scholarly journals Déjà vu: Abusing Browser Cache Headers to Identify and Track Online Users

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-406
Author(s):  
Vikas Mishra ◽  
Pierre Laperdrix ◽  
Walter Rudametkin ◽  
Romain Rouvoy
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Specific Time ◽  
Exact Date ◽  
Timing Attack ◽  
Déjà Vu ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Web ◽  
Cache Attacks

Abstract Many browser cache attacks have been proposed in the literature to sniff the user’s browsing history. All of them rely on specific time measurements to infer if a resource is in the cache or not. Unlike the state-of-the-art, this paper reports on a novel cache-based attack that is not a timing attack but that abuses the HTTP cache-control and expires headers to extract the exact date and time when a resource was cached by the browser. The privacy implications are serious as this information can not only be utilized to detect if a website was visited by the user but it can also help build a timeline of the user’s visits. This goes beyond traditional history sniffing attacks as we can observe patterns of visit and model user’s behavior on the web. To evaluate the impact of our attack, we tested it on all major browsers and found that all of them, except the ones based on WebKit, are vulnerable to it. Since our attack requires specific HTTP headers to be present, we also crawled the Tranco Top 100K websites and identified 12, 970 of them can be detected with our approach. Among them, 1, 910 deliver resources that have expiry dates greater than 100 days, enabling long-term user tracking. Finally, we discuss possible defenses at both the browser and standard levels to prevent users from being tracked.

scholarly journals A Sign of Things to Come: Predicting the Perception of Above-the-Fold Time in Web Browsing

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Hamed Z. Jahromi ◽  
Declan Delaney ◽  
Andrew Hines
Keyword(s):  
Web Application ◽  
Web Applications ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Influencing Factor ◽  
The State ◽  
Experimental Result ◽  
Web Page ◽  
To Come ◽  
Web Quality ◽  
The Web

Content is a key influencing factor in Web Quality of Experience (QoE) estimation. A web user’s satisfaction can be influenced by how long it takes to render and visualize the visible parts of the web page in the browser. This is referred to as the Above-the-fold (ATF) time. SpeedIndex (SI) has been widely used to estimate perceived web page loading speed of ATF content and a proxy metric for Web QoE estimation. Web application developers have been actively introducing innovative interactive features, such as animated and multimedia content, aiming to capture the users’ attention and improve the functionality and utility of the web applications. However, the literature shows that, for the websites with animated content, the estimated ATF time using the state-of-the-art metrics may not accurately match completed ATF time as perceived by users. This study introduces a new metric, Plausibly Complete Time (PCT), that estimates ATF time for a user’s perception of websites with and without animations. PCT can be integrated with SI and web QoE models. The accuracy of the proposed metric is evaluated based on two publicly available datasets. The proposed metric holds a high positive Spearman’s correlation (rs=0.89) with the Perceived ATF reported by the users for websites with and without animated content. This study demonstrates that using PCT as a KPI in QoE estimation models can improve the robustness of QoE estimation in comparison to using the state-of-the-art ATF time metric. Furthermore, experimental result showed that the estimation of SI using PCT improves the robustness of SI for websites with animated content. The PCT estimation allows web application designers to identify where poor design has significantly increased ATF time and refactor their implementation before it impacts end-user experience.

Budgetary Regulation in the Context of Preventing the Consequences of the Spread of a New Coronavirus Infection in the Russian Federation

Lex Russica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-79
Author(s):  
R. V. Tkachenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
The State ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Coronavirus Infection ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
Legal Forms ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Budget System

The paper is devoted to the examination of issues related to the increasing importance of budgetary regulation for the proper functioning of a modern innovative society. The key role of the budgetary regulation in the financial process of the State is particularly acute in the context of systemic crises that include socio-economic consequences caused by the spread of a new coronavirus infection (COVID-19) in Russia. In the course of the study, the features of changes in the state financial policy caused by the above-mentioned crisis phenomena are highlighted. The paper describes various approaches to the interpretation of the budgetary regulation as a category of financial law, explores various types and legal forms of methods of the budgetary regulation, analyses mechanisms and the impact of the State on the budget system through the existing legal structure of the budgetary regulation. It is determined that the rules of financial law governing the whole complex of public relations concerning the distribution and redistribution of the national product between the levels of the budget system of the Russian Federation constitute the institution of financial law, namely: the budgetary regulation. The author concludes that the approach based on the concentration of basic powers in the financial field at the federal level significantly slows down the dynamics of development of economic activity in the majority of regions of Russia, while the need for breakthrough innovative development of Russian society determinates the expansion of long-term tax sources of income for regional budgets. In this regard, it is proposed to consolidate additional regulation for revenues gained by regional and local budgets in the form of targeted deductions from federal taxes on a long-term basis.

ISSUES OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE STATE BUDGET AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN UZBEKISTAN

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
pp. 4-19
Author(s):  
Akmal Baltayevich Allakuliev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
The State ◽  
Rate Of Return ◽  
State Budget ◽  
Macroeconomic Shocks ◽  
Dynamic Correlations ◽  
Short And Long Term ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines the interaction of the country's GDP with the state budget in the short and long term, the impact of the macro-fiscal mechanism on the country's economic growth on the example of Uzbekistan.The aim of the study is to identify dynamic correlations between the country's state budget expenditures and the economic growth of the macro-fiscal mechanism in the short and long term, as well as to analyze the approximation or rate of return of GDP and the state budget to equilibrium during various macroeconomic shocks. and hesitation.The scientific novelties of the research are:

scholarly journals Long-term Prescription? Digital Surveillance is Here to Stay

2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Žilvinas Švedkauskas ◽  
Ahmed Maati
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
The State ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Stanford University ◽  
Digital Surveillance ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Everyday Communication

An emerging literature has shown concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the proliferation of digital surveillance. Contributing to these debates, in this paper we demonstrate how the pandemic facilitates digital surveillance in three ways: (1) By shifting everyday communication to digital means it contributes to the generation of extensive amounts of data susceptible to surveillance. (2) It motivates the development of new digital surveillance tools. (3) The pandemic serves as a perfect justification for governments to prolong digital surveillance. We provide empirical anecdotes for these three effects by examining reports by the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University. Building on our argument, we conclude that we might be on the verge of a dangerous normalization of digital surveillance. Thus, we call on scholars to consider the full effects of public health crises on politics and suggest scrutinizing sources of digital data and the complex relationships between the state, corporate actors, and the sub-contractors behind digital surveillance.

scholarly journals THE IMPACT OF CONFUCIAN VALUES ON CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY DURING THE PERIOD OF “REFORMS AND OPENNESS”

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Tetyana Meteliova ◽  
Vira Chghen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
The State ◽  
Confucian Values ◽  
China’S Foreign Policy ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Impact

The article is devoted to identifying the role of the Confucian component in shaping China’s foreign policy during the period of “reforms and openness”. The author analyzes the Chinese “soft power” model and its differences from the classical one, the theoretical foundations of which were formulated by J. Nye, and discovers the China’s “soft power” features in foreign policy and establishes its meaningful connection with Confucian values and concepts. The article provides an overview of “soft power” interpretations in the main works of Chinese scholars, examines the reflection of Confucian “soft power” ideas in the state and party documents and decisions of the period of “reforms and openness”, shows the application of Confucian principles in the foreign policy of China. It is shown that the creation of effective Chinese “soft power” tools is becoming a part of a purposeful and long-term policy of the state. Such tools include the swift reform of leading media, TV and radio companies using modern technologies and focusing on foreign audience abroad, promoting China’s traditional and modern culture in foreign cultural markets, increasing China’s presence on the world market, spreading and promoting the Chinese language, “Education Export” and widening educational contacts, economic ties development and scientific and technical cooperation, public diplomacy development, support of the compatriots living abroad. Geopolitically, China’s soft power strategy is focused on developing relations with its close neighbors and creating a security belt around China. It has been proved that modern China seeks to proclaim itself as a new “soft power” center, the creation of which is a part of the State purposeful long-term policy. It is accompanied by the active appeal of Chinese ideologists to the country's traditional cultural heritage and basing of this new foreign policy on the conservative values of Confucianism, which is a kind of civilizational code determining all aspects of social life for China.

scholarly journals A Multilayer CARU Framework to Obtain Probability Distribution for Paragraph-Based Sentiment Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
pp. 11344
Author(s):  
Wei Ke ◽  
Ka-Hou Chan
Keyword(s):  
Probability Distribution ◽  
Information Extraction ◽  
Sentiment Analysis ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Final Analysis ◽  
The State ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Content Adaptive

Paragraph-based datasets are hard to analyze by a simple RNN, because a long sequence always contains lengthy problems of long-term dependencies. In this work, we propose a Multilayer Content-Adaptive Recurrent Unit (CARU) network for paragraph information extraction. In addition, we present a type of CNN-based model as an extractor to explore and capture useful features in the hidden state, which represent the content of the entire paragraph. In particular, we introduce the Chebyshev pooling to connect to the end of the CNN-based extractor instead of using the maximum pooling. This can project the features into a probability distribution so as to provide an interpretable evaluation for the final analysis. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach, being compared to the state-of-the-art models.

scholarly journals Learning from Interventions Using Hierarchical Policies for Safe Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (06) ◽  
pp. 10352-10360
Author(s):  
Jing Bi ◽  
Vikas Dhiman ◽  
Tianyou Xiao ◽  
Chenliang Xu
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Time ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Asymptotic Performance ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Learning From Demonstrations ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Long Term Behavior

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) via Behavior Cloning (BC) works well on multiple complex tasks. However, a limitation of the typical LfD approach is that it requires expert demonstrations for all scenarios, including those in which the algorithm is already well-trained. The recently proposed Learning from Interventions (LfI) overcomes this limitation by using an expert overseer. The expert overseer only intervenes when it suspects that an unsafe action is about to be taken. Although LfI significantly improves over LfD, the state-of-the-art LfI fails to account for delay caused by the expert's reaction time and only learns short-term behavior. We address these limitations by 1) interpolating the expert's interventions back in time, and 2) by splitting the policy into two hierarchical levels, one that generates sub-goals for the future and another that generates actions to reach those desired sub-goals. This sub-goal prediction forces the algorithm to learn long-term behavior while also being robust to the expert's reaction time. Our experiments show that LfI using sub-goals in a hierarchical policy framework trains faster and achieves better asymptotic performance than typical LfD.

scholarly journals A pilot for implementing environmental DNA (eDNA) based methods into environmental and biomonitoring

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiina Laamanen ◽  
Veera Norros ◽  
Sanna Suikkanen ◽  
Mikko Tolkkinen ◽  
Kristiina Vuorio ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Environmental Dna ◽  
Bulk Sample ◽  
The State ◽  
Molecular Techniques ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dna Metabarcoding

Environmental DNA (eDNA) and other molecular based approaches are revolutionizing the field of biomonitoring. These approaches undergo rapid modifications, and it is crucial to develop the best practices by sharing the newest information and knowledge. In our ongoing project we: assess the state-of-the-art of eDNA methods at Finnish Environment Institute SYKE; identify concrete next steps towards the long-term aim of implementing eDNA methods into environmental and biomonitoring; promote information exchange on eDNA methods and advance future research efforts both within SYKE and with our national and international partners. assess the state-of-the-art of eDNA methods at Finnish Environment Institute SYKE; identify concrete next steps towards the long-term aim of implementing eDNA methods into environmental and biomonitoring; promote information exchange on eDNA methods and advance future research efforts both within SYKE and with our national and international partners. Scientific background Well-functioning and intact natural ecosystems are essential for human well-being, provide a variety of ecosystem services and contain a high diversity of organisms. However, human activities such as eutrophication, pollution, land-use or invasive species, are threatening the state and functioning of ecosystems from local to global scale (e.g. Benateau et al. 2019; Reid et al. 2018; Vörösmarty et al. 2010). New molecular techniques in the field and in the laboratory have enabled sampling and identification of much of terrestrial, marine and freshwater biodiversity. These include environmental DNA (eDNA, e.g. Valentini et al. 2016) and bulk-sample DNA metabarcoding approaches (e.g. Elbrecht et al. 2017) and targeted RNA-based methods (e.g. Mäki and Tiirola 2018). The eDNA technique uses DNA that is released from organisms into their environment, from which a signal of organisms’ presence in the system can be obtained. For example, in aquatic ecosystems, eDNA is typically extracted from sediment or filtered water samples (e.g. Deiner et al. 2016), and this approach is distinguished from bulk DNA metabarcoding, where organisms are directly identified from e.g. complete biological monitoring samples (e.g. Elbrecht et al. 2017). Despite the demonstrated potential of environmental and bulk-sample DNA metabarcoding approaches in recent years, there are still significant bottlenecks to their routine use that need to be addressed (e.g. Pawlowski et al. 2020). Methods and implementati on The project is divided into three work packages: WP1 Gathering existing knowledge, identifying knowledge gaps and proposing best practices, WP2 Roadmap to implementation and WP3 eDNA monitoring pilot. Please see more details in the Fig. 1

Self-healing organic coatings based on microcapsules – A patent-based review

2021 ◽  
Vol 04 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Moreira Schlemper ◽  
Sérgio Henrique Pezzin
Keyword(s):  
Corrosion Protection ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Review Article ◽  
The State ◽  
Organic Coatings ◽  
Self Healing ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Healing Agent

: Self-healing coatings are intended to increase long-term durability and reliability and can be enabled by the presence of microcapsules containing a self-healing agent capable of interacting with the matrix and regenerating the system. This review article provides an overview of the state-of-the-art, focusing on the patents published in the field of microcapsule-based self-healing organic coatings, since the early 2000’s. A discussion about coatings for corrosion protection and the different self-healing approaches and mechanisms are also addressed, as well as future challenges and expectations for this kind of coatings.

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