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While the Internet increasingly permeates everyday life of individuals around the world, it becomes crucial to prevent unauthorized collection and abuse of personalized information. Internet anonymization software such as Tor is an important instrument to protect online privacy. However, due to the performance overhead caused by Tor, many Internet users refrain from using it. This causes a negative impact on the overall privacy provided by Tor, since it depends on the size of the user community and availability of shared resources. Detailed measurements about the performance of Tor are crucial for solving this issue. This paper presents comparative experiments on Tor latency and throughput for surfing to 500 popular websites from several locations around the world during the period of 28 days. Furthermore, we compare these measurements to critical latency thresholds gathered from web usability research, including our own user studies. Our results indicate that without massive future optimizations of Tor performance, it is unlikely that a larger part of Internet users would adopt it for everyday usage. This leads to fewer resources available to the Tor community than theoretically possible, and increases the exposure of privacy-concerned individuals. Furthermore, this could lead to an adoption barrier of similar privacy-enhancing technologies for a Future Internet. Future Internet2012, 4 489

In the much-observed field of weblogs, corporate blogs are of particular relevance and interest. This study 1 empirically examines the corporate blog phenomenon by reviewing the blog status of 250 companies from the consumer goods industry. Their blogs -if any -were tested with the help of different variables, such as the location of the company, the blog's updating frequency or its interactivity. This allowed for testing certain hypotheses, in particular concerning the existence of corporate blogs in certain companies, industries and regions, or whether a blog's traffic rank depends upon these variables. This survey suggests that a blog's traffic rank is significantly influenced by the frequency of blog postings and its interactivity features. These factors seem to greatly depend upon the sales volume of a company. However, the data sample at hand suggests that there is not yet a widespread usage of corporate weblogs.

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Due to the shortage of skilled workforce and the increasing usage of social network sites, companies increasingly apply social network sites to attract potential applicants. This paper explores how corporate career presences on network sites should be realized in order to attract potential applicants. Therefore, we tested the impact of seven individual characteristics (namely Appointments, Daily Working Routine, Jobs, Corporate News, Entertainment, Media Format, and Features) of these corporate career presences that we extracted by a comprehensive pre-study on users' perceived hedonic and utilitarian value of these presences on social network sites. Based on an online survey with 470 participants, the results reveal a highly significant impact of five characteristics that corporate career presences provide both a hedonic as well as a utilitarian value to the user.