Real-Time Client-Side Phishing Prevention

In the last decades researchers and companies have been working to deploy effective solutions to steer users away from phishing websites. These solutions are typically based on servers or blacklisting systems. Such approaches have several drawbacks: they compromise user privacy, rely on off-line analysis, are not robust against adaptive attacks and do not provide much guidance to the users in their warnings. To address these limitations, we developed a fast real-time client-side phishing prevention software that implements a phishing detection technique recently developed by Marchal et al. It extracts information from the visited webpage and detects if it is a phish to warn the user. It is also able to detect the website that the phish is trying to mimic and propose a redirection to the legitimate domain. Furthermore, to attest the validity of our solution we performed two user studies to evaluate the usability of the interface and the program's impact on user experience

Off-the-Hook: An Efficient and Usable Client-Side Phishing Prevention Application

Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they suffer from several drawbacks including potential to compromise user privacy, difficulty of detecting phishing websites whose content change dynamically, and reliance on features that are too dependent on the training data. To address these limitations we present a new approach for detecting phishing webpages in real-time as they are visited by a browser. It relies on modeling inherent phisher limitations stemming from the constraints they face while building a webpage. Consequently, the implementation of our approach, Off-the-Hook, exhibits several notable properties including high accuracy, brand-independence and good language-independence, speed of decision, resilience to dynamic phish and resilience to evolution in phishing techniques. Off-the-Hook is implemented as a fully-client-side browser add-on, which preserves user privacy. In addition, Off-the-Hook identifies the target website that a phishing webpage is attempting to mimic and includes this target in its warning. We evaluated Off-the-Hook in two different user studies. Our results show that users prefer Off-the-Hook warnings to Firefox warnings.Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they suffer from several drawbacks including potential to compromise user privacy, difficulty of detecting phishing websites whose content change dynamically, and reliance on features that are too dependent on the training data. To address these limitations we present a new approach for detecting phishing webpages in real-time as they are visited by a browser. It relies on modeling inherent phisher limitations stemming from the constraints they face while building a webpage. Consequently, the implementation of our approach, Off-the-Hook, exhibits several notable properties including high accuracy, brand-independence and good language-independence, speed of decision, resilience to dynamic phish and resilience to evolution in phishing techniques. Off-the-Hook is implemented as a fully-client-side browser add-on, which preserves user privacy. In addition, Off-the-Hook identifies the target website that a phishing webpage is attempting to mimic and includes this target in its warning. We evaluated Off-the-Hook in two different user studies. Our results show that users prefer Off-the-Hook warnings to Firefox warnings.Non Peer reviewe

Local Field Potential Modeling Predicts Dense Activation in Cerebellar Granule Cells Clusters under LTP and LTD Control

Local field-potentials (LFPs) are generated by neuronal ensembles and contain information about the activity of single neurons. Here, the LFPs of the cerebellar granular layer and their changes during long-term synaptic plasticity (LTP and LTD) were recorded in response to punctate facial stimulation in the rat in vivo. The LFP comprised a trigeminal (T) and a cortical (C) wave. T and C, which derived from independent granule cell clusters, co-varied during LTP and LTD. To extract information about the underlying cellular activities, the LFP was reconstructed using a repetitive convolution (ReConv) of the extracellular potential generated by a detailed multicompartmental model of the granule cell. The mossy fiber input patterns were determined using a Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm. The major component of the LFP was generated by the granule cell spike Na+ current, which caused a powerful sink in the axon initial segment with the source located in the soma and dendrites. Reproducing the LFP changes observed during LTP and LTD required modifications in both release probability and intrinsic excitability at the mossy fiber-granule cells relay. Synaptic plasticity and Golgi cell feed-forward inhibition proved critical for controlling the percentage of active granule cells, which was 11% in standard conditions but ranged from 3% during LTD to 21% during LTP and raised over 50% when inhibition was reduced. The emerging picture is that of independent (but neighboring) trigeminal and cortical channels, in which synaptic plasticity and feed-forward inhibition effectively regulate the number of discharging granule cells and emitted spikes generating “dense” activity clusters in the cerebellar granular layer

Intelligent Information Access

Intelligent Information Access techniques attempt to overcome the limitations of current search devices by providing personalized information items and product/service recommendations. They normally utilize direct or indirect user input and facilitate the information search and decision processes, according to user needs, preferences and usage patterns. Recent developments at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Information Filtering, Machine Learning, User Modelling, Natural Language Processing and Human- Computer Interaction offer novel solutions that empower users to go beyond single-session lookup tasks and that aim at serving the more complex requirement: “Tell me what I don’t know that I need to know”. Information filtering systems, specifically recommender systems, have been revolutionizing the way information seekers find what they want, because they effectively prune large information spaces and help users in selecting items that best meet their needs and preferences. Recommender systems rely strongly on the use of various machine learning tools and algorithms for learning how to rank, or predict user evaluation, of items. Information Retrieval systems, on the other hand, also attempt to address similar filtering and ranking problems for pieces of information such as links, pages, and documents. But they generally focus on the development of global retrieval techniques, often neglecting individual user needs and preferences. The book aims to investigate current developments and new insights into methods, techniques and technologies for intelligent information access from a multidisciplinary perspective. It comprises six chapters authored by participants in the research event Intelligent Information Access, held in Cagliari (Italy) in December 2008. In Chapter 1, Enhancing Conversational Access to Information through a Socially Intelligent Agent, Berardina De Carolis, Irene Mazzotta and Nicole Novielli emphasize the role of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as a natural interaction metaphor for personalized and context-adapted access to information. They propose a scalable architecture for the development of ECAs able to exhibit an emotional state and/or social signs. VI Preface The automatic detection of emotions in text is the problem investigated in Chapter 2, Annotating and Identifying Emotions in Text, by Carlo Strapparava and Rada Mihalcea. The authors describe the “Affective Text” task, presented at SEMEVAL- 2007. The task focused on classifying emotions in news headlines, and was intended to explore the connection between emotions and lexical semantics. After illustrating the data set, the rationale of the task and a brief description of the participating systems, several experiments on the automatic annotation of emotions in text are presented. The practical applications of the task are very important. Consider for example opinion mining and market analysis, affective computing, natural language interfaces for e-learning environments or educational games. Personalization of the ranking computed by search engines and recommender systems is the main topic of Chapter 3, Improving Ranking by Respecting the Multidimensionality and Uncertainty of User Preferences, by Bettina Berendt and Veit Koppen. The research question addressed by the authors is whether system ranking is the “right ranking” for the user, based on the context in which she/he operates. A general conceptualization of the ranking-evaluation task is proposed: the comparison between the ranking generated by a computational system, and the “ user’s ideal ranking”. Eight challenges to this simple model are discussed, leading to the conclusion that approaches for dealing with multidimensional, and often only partial, preference orders are required and that randomness could be a beneficial feature of system rankings. In Chapter 4, Hotho reviews the state of the art in the new research area of data mining on folksonomies. The first part describes the basics of folksonomies, summarizing del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking system, and illustrates in detail BibSonomy, a very successful online service for social bookmarking and publication sharing. Starting from these systems, the author discusses in greater depth the main issues regarding folksonomies, proposing a formal model and presenting their most important network properties. In the second part, the author illustrates three applications: spam detection, ranking and recommendation. Regarding spam detection, the author develops techniques, based on binary classifiers, which prevent spammers from publishing in social bookmarking systems. As far as ranking is concerned, a new algorithm is proposed, namely FolkRank, which takes into account the folksonomy structure for ranking users, tags and resources. For recommendation, the author evaluates a tag recommender based on Collaborative Filtering, a graph based recommender using FolkRank and several simple approaches based on tag counts. In the third part, a possible link between folksonomies and ontologies is suggested, paving the way to some very promising strategies for detecting organizational principles hidden within folksonomies. Amati, Amodeo, Bianchi, Gaibisso and Gambosi propose, in Chapter 5, A Uniform Theoretic Approach to Opinion and Information Retrieval, an application of the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) model to the Preface VII opinion finding task, the task of retrieving opinionated blog posts, relevant for a given topic, from a large collection. The opinion finding task can be seen as a search in which, after the standard retrieval of ranked documents, documents are re-ranked according to the presence of opinions within the selected documents. This task can be handled by a supervised or unsupervised method. The authors propose a method for creating a lexicon of opinionated terms for re-ranking the documents, using a supervised algorithm. The first part introduces the statistical basis underpinning the proposed approach and its adoption in opinion retrieval. In particular, two information-theoretic functions are defined, opinion entropy and average opinion entropy. The authors also formally describe their lightweight opinion retrieval algorithm. Lastly, the authors discuss the effectiveness of their approach for creating a dictionary of polarity-bearing terms. They also describe some preliminary experiments and propose alternative ways to approach the polarity detection problem. In Chapter 6, A Suite of Semantic Web Tools Supporting Development of Multilingual Ontologies, Pazienza, Stellato and Turbati propose a suite of software libraries, tools and ontologies to support multilingual development of Semantic Web ontologies. The three tools illustrated in this Chapter are Semantic Turkey, The Linguistic Watermark, and Ontoling. Semantic Turkey is aimed at providing innovative solutions for web browsing and for gathering and organizing the information observed when surfing the net. The novel aspect of Semantic Turkey is its ability to provide a clear separation between acquired data and web links. The Linguistic Watermark is an ontological and software framework for describing and managing heterogeneous linguistic resources and for using their contents for ontological-driven document enrichment. Ontoling is a generic architecture for extending ontology development tools with functionalities for enriching ontological knowledge with linguistic content. The tools presented implicitly embed a new way of rethinking the development of ontologies in terms of making their content reusable and comprehensible. Furthermore, they represent living proof of software engineering principles associated with software reuse, documentation, modularity, interaction analysis, applied to the domain of Knowledge Management Software. We would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions and the reviewers for their careful revision and suggestions for improving them. We are grateful to the Springer-Verlag Team for their assistance during the preparation of the manuscripts. This book is dedicated to the memory of Fiorella de Rosis in recognition of her contribution to user modeling. She was a pioneer in the field of affective computing, a leader in research on modeling emotions and constructing embodied animated agents. She produced key contributions in intelligent user interfaces, in particular on user-adapted generation of natural language and multimedia messages, uncertainty in user models, and presentation of medical explanations and clinical guidelines. During her teaching and research activities she mentored many students who have become established researchers. These research and teaching activities didn’t prevent her from being an active VIII Preface member of the ACM, of the International Society for Research on Emotions, of the European Network of Excellence on Emotions (HUMAINE), of the editorial boards of UMUAI and co-chair of many international conferences. All the people acquainted with Fiorella have appreciated her scientific and human value and are grateful for her friendship

Confounding factors of transvaginal ultrasound accuracy in endometrial cancer

Endometrial cancer is the most frequently diagnosed gynecological tumour. Transvaginal ultrasound has a leading role in the preoperative evaluation of endometrial cancer patients. The study aimed to identify factors that can worsen the diagnostic accuracy of transvaginal ultrasound in endometrial cancer patients. We retrospectively analysed 290 patients with histological diagnosis of endometrial adenocarcinoma. Two-dimensional (2D) gray-scale ultrasound and power Doppler imaging were performed. Age, menopause status, obesity, parity, Figo stage and benign uterine disorders were evaluated as possible factors worsening the diagnostic accuracy of the ultrasonography. FIGO stage IB was the main significant confounding factor in the univariate analysis (p = .004). Furthermore, 2D transvaginal ultrasound showed worse diagnostic accuracy in endometrial cancer patients with concomitant benign uterine pathologies.Impact statement What is already known on this subject? Many studies have analysed the reliability and diagnostic accuracy of transvaginal ultrasound in predicting myometrial invasion, but few studies have underlined the importance of confounding factors. Shin et al. () showed that diffuse fibromatosis is a quality ultrasound confounding factor. Furthermore, Fischerova et al. () showed that body mass index (BMI) did not influence the diagnostic accuracy of ultrasound assessment. What do the results of this study add? FIGO stage IB is the main factor worsening the diagnostic accuracy of transvaginal ultrasound in endometrial cancer patients (p = .004). Among the 82 patients with histologically proven FIGO stage IB, 27 (32.9%) had a wrong ultrasound prediction of myometrial infiltration. Twenty-one (36.2%) patients in whom there was no agreement between ultrasound prediction of myometrial infiltration and pathological analysis had fibromatosis and/or adenomyosis (p = 0.04). What are the implications of these findings for clinical practice and/or further research? Two-dimensional ultrasound represents a useful tool in the correct pre-operative setting of patients with endometrial cancer. In FIGO stages IB endometrial cancer patients and in conjunction with benign uterine pathologies, 2D transvaginal ultrasound has less diagnostic accuracy. In these cases, MRI still plays a leading role

Le culture del neoliberismo. Retoriche pubbliche e nuove forme della soggettività

Il fascicolo 59/2020 della rivista semestrale «Sociologia della comunicazione» è dedicato alle culture del neoliberismo, in quanto forma del capitalismo attuale, che si articolano tra retoriche pubbliche e nuove forme della soggettività, in orientamenti di valore e concezioni della società e dell’individuo che si traducono in discorsi, pratiche e dispositivi, in modi di sentire, di pensare e di agire nel quotidiano e nei contesti istituzionali, di cui gli attori non sono necessariamente consapevoli. Diversi studiosi convergono nel riconoscere alcuni tratti comuni delle culture del neoliberismo che abitano e dominano trasversalmente i molteplici settori della società e le forme dell’esistenza quotidiana – l’economia, il lavoro, la cittadinanza e la partecipazione, i consumi, il genere, le emozioni e la vita intima, solo per citarne alcuni. La competizione diventa norma di comportamento generalizzata, uscendo dai confini dell’economico, e l’individuo viene esortato a governare se stesso come un’impresa – cui espressioni quali capitale umano e capitale emotivo rimandano, e come hanno messo in evidenza studiose della sociologia delle emozioni americane quali Illouz (2007) e Hochshild (2015). Si assiste contestualmente alla privatizzazione e depoliticizzazione di istanze di rilevanza collettiva e pubblica che collassano nella sfera individuale e domestica (come indagato ad es. in Zappino 2016) e alla contrattualizzazione dei rapporti sociali

Hysteroscopic endometrial tumor localization and sentinel lymph node mapping. An upgrade of the hysteroscopic role in endometrial cancer patients

Introduction: Given the growing interest in sentinel node mapping (SLN) biopsy in Endometrial Cancer (EC) patients, many efforts have been made to maximize the SLN bilateral detection rate. However, at present, no previous research assessed the potential correlation between primary EC location in the uterine cavity and SLN mapping. In this context, this study aims to investigate the possible role of intrauterine EC hysteroscopic localization in predicting SLN nodal placement.Materials and methods: EC patients surgically treated from January 2017 to December 2021 were retrospectively analyzed. All patients underwent hysterectomy, bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, and SLN mapping. During hysteroscopy, the location of the neoplastic lesion was described as follows: uterine fundus (comprising the most cranial portion of the uterine cavity up to the tubal ostium including the cornual areas), corpus uteri (from the tubal ostium to the inner uterine orifice), and diffuse (when the tumor invades more than 50% of the uterine cavity).Results: Three hundred ninety patients met the inclusion criteria. The tumor pattern diffused to the whole uterine cavity was statistically associated with SLN uptake on common iliac lymph nodes (OR 2.4, 95%CI 1-5.8, p = 0.05). Patients'age is an independent factor associated with SLN failure (OR: 0.95, 95%CI 0.93-0.98, p < 0.001).Conclusions: The study showed a statistically significant association between EC hysteroscopically spread throughout the whole uterine cavity and SLN uptake at the common iliac lymph nodes. Furthermore, patient age negatively affected the SLN detection rate. (c) 2023 Elsevier Ltd, BASO similar to The Association for Cancer Surgery, and the European Society of Surgical Oncology. All rights reserved