The 6th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '16), to be held on August 8, 2016 in Austin, TX, seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners working on means to study, detect, or circumvent practices that inhibit free and open communication on the Internet.

Internet communications drive political and social change around the world. Governments and other actors seek to control, monitor, manipulate, and block Internet communications for a variety of reasons, ranging from extending copyright law to suppressing free speech and assembly. Methods for controlling what content people post and view online are also multifarious. Whether it's traffic throttling by ISPs or man-in-the-middle attacks by countries seeking to identify those organizing protests, threats to free and open communications on the Internet raise a wide range of research challenges.

FOCI '16 invites submissions from technical as well as policy and social science-oriented research. Work that combines perspectives from multiple fields is especially encouraged.

We encourage submission of new, interesting work on a wide variety of topics of interest, including but not limited to the following general areas:

Designing systems for circumventing Internet censorship
Measurement, detection, and analysis (including metrics) of Internet censorship/circumvention tools
Legal, economic, policy, social, and ethical issues in Internet censorship/circumvention tools
Usability and performance studies for censorship-resistant systems
Understanding censoring adversaries and attack capabilities, including theoretical modeling/analysis and surveillance tools
Deployment of circumvention mechanisms in real-world platforms such as Tor

FOCI favors interesting and new ideas and early results. We envision that work presented at FOCI will ultimately lead to more mature publications at relevant, high-quality conferences. Papers will be selected primarily based on originality, significance, and technical merit, with additional consideration given to their potential to foster productive discussion at the workshop.

Submission Instructions

Submitted papers must be no longer than six 8.5" x 11" pages (including references), based on the standard USENIX format. Specifically, your paper should be typeset in two column format in 10-point type on 12-point (single-spaced) leading, with a text block no more than 6.5" wide by 9" deep. All papers must be submitted via the Web submissions form.

Paper submissions must be submitted in a form suitable for anonymous review: no author names or affiliations may appear on the title page, and authors should avoid revealing their identity in the text. When referring to your previous work, do so in the third person, as though it were written by someone else. Only blind the reference itself in the (unusual) case that a third-person reference is infeasible. Contact the program co-chairs at foci16chairs@usenix.org if you have any questions.

Papers that do not comply with the submission requirements may be rejected without review. All accepted papers will be available online to registered attendees before the workshop. If your paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on the day of the workshop, August 8, 2016.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference Submissions Policy for details. Note, however, that we expect that many papers accepted for FOCI '16 will eventually be extended as full papers suitable for presentation at future conferences. Questions? Contact your program co-chairs, foci16chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX FOCI '16 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.