Invisible Pixels Are Dead, Long Live Invisible Pixels!

Privacy has deteriorated in the world wide web ever since the 1990s. The tracking of browsing habits by different third-parties has been at the center of this deterioration. Web cookies and so-called web beacons have been the classical ways to implement third-party tracking. Due to the introduction of more sophisticated technical tracking solutions and other fundamental transformations, the use of classical image-based web beacons might be expected to have lost their appeal. According to a sample of over thirty thousand images collected from popular websites, this paper shows that such an assumption is a fallacy: classical 1 x 1 images are still commonly used for third-party tracking in the contemporary world wide web. While it seems that ad-blockers are unable to fully block these classical image-based tracking beacons, the paper further demonstrates that even limited information can be used to accurately classify the third-party 1 x 1 images from other images. An average classification accuracy of 0.956 is reached in the empirical experiment. With these results the paper contributes to the ongoing attempts to better understand the lack of privacy in the world wide web, and the means by which the situation might be eventually improved.Comment: Forthcoming in the 17th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2018), Toronto, AC

Why Modern Open Source Projects Fail

Open source is experiencing a renaissance period, due to the appearance of modern platforms and workflows for developing and maintaining public code. As a result, developers are creating open source software at speeds never seen before. Consequently, these projects are also facing unprecedented mortality rates. To better understand the reasons for the failure of modern open source projects, this paper describes the results of a survey with the maintainers of 104 popular GitHub systems that have been deprecated. We provide a set of nine reasons for the failure of these open source projects. We also show that some maintenance practices -- specifically the adoption of contributing guidelines and continuous integration -- have an important association with a project failure or success. Finally, we discuss and reveal the principal strategies developers have tried to overcome the failure of the studied projects.Comment: Paper accepted at 25th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), pages 1-11, 201