Recent content on Philipp Winter

 Validating data in Go
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 Mat Ryer’s approach to
 validating data in Go 
is simple and elegant.
I have been using it extensively while building
 WhyNotLog .
The idea is to define a Validator interface and
any type that implements this interface is validation-ready: 
 type Validator interface {
 Validate() map[string]string
}
 The…

 Emotional management
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 Engineers enjoy discussing text editors,
tech stacks, and
note taking apps but barely anyone ever talks about emotional management.
How does everyone handle stress, rejection, or distraction?
In fact, I only ever stumbled upon
 Dan Luu’s 
and
 Jamie Brandon’s 
thoughtful takes on the topic.
Here’s…

 Moving from academia to industry
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 I left academia in 2015.
Having completed a PhD and a postdoc,
academia was all I’ve ever known,
making the transition to industry bumpy:
I knew that academics’ productivity is measured by how many research papers they produce.
But what does success look like for roles outside of academia?
The following…

 Insightful questions to ask at interviews
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 I find that the following questions make people think,
both as interviewer and as interviewee . 
 
 As interviewee
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 Why is this role open? 
 For how long has the oldest team member been around? 
 What does success look like in this role? 
 What qualities are most important for success…

 Intelligent Design Enables Architectural Evolution
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 Looking at the Internet’s development over the last decades, we have seen plenty of innovation on the access and application layer. In contrast, the address (IP) and transport layer (UDP/TCP) have seen practically none. The only noteworthy development is the still-ongoing and painful switch from IPv4 to IPv6. This…

 LAP: Lightweight Anonymity and Privacy
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 This paper from Security & Privacy 2012 
proposes a new network-layer anonymity system called Lightweight Anonymity and Privacy (LAP). LAP is a new point in the design space for anonymity systems, which trades off a strong threat model for significantly better performance. In practice, its anonymity guarantees are weaker than Tor,…

 Enlisting ISPs to Improve Online Privacy: IP Address Mixing by Default
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 This paper 
proposes the address hiding protocol (AHP), a relatively simple mechanism that is meant to improve Internet users’ privacy. The protocol is meant to be deployed by ISPs, and works by substituting the IP address:port pairs of clients. The size of an ISP’s address pool becomes…

 Opening up academic research
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 In academia it is common to consider research projects secret until publication. Before publication, academics discuss their ideas only with a select few, under implicit understanding of confidentiality. This has several reasons. Primarily, people are scared of getting scooped, that is, have another research group publish first. This is…

 A Messy State of the Union: Taming the Composite State Machines of TLS
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 This paper 
is about the state machines of TLS implementations such as OpenSSL and NSS. When parts of TLS are formally proven to be secure, then it’s typically only specific cipher suites in isolation; the security proofs don’t consider the big picture, such as the non-trivial state…

 Detecting Internet Filtering from Geographic Time Series
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 This paper 
talks about detecting Internet filtering by analysing usage statistics
 such as the ones provided by The Tor Project . I used to follow Tor’s existing censorship detector quite closely, but it tends to raise many alerts—especially for countries with low usage numbers—so I am…

 A First Look at Anycast CDN Traffic
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 I’m a little bit out of my comfort zone by reviewing a network measurement paper this time.
 The paper discusses anycasting for CDN traffic. It’s a recent paper that does not seem to be peer-reviewed yet, so its results have to be taken with a grain of salt. Early on, the authors explain that anycasting was mostly used…

 An Internet Architecture Based on the Principle of Least Privilege
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 This paper 
presents a novel Internet architecture meant to replace IP. The architecture is based on the principle of least privilege, meaning that every actor in the network is only exposed to the bare minimum of information that is necessary to do its job. That is in contrast to the Internet’s…

 Bitcoin over Tor isn’t a good idea
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 This paper 
claims that Bitcoin and Tor don’t play well together, which leads to a number of weaknesses that limit, or even eliminate, the anonymity provided by Tor. In particular, a moderate-resource attacker is able to: 
 See and control all Bitcoin traffic that is routed over Tor.
Set a cookie on clients that…

 The Censorship Bibliography
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 I maintain an
 online bibliography of Internet censorship research .

 Research papers
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 2025
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 Purpose Mode: Reducing Distraction through Toggling Attention Capture Damaging Patterns on Social Media Web Sites 
Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Yi-Shyuan Chiang, Lan Gao, Stephanie Yang, Philipp Winter , Sauvik Das
( ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction ) 
 
 
 2024
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…

 Public talks
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 Ethical Internet Measurement: From outages to anonymity 
 CANVAS workshop , March 2019 
 State of Internet Censorship 2016 
 33rd Chaos Communication Congress , December 2016 
 Identifying and Characterizing Sybils in the Tor Network 
 USENIX Security , August 2016 
 How the Great Firewall discovers hidden circumvention servers…

 TikZ examples
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 This page contains
 TikZ 
examples for computer networks and security. 
 
 Tor protocol stack
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 \tikzset{>=latex}
\begin{tikzpicture}

\node[circle,draw,minimum size=1cm] (R1) at (0, 0) {$R_n$};
\node[circle,draw,minimum size=1cm] (R2) at (5, 0) {$R_{n+1}$};

\draw[<->] (R1.east) -- node [midway,…

 Research Power Tools
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 In March 2023, I published my book
 Research Power Tools .
As the title suggests,
the book distills advice on how to be more effective at research,
be it version control, reading, writing, or organizing.
Find out more about the book
 on its official site .
You can buy the ebook on
 Gumroad 
and a printed copy on
…