that is lightweight and requireslittle training, and a framework for automatically collecting and labelling encrypted TCPtraffic without the use of a proxy.

Research has revealed that more Americans than ever are turning to the World Wide Web as their primary source for news and information instead of legacy media outlets such as printed newspapers and magazines and broadcast news. As more and more people rely on the Internet as a primary source for news, it is important to analyze the characteristics and content of online news to expose and correct problems associated with the practices that inform its production and presentation. There are several longstanding practices in the American journalistic tradition that have been adapted to the online news environment. The practices of market segmentation and gatekeeping are two such practices. To date, few studies have explored how internet news coverage differs when the same story is altered to address the perceived interests of specific target audiences. This goal of this study was to collect and examine the characteristics of news stories presented on the homepages of three news websites—the Huffington Post, Huffington Post Black Voices and News One—to arrive at conclusions about the similarities and differences in how news content is reported to a general audience and to an African-American audience. This exploratory study used both Web sphere analysis and qualitative analysis to examine the collected homepage news stories. It used the results of the analyses to explore the possible effects continued market segmentation and selective exposure online could have on discourse in the public sphere. The study found that the legacy media practice of market segmentation was evident when online news reporting on targeted and untargeted news website homepages was compared. The study also revealed that the traditional role of the Black Press in legacy media has been resurrected in new media and is evident on news websites produced by African-Americans, for an African-American audience. Additionally, a qualitative examination of online news coverage of President Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address and the death of Trayvon Martin revealed that the targeted audience influences the editorial slant through which news websites report stories.

(English) The purpose of this diploma thesis was to analyze a role of Sputnik Česká republika (Sputnik Czech Republic) website as an information source in the ecosystem of the so-called alternative media. The main research method was quantitative content analysis. In the practical part of the work - using available metadata sraped with Outwit Hub -, this thesis described content of articles published on Sputnik Česká republika and other selected alternative media. Next, with the use of online marketing tools and other sources, it compared similarities of content and user behaviour. Next, it compared similarities of content and user behaviour on a sample of selected websites. The result of this was evaluation of possible importance of Sputnik Česká republika in the ecosystem of alternative media and pointing out some new elements and connections within this system. Possible usage of this thesis comprises follow-up research and education in fields of information and media literacy, especially in the issue evaluation of information sources.