This April 2024 issue contains two technical papers and one editorial note.
The first technical paper, This Is a Local Domain: On Amassing Country-Code Top-Level Domains from Public Data, by Raffaele Sommese and colleagues, presents a measurement study that investigates ccTLD coverage using public data sources. Domain lists such as Alexa and Tranco are crucial tools for performing representative Web censuses. However, these lists often overlook domains under country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), resulting in biased census outcomes. The authors demonstrate that data from Certificate Transparency (CT) logs and Common Crawl provide robust ccTLD coverage and can serve as reliable proxies for Web censuses. The authors also plan to release ccTLD domain names to the community as part of an expansion of the daily OpenINTEL measurement.
The second technical paper, On Sample Selection for Continual Learning: a Video Streaming Case Study, by Alexander Dietmüller and colleagues, proposes Memento, a prototype implementation aiming at improving sample selection, especially in the tail of the traffic distribution. An already sizable and increasing body of work focuses on using ML models to capture the inherent complexity of communication networks. And yet, as network traffic evolves, ML approaches need to tackle the issue of concept drift, which implies that the model will eventually underperform. This means that ML models need retraining. When to retrain and on what data remain difficult problems. This paper focuses precisely on those open issues.
Finally, the editorial note, Towards Re-architecting Today’s Internet for Survivability — NSF Workshop Report by Fabian Bustamante and colleagues, reports on a workshop that took place on November 28-29, 2023, at Northwestern University. The goal of the workshop was to bring together a group of national and international experts to sketch and start implementing a transformative research agenda for solving one of our community’s most challenging yet important tasks: the re-architecting of tomorrow’s Internet for “survivability”, ensuring that the network is able to fulfill its mission even in the presence of large-scale catastrophic events.
I hope that you will enjoy reading this new issue and welcome comments and suggestions on CCR Online (https://ccronline.sigcomm.org) or by email at ccr-editor at sigcomm.org.