Largest Scientific Study on Effectiveness of Online Video Advertising Presented at Internet Conference

University of Massachusetts Amherst presented a study on the effectiveness of video advertising as an economic, sustainable and profitable media platform. The study covered 275 million ads from in 367 million videos. With over 3,000 publishers and 65 million viewers, this study is the largest ever done on video advertising.

UMass researchers used Akamai's media analytics platform to study a 15 day period in April 2013 of anonymized viewer data to come up with their observation.

The study noted several factors such as the duration of the ad, where the ad is inserted, and viewer behavior while the ad is showing. It is even observed that weekend and evening viewing scored higher than regular days. Also, a 10 to 15 second fast loading video ad inserted in the middle of a video has a higher completion rate especially if the visitor is a repeat visitor on the site.

The findings of the study will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona.

Online video is one of the largest source of internet traffic and companies like YouTube are taking advantage of the opportunities it presents for advertising.

MIT News: Algorithm Developed To Allow Cars To Connect To Wi-Fi Network

WiFi is a computer network that uses radio technology to connect to other computers or Wi-Fi enabled devices. This is done without the use of cables.

The wireless technology called 802.11 provides the same function as a wired network which works on Ethernet technology. Wi-Fi networks operate in the 2.4 and 5 GHz radio bands, with some products containing both bands (dual band).

Mobile phones, tablet computers, and laptops use Wi-Fi to connect to the internet. Business establishments and public areas also provide a Wi-Fi connection, these are called Wi-Fi hotspots. While some of these places provide Wi-Fi access for free, others charge a fee to connect to their wireless network.

Sharing data links in networks of cars

Wi-Fi is coming to our cars. Ford Motor Co. has been equipping cars with Wi-Fi transmitters since 2010; according to an Agence France-Presse story last year, the company expects that by 2015, 80 percent of the cars it sells in North America will have Wi-Fi built in. The same article cites a host of other manufacturers worldwide that either offer Wi-Fi in some high-end vehicles or belong to standards organizations that are trying to develop recommendations for automotive Wi-Fi.

Two Wi-Fi-equipped cars sitting at a stoplight could exchange information free of charge, but if they wanted to send that information to the Internet, they’d probably have to use a paid service such as the cell network or a satellite system. At the ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, taking place this month in Portugal, researchers from MIT, Georgetown University and the National University of Singapore (NUS) will present a new algorithm that would allow Wi-Fi-connected cars to share their Internet connections. “In this setting, we’re assuming that Wi-Fi is cheap, but 3G is expensive,” says Alejandro Cornejo, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and lead author on the paper.

The general approach behind the algorithm is to aggregate data from hundreds of cars in just a small handful, which then upload it to the Internet. The problem, of course, is that the layout of a network of cars is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. Ideally, the aggregators would be those cars that come into contact with the largest number of other cars, but they can’t be identified in advance.

Software Engineers Develop Cryptographic Attack That Allows Access to Secure Internet Servers

HTTP or HyperText Transfer Protocol is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. It defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various browser and computer commands. Entering a web address or URL in a browser sends an HTTP command to the web server directing it to fetch and transmit the requested Web page.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) with SSL/TLS protocol. It provides encrypted communication and secure identification of a network web server. HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet.

A padlocked icon in a web-browser or a URL starting with https provides communication security over the Internet. The icon or URL indicates OpenSSL, a cryptography toolkit implementing the SSL protocol, or a similar system is being used. New research by a collaborative team has developed an attack that can circumvent the security OpenSSL should provide. The attack worked on a very specific version of the OpenSSL software, 0.9.8g, and only when a specific set of options were used.

Dr Dan Page, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, and one of the collaborative team, will present a paper at the RSA conference in San Francisco next week [Wednesday 29 February] about the EPSRC-funded research.

The attack worked by targeting a bug in the software. Carefully constructed messages were sent to the web-server, each of which triggered the bug and allowed part of a cryptographic key to be recovered. Using enough messages, the entire key could be recovered.

Text Messaging Limits Brain From Accepting New Words

The 21st century has greatly changed the way people communicate. Email, Social Networks, Online messaging, and SMS messaging or texting are the major channels of communication for this generation. But some teachers think the changes are not all for the better.

Eleanor Johnson, an English professor at Columbia University in New York City says that text messaging has made students believe that it is acceptable to make bad spelling and grammatical errors. She says her students have increasingly used less formal English in their writing. She says words and phrases like "guy" and "you know" now appear in research papers.

Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words.

The study, conducted by Joan Lee for her master's thesis in linguistics, revealed that those who texted more were less accepting of new words. On the other hand, those who read more traditional print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers were more accepting of the same words.

The study asked university students about their reading habits, including text messaging, and presented them with a range of words both real and fictitious.