Web Tracking: Mechanisms, Implications, and Defenses

This articles surveys the existing literature on the methods currently used by web services to track the user online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user's defenses. A significant majority of reviewed articles and web resources are from years 2012-2014. Privacy seems to be the Achilles' heel of today's web. Web services make continuous efforts to obtain as much information as they can about the things we search, the sites we visit, the people with who we contact, and the products we buy. Tracking is usually performed for commercial purposes. We present 5 main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, or yet other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users (price discrimination, assessing financial credibility, determining insurance coverage, government surveillance, and identity theft). For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Apart from describing the methods and tools used for keeping the personal data away from being tracked, we also present several tools that were used for research purposes - their main goal is to discover how and by which entity the users are being tracked on their desktop computers or smartphones, provide this information to the users, and visualize it in an accessible and easy to follow way. Finally, we present the currently proposed future approaches to track the user and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users' privacy.Comment: 29 pages, 212 reference

WebChem Viewer: a tool for the easy dissemination of chemical and structural data sets.

BackgroundSharing sets of chemical data (e.g., chemical properties, docking scores, etc.) among collaborators with diverse skill sets is a common task in computer-aided drug design and medicinal chemistry. The ability to associate this data with images of the relevant molecular structures greatly facilitates scientific communication. There is a need for a simple, free, open-source program that can automatically export aggregated reports of entire chemical data sets to files viewable on any computer, regardless of the operating system and without requiring the installation of additional software.ResultsWe here present a program called WebChem Viewer that automatically generates these types of highly portable reports. Furthermore, in designing WebChem Viewer we have also created a useful online web application for remotely generating molecular structures from SMILES strings. We encourage the direct use of this online application as well as its incorporation into other software packages.ConclusionsWith these features, WebChem Viewer enables interdisciplinary collaborations that require the sharing and visualization of small molecule structures and associated sets of heterogeneous chemical data. The program is released under the FreeBSD license and can be downloaded from http://nbcr.ucsd.edu/WebChemViewer. The associated web application (called "Smiley2png 1.0") can be accessed through freely available web services provided by the National Biomedical Computation Resource at http://nbcr.ucsd.edu

Learning Analytics in the LMS: Using Browser Extensions to Embed Visualizations into a Learning Management System

Proceedings of: Workshop Towards Theory and Practice of Teaching Analytics 2012 (TaPTA 2012) Saarbrücken, Germany, September 18, 2012.The use of analytics has gained a relevant level of impor- tance in current learning environments. Due to its life-cycle of observa- tion, analysis and intervention, it is important to make learning analytics available to all the participants of a learning process. A Learning Man- agement System (LMS) is a very suitable platform to present results in the form of visualizations, but the development of custom modules usu- ally requires programming and administrative work. This paper presents a system architecture to embed learning analytics visualizations without having to develop a custom LMS module. Our approach is based on the modi cation of the LMS' web pages through a browser extension. The details of the implementation are presented, as well as issues that might arise and how to address them.Work partially funded by the EEE project, "Plan Nacional de I+D+I TIN2011-28308-C03-01" and the "Emadrid: Investigación y desarrollo de tecnologías para el e-learning en la Comunidad de Madrid" project (S2009/TIC-1650).Publicad

DCMF: DC & Microformats, a good marriage

This report introduces the Dublin Core Microformats (DCMF) project, a new way to use the DC element set within X/HTML. The DC microformats encode explicit semantic expressions in an X/HTML webpage, by using a specific list of terms for values of the attributes “rev” and “rel” for and elements, and “class” and “id” of other elements. Microformats can be easily processed by user agents and software, enabling a high level of interoperability. These characteristics are crucial for the growing number of social applications allowing users to participate in the Web 2.0 environment as information creators and consumers. This report reviews the origins of microformats; illustrates the coding of DC microformats using the Dublin Core Metadata Gen tool, and a Firefox extension for extraction and visualization; and discusses the benefits of creating Web services utilizing DC microformats

Medical Data Visual Synchronization and Information interaction Using Internet-based Graphics Rendering and Message-oriented Streaming

The rapid technology advances in medical devices make possible the generation of vast amounts of data, which contain massive quantities of diagnostic information. Interactively accessing and sharing the acquired data on the Internet is critically important in telemedicine. However, due to the lack of efficient algorithms and high computational cost, collaborative medical data exploration on the Internet is still a challenging task in clinical settings. Therefore, we develop a web-based medical image rendering and visual synchronization software platform, in which novel algorithms are created for parallel data computing and image feature enhancement, where Node.js and Socket.IO libraries are utilized to establish bidirectional connections between server and clients in real time. In addition, we design a new methodology to stream medical information among all connected users, whose identities and input messages can be automatically stored in database and extracted in web browsers. The presented software framework will provide multiple medical practitioners with immediate visual feedback and interactive information in applications such as collaborative therapy planning, distributed treatment, and remote clinical health care

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c