The task of reviewer recommendation is increasingly important, with main techniques utilizing general models of text relevance. However, state of the art (SotA) systems still have relatively high error rates. Two possible reasons for this are: a lack of large datasets and the fact that large language models (LLMs) have not yet been applied. To fill these gaps, we first create a substantial new dataset, in the domain of Internet specification documents; then we introduce the use of LLMs and evaluate their performance. We find that LLMs with prompting can improve on SotA in some cases, but that they are not a cure-all: this task provides a challenging setting for prompt-based methods

An important concept in organisational behaviour is how hierarchy affects the voice of individuals, whereby members of a given organisation exhibit differing power relations based on their hierarchical position. Although there have been prior studies of the relationship between hierarchy and voice, they tend to focus on more qualitative small-scale methods and do not account for structural aspects of the organisation. This paper develops large-scale computational techniques utilising temporal network analysis to measure the effect that organisational hierarchy has on communication patterns throughout an organisation, focusing on the structure of pairwise interactions between individuals. To this end, we focus on one major organisation as a case study --- the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) --- a major technical standards development organisation for the Internet. A particularly useful feature of the IETF is a transparent hierarchy, where participants take on explicit roles (e.g., Area Directors, Working Group Chairs), and because its processes are open we have visibility into the communication of people at different hierarchy levels over a long time period. Exploiting this, we utilise a temporal network dataset of 989,911 email interactions among 23,741 participants to study how hierarchy impacts communication patterns. We show that the middle levels of the IETF are growing in terms of their dominance in communications. Higher levels consistently experience a higher proportion of incoming communication than lower levels, with higher levels initiating more communications too. We find that, overall, communication tends to flow "up" the hierarchy more than "down". Finally, we find that communication with higher-levels is associated with future communication more than for lower-levels, which we interpret as "facilitation". We conclude by discussing the implications this has on patterns within the wider IETF and the impact our analysis can have for other organisations.

We present the first measurement of the user-effect and privacy impact of "Related Website Sets," a recent proposal to reduce browser privacy protections between two sites if those sites are related to each other. An assumption (both explicitly and implicitly) underpinning the Related Website Sets proposal is that users can accurately determine if two sites are related via the same entity. In this work, we probe this assumption via measurements and a user study of 30 participants, to assess the ability of Web users to determine if two sites are (according to the Related Website Sets feature) related to each other. We find that this is largely not the case. Our findings indicate that 42 (36.8%) of the user determinations in our study are incorrect in privacy-harming ways, where users think that sites are not related, but would be treated as related (and so due less privacy protections) by the Related Website Sets feature. Additionally, 22 (73.3%) of participants made at least one incorrect evaluation during the study. We also characterise the Related Website Sets list, its composition over time, and its governance.

The public suffix list is a community-maintained list of rules that can be applied to domain names to determine how they should be grouped into logical organizations or companies. We present the first large-scale measurement study of how the public suffix list is used by open-source software on the Web and the privacy harm resulting from projects using outdated versions of the list. We measure how often developers include out-of-date versions of the public suffix list in their projects, how old included lists are, and estimate the real-world privacy harm with a model based on a large-scale crawl of the Web. We find that incorrect use of the public suffix list is common in open-source software, and that at least 43 open-source projects use hard-coded, outdated versions of the public suffix list. These include popular, security-focused projects, such as password managers and digital forensics tools. We also estimate that, because of these out-of-date lists, these projects make incorrect privacy decisions for 1313 effective top-level domains (eTLDs), affecting 50,750 domains, by extrapolating from data gathered by the HTTP Archive project.

An increasing number of students arrive at university with programming experience and pre-formed mental models. These models are often incorrect, with students holding entrenched misconceptions. In this paper, we describe a study that investigated whether making explicit connections between our introductory Python programming and computing systems courses could expose mental models and help identify and fix misconceptions. We hypothesised that students would develop a correct mental model by creating a low level systems implementation of a high level program. While we identified misconceptions, these prevented the students from making explicit links and correcting their mental models. We detail these misconceptions, develop a set of hypotheses for why these were held, and suggest future studies.

As computing education grows rapidly across the globe, there is an increasing need to broaden participation and engage all students in computing, particularly those from underrepresented groups and developing countries. A programming workshop that uses various interventions to broaden participation was set up to empower African university students with computer programming skills to address this need. Out of 487 applications, 172 participants from 11 African countries were selected to participate in the workshop. This paper aims to explore the participants' experiences, including their motivation for attending the workshop, their programming skills confidence, what they found most useful for their learning, and the challenges they faced. Employing a mixed-methods design, our quantitative and qualitative results indicate that participants' motivations were more intrinsic. Furthermore, the results indicate that participants' confidence increased after the workshop. They found the hands-on sessions with the tutors to be most beneficial to their learning. We also observed that many participants struggled with access to basic ICT resources during the workshop, even though they were provided with the internet. Our findings highlight that participants are interested in learning programming; therefore, to support them, sustainable collaborative partnerships are necessary to provide relevant teaching interventions and resources.

Protocol standards, defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), are crucial to the successful operation of the Internet. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of IETF activities, with a focus on understanding collaborative activities, and how these underpin the publication of standards documents (RFCs). Using a unique dataset of 2.4 million emails, 8,711 RFCs and 4,512 authors, we examine the shifts and trends within the standards development process, showing how protocol complexity and time to produce standards has increased. With these observations in mind, we develop statistical models to understand the factors that lead to successful uptake and deployment of protocols, deriving insights to improve the standardisation process.

Use of formal protocol description techniques and code generation can reduce bugs in network packet parsing code. However, such techniques are themselves complex, and don't see wide adoption in the protocol standards development community, where the focus is on consensus building and human-readable specifications. We explore the utility and effectiveness of new techniques for describing protocol data, specifically designed to integrate with the standards development process, and discuss how they can be used to generate code that is safer and more trustworthy, while maintaining correctness and performance.

Anycast is a popular tool for deploying global, widely available systems, including DNS infrastructure and content delivery networks (CDNs). The optimization of these networks often focuses on the deployment and management of anycast sites. However, such approaches fail to consider one of the primary configurations of a large anycast network: the set of networks that receive anycast announcements at each site (i.e., an announcement configuration). Altering these configurations, even without the deployment of additional sites, can have profound impacts on both anycast site selection and round-trip times.

Adaptive streaming over HTTP has become the de-facto standard for video streaming over the Internet, partly due to its ease of deployment in a heavily ossified Internet. Though performant in most on-demand scenarios, it is bound by the semantics of TCP, with reliability prioritised over timeliness, even for live video where the reverse may be desired. In this paper, we present an implementation of MPEG-DASH over TCP Hollywood, a widely deployable TCP variant for latency sensitive applications. Out-of-order delivery in TCP Hollywood allows the client to measure, adapt and request the next video chunk even when the current one is only partially downloaded. Furthermore, the ability to skip frames, enabled by multi-streaming and out-of-order delivery, adds resilience against stalling for any delayed messages. We observed that in high latency and high loss networks, TCP Hollywood significantly lowers the possibility of stall events and also supports better quality downloads in comparison to standard TCP, with minimal changes to current adaptation algorithms.

Real-time multimedia applications use either TCP or UDP at the transport layer, yet neither of these protocols offer all of the features required. Deploying a new protocol that does offer these features is made difficult by ossification: firewalls, and other middleboxes, in the network expect TCP or UDP, and block other types of traffic. We present TCP Hollywood, a protocol that is wire-compatible with TCP, while offering an unordered, partially reliable message-oriented transport service that is well suited to multimedia applications. Analytical results show that TCP Hollywood extends the feasibility of using TCP for real-time multimedia applications, by reducing latency and increasing utility. Preliminary evaluations also show that TCP Hollywood is deployable on the public Internet, with safe failure modes. Measurements across all major UK fixed-line and cellular networks validate the possibility of deployment.

We present initial measurements to determine if ECN is usable with UDP traffic in the public Internet. This is interesting because ECN is part of current IETF proposals for congestion control of UDP-based interactive multimedia, and due to the increasing use of UDP as a substrate on which new transport protocols can be deployed. Using measurements from the author's homes, their workplace, and cloud servers in each of the nine EC2 regions worldwide, we test reachability of 2500 servers from the public NTP server pool, using ECT(0) and not-ECT marked UDP packets. We show that an average of 98.97% of the NTP servers that are reachable using not-ECT marked packets are also reachable using ECT(0) marked UDP packets, and that ~98% of network hops pass ECT(0) marked packets without clearing the ECT bits. We compare reachability of the same hosts using ECN with TCP, finding that 82.0% of those reachable with TCP can successfully negotiate and use ECN. Our findings suggest that ECN is broadly usable with UDP traffic, and that support for use of ECN with TCP has increased.