Journey to the Center of the Cookie Ecosystem: Unraveling Actors' Roles and Relationships

Web pages have been steadily increasing in complexity over time, including code snippets from several distinct origins and organizations. While this may be a known phenomenon, its implications on the panorama of cookie tracking received little attention until now. Our study focuses on filling this gap, through the analysis of crawl results that are both large-scale and fine-grained, encompassing the whole set of events that lead to the creation and sharing of around 138 million cookies from crawling more than 6 million webpages. Our analysis lets us paint a highly detailed picture of the cookie ecosystem, discovering an intricate network of connections between players that reciprocally exchange information and include each other's content in web pages whose owners may not even be aware. We discover that, in most webpages, tracking cookies are set and shared by organizations at the end of complex chains that involve several middlemen. We also study the impact of cookie ghostwriting, i.e., a common practice where an entity creates cookies in the name of another party, or the webpage. We attribute and define a set of roles in the cookie ecosystem, related to cookie creation and sharing. We see that organizations can and do follow different patterns, including behaviors that previous studies could not uncover: for example, many cookie ghostwriters send cookies they create to themselves, which makes them able to perform cross-site tracking even for users that deleted third-party cookies in their browsers. While some organizations concentrate the flow of information on themselves, others behave as dispatchers, allowing other organizations to perform tracking on the pages that include their content

Novedades sobre la tipología de las ánforas Dressel 2-4 tarraconenses

The canonical name Dressel 2-4 had been used traditionally in scientific studies to nominate the most representative roman wine amphora from the High Roman Empire, especially those produced in the western Mediterranean basin. This is a generic and ambiguous definition including three Dressel CIL XV’s successive types. As we will see, this three types have different meaning, although a common economic function and a related design. Since 1971, when André Tchernia brought to the international community the existence of kilns in Catalonia to produce this kind of amphora, the concept of “Dressel 2-4 tarraconensis” become the standard denomination in almost all the studies published to date. To understand its raison d’être, the nature of the name, and its scientific limits as a typological classification, we start from a new, and yet necessary, general analysis of all the published data existing on the subject. The result of this work has been the construction of the first descriptive model to precisely date the Laietana amphorae. Finally, the systematization of evolutionary sub-types over time has revealed a change in the commercial dynamics of wines by the conjuncture “quality versus quantity”.<br><br>El nombre canónico Dressel 2-4 se utiliza tradicionalmente en el argot científico para señalar a las ánforas vinícolas más representativas de época romana altoimperial, especialmente aquellas producidas en la vertiente occidental del Mediterráneo. Se trata de una definición genérica y al mismo tiempo ambigua que agrupa tres formas sucesivas de la tabla tipológica de Dressel en CIL XV, con una función económica común a través de un diseño afín, pero con valores diferentes, como vamos a ver, llenos de contradicciones. Desde que André Tchernia diera a conocer en 1971 a la comunidad internacional la existencia de hornos en Cataluña para producir esta clase de ánfora, el concepto de “Dressel 2-4 tarraconense” se ha convertido en una constante que encontramos, en la práctica, ejemplificada en la casi totalidad de los trabajos publicados hasta nuestros días. Para comprender su razón de ser, la naturaleza del nombre, y sus límites científicos como clasificación tipológica, hemos creído necesario llevar a cabo un nuevo análisis general de los datos publicados hasta ahora. Esta labor ha dado como resultado la confección del primer modelo descriptivo con el que poder datar las ánforas layetanas con precisión. Asimismo, la sistematización en el tiempo de sus variantes evolutivas ha hecho posible percibir un cambio en la dinámica comercial de los vinos por la coyuntura “calidad versus cantidad”

Classification of Livebus arrivals user behavior

With the increasing use of Intelligent Transport Systems, large amounts of data are created. Innovative information services are introduced and new forms of data are available, which could be used to understand the behavior of travelers and the dynamics of people flows. This work analyzes the requests for real-time arrivals of bus routes at stops in London made by travelers using Transport for London's LiveBus Arrivals system. The available dataset consists of about one million requests for real-time arrivals for each of the 28 days under observation. These data are analyzed for different purposes. LiveBus Arrivals users are classified based on a set of features and using K-Means, Expectation Maximization, Logistic regression, One-level decision tree, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) by Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO). The results of the study indicate that the LiveBus Arrivals requests can be classified into six main behaviors. It was found that the classification-based approaches produce better results than the clustering-based ones. The most accurate results were obtained with the SVM-SMO methodology (Precision of 97%). Furthermore, the behavior within the six classes of users is analyzed to better understand how users take advantage of the LiveBus Arrivals service. It was found that the 37% of users can be classified as interchange users. This classification could form the basis of a more personalized LiveBus Arrivals application in future, which could support management and planning by revealing how public transport and related services are actually used or update information on commuters

N,N-dimethylcarbamato complexes of zinc

By reaction of Zn4O(O2CNMe2)6 (1) with [NH2Me2][O2CNMe2] in toluene as medium, the homoleptic zinc compound [Zn(O2CNMe2)2] (2) was obtained, which reverted back to the tetranuclear l-oxo derivative by controlled hydrolysis. The reaction of ZnO in MeCN with an excess of [NH2Me2][O2CNMe2] in concentrated solution produced high yields of [Zn(O2CNMe2)2] (2) or [NH2Me2][Zn2(O2CNMe2)5] Æ xMeCN, 3 Æ xMeCN, x = 1 or 2, depending on the experimental conditions. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

N,N-dimethylcarbamato derivatives of magnesium starting from the metal oxide

Magnesium oxide reacts with dimethylammonium dimethylcarbamate, [Me2NH2][O2CNMe2], in toluene yielding the carbonato-carbamato complex [Me2NH2]3[Mg8(CO3)2(O2CNMe2)15] 1, which gradually loses [Me2NH2][O2CNMe2] upon mild heating or by lowering the carbon dioxide pressure to give products of intermediate composition [Me2NH2]n[Mg8(CO3)2(O2CNMe2)12+n] with n ranging from 3 to 0, the neutral complex [Mg8(CO3)2(O2CNMe2)12], 2, being obtained upon exhaustive treatment in vacuo. The equilibria may be shifted back from 2 to 1 by using an excess of [Me2NH2][O2CNMe2]. The same products were obtained in low yields by reacting magnesium with [Me2NH2][O2CNMe2]: in this case the reaction proceeds slowly, being presumably promoted by the presence of some MgO and/or H2O. The crystal and molecular structure of 1 has been studied by single-crystal X-ray diffraction methods, the anion containing a ring of eight edgeor apex-sharing {MgO6} distorted octahedra, with Mg–O distances in the range from 1.921 to 2.313 Å. The framework is kept together by two μ6-carbonato ligands and by the fifteen carbamato ligands. The ionic aggregates [NH2Me2]3[Mg8(CO3)2(OCONMe2)15] are alternated in the crystal with heptane molecules and only weak van der Waals interactions are present between adjacent octanuclear aggregates, in agreement with the solubility of the substance in toluene

Presence of hepatitis E RNA in mussels used as bio-monitors of viral marine pollution

Mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis), collected from a harvesting area approved by European Community Regulation, were transplanted to four polluted sites located in the Northwestern Mediterranean area (Tuscany). They were used as bio-monitors to test the quality of the marine water pollution. At different times after the transplantation, mussels were withdrawn and tested for presence of phages and enteric viruses by molecular tests. 52.4% of the transplanted mussel samples were positive for at least one enteric virus. Hepatitis A virus (HAV) was identified in each site (17/37; 45.9%). Three samples were positive for hepatitis E virus (HEV) (8.1%) and two (5.4%) for norovirus (NoV) genogroup I. Coliphages and RYC 2056 phages were detected in all sites, while HSP 40 phages were detected in three sites. Results demonstrate the ability of transplanted mussels in accumulating and retaining different species of enteric microorganisms. Their utility as bio-monitor organisms enables testing for viral marine pollutio

Presence of Hepatitis E Rna in mussels used as bio-monitors of viral marine pollution

Mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis), collected from a harvesting area approved by European Community Regulation, were transplanted to four polluted sites located in the northwestern Mediterranean area (Tuscany). They were used as bio-monitors to test the quality of the marine water pollution. At different times after the transplantation, mussels were withdrawn and tested for presence of phages and enteric viruses by molecular tests. 52.4% of the transplanted mussel samples were positive for at least one enteric virus. Hepatitis A virus (HAV) was identified in each site (17/37; 45.9%). Three samples were positive for Hepatitis E virus (HEV) (8.1%) and two (5.4%) for Norovirus (NoV) genogroup I. Coliphages and RYC 2056 phages were detected in all sites, while HSP 40 phages were detected in three sites. Results demonstrate the ability of transplanted mussels in accumulating and retaining different species of enteric microorganisms. Their utility as bio-monitor organisms enables testing for viral marine pollution