Researchers track the trackers through 20 years of the archived web

Everywhere you go on the web, trackers are working to reconstruct your every move. But who tracks the trackers? That’s just what researchers at the University of Washington are doing, with purpose-built tools and liberal use of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The Tracking Excavator project is an effort to quantify a trend we all have more or less accepted as axiomatic: as the web has grown, third-party trackers, from advertisers to analytics, have grown with it. It’s one thing to accept something as true, however, and another to show it and analyze it.

“Until now, we didn’t have the tools to understand how these approaches have changed since the earliest days of the web,” said Tadayoshi Kohno, from UW’s Security and Privacy Laboratory, in a news release. “Now we can see how the quantity and variety of trackers has grown, and how some approaches have fallen out of favor while others are on the rise.”

Not that it was easy. The team, led by grad students Adam Lerner and Anna Kornfeld Simpson, was working with a highly incomplete data set, much like the fossil record. Their primary source was the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. But that tool, for all its usefulness, was designed for savingcontent, like blog posts — not metadata or offsite code and scripts.

“We had to develop techniques to extract tracking information from the archive,” said Kornfel Simpson. “For example, we collected tracking cookies from archived HTTP headers and Javascript and then simulated the browser’s cookie storage behaviors to detect tracking behavior.”

No shortcuts there — it took the team a year to sort through 20 years of records, starting in 1996. But the resulting tools and dataset are original and valuable.

The study was presented at the USENIX conference in Austin, and represents a sort of first pass at the data; deeper analysis is forthcoming. Among the facts they did discover is that the amount of third-party tracking happening on the average website has increased by a factor of four. That is to say that, in 1996, there was maybe one tracker on most websites, and now there are generally at least four.

Individual trackers cover a larger part of the web, as well: no longer will an advertiser or analytics company be found only in a thin cross-section of sites. Instead, the biggest ones are now present on 20 to 30 percent of all sites tested. The trackers themselves have become more complex, watching and correlating many types of behaviors across many sites.

These results do sound intuitively true, but the dataset collected by the team makes it possible not just to confirm them, but to graph them over time and link them to other developments with changes observed in it. Did ad-blockers make a dent or spur growth? Did improving web standards change the way trackers worked? What about changes in consumer spending and the economy?

The “Tracking Excavator” the researchers built to automate some of the tracker-tracking process isn’t available for download yet, but they plan to release it soon. In the meantime, you can browse through the data they collected and perform your own analysis, if you dare.

Scientists in Singapore grow functioning 'mini' midbrain tissue

SINGAPORE — Scientists in Singapore claim to have successfully grown functioning midbrain tissue — a feat that may bring researchers a step closer to finding a cure for brain diseases like Parkinson's disease.

The group of researchers from the A*Star Genome Institute of Singapore, the Duke-NUS Medical School and the National Neuroscience Institute announced their findings from their two-year research effort to the press on Thursday.

While other researchers have previously managed to grow brain tissue in a lab, the Singapore team says their "eureka moment" came when they found the midbrain tissue had created neuromelanin, a pigment found in the human midbrain.

The brain organoid in a small jar, with black pigment visible.

IMAGE: VICTORIA HO/MASHABLE

The midbrain is located in the brain stem, and is the part of the brain responsible for controlling auditory, eye movement and body movement.

The brain of a Parkinson's disease sufferer shows depleted levels of neuromelanin, which has been associated with protecting cells from dying. With the functioning midbrain tissue, the researchers hope it can provide new testing ground for possible cures for the disease.

IMAGE: BRUCEBLAUS/WIKIMEDIA

Professor Ng Huck Hui, the Genome Institute's executive director, said the midbrain tissue had been grown from pluripotent cells — stem cells that can be programmed to become any tissue. The scientists had established a method of turning the cells into midbrain tissue, and noticed the neuromelanin in the "mini brains" that they had grown.

"We didn't expect to find the black pigment there," he said, adding that the discovery opens the path for more targeted, individual cures. 

Microscopic view of the tissue showing the black pigment.

IMAGE: VICTORIA HO/MASHABLE

Theoretically, doctors could grow many mini brain replicas from skin cells taken from a Parkinson's patient, allowing specific testing and treatment to be done for the individual, said Professor Ng.

Each brain organoid is just 2-3mm in size, and took just over a month to grow. The tissue's neurons are "live and firing," the team said.

According to the Singapore Ministry of Health, three in every 1,000 Singaporeans over the age of 50 suffer from Parkinson's disease.

New robot bee may soon be a spy's secret weapon

People fear robots are becoming too human, but, in reality, robots are becoming a little more bug-like every day.

A team of Harvard University researchers proved this axiom when they found the solution to extending tiny robot flight is by mimicking the way small bugs alight on walls and ceilings.

The applications for such a robot are wide-ranging, from small spying devices that can conduct surveillance missions while suspended from a ceiling to research drones that can allow scientists to take measurements where no other sensors can physically go.

For the typical drone, hovering can take just as much energy as flying. As long as the robot is in the air, it’s expending energy and running down its small battery capacity. 

What researchers discovered, as reported in a new study published Thursday in the journalScience, is that tiny robots could save considerable energy if they simply landed and perched between jaunts, the way a bee or butterfly might land on the ceiling before taking off again.

The robo-bee making its approach, landing and then perching.

IMAGE: CARLA SCHAFFER / AAAS

While the scientists toyed with a number of different surface adhesion possibilities, the team finally settled on a unique combination of electrostatic material and foam to create a new kind of built-in robot landing pad. 

A bee-inspired robot

The team built a bee-inspired micro aerial vehicle (MAV) robot and attached an electrostatic patch consisting of a carbon-fiber base, copper electrodes and a polyamide coating. It sits on a small foam cylinder. 

When charged, the electrostatic plate can attach itself to almost any surface (wood, glass, organic material) that responds to static electricity (yes, the same stuff you build up when you rub a balloon on a wall or your feet on the carpet).

The chosen technology would work equally well on the ground or ceiling, said Robert Wood, a co-author of the new study, in an email to Mashable. 

“But we felt that perching on an overhang is more challenging since you have to have an adhesive force to overcome gravity.”

The foam is there to help cushion the landing. Without it, the tiny robot — it has just a 3-centimeter wingspan — might just bounce off the surface. 

By using electrostatic energy, the researchers significantly broadened the kinds of materials and situations in which the robot can land and then take off again. 

During testing, the robot was tethered to a power source at all times, allowing researchers to remotely power the electro-static plate, and to circuitry that provided some pre-programmed flight control behaviors (hover, approach target, detach and hover).

To design their robot landings, researchers took a cue from how bees perch, observing how they control their own velocity and slow down and hover before landing softly.

Perching and flying again

The resulting perch solution allows the robot to slow down until it’s hovering right underneath the landing spot — perhaps a leaf — and to rise up slowly until it's touching the surface. 

Then the researchers powered up the electrostatic patch, which creates a bind strong enough to hold the robot in place, even after it powers down its flight motor.

A closer look at how researchers built and controlled the robot with bee-like flight and landing capabilities.

IMAGE: AAAS

The robot can remain perched for as long as the patch is powered up. However, “it’s worth noting that the power for adhesion is several orders of magnitude lower than the power required for flight... highlighting one of the benefits of this approach,” Wood said.

However, the use of static electricity to hold the robot in place produces some significant weight constraints. According to Wood, a Harvard professor who founded the school's microrobotics laboratory, the amount of weight the patch can support is proportional to the area of the patch. 

“But as size is reduced, surface area (thus adhesion) increases faster than volume (thus weight)," Wood said. "What this means is that this sort of adhesive mechanism is quite appropriate for small-scale systems." 

Electrostatic adhesion is not new to robotics. 

Study co-author Moritz Alexander Graule said it's a frequent target for climbing robot research, but it proved especially attractive for this project because the adhesion can be turned on and off without the need for moving parts. It also meant the robot-bee could land, perch and take off without applying any force to the landing surface.

What's next?

Why build a robot that can fly, land and take off like a bug? Because it can do things people can’t do, and could become a critical component in search and rescue operations.

According to Wood, it could be useful in “basically any situation where you want to have low cost and distributed sensing [that] would be too difficult or too dangerous for a human."

It might also have some pretty handy surveillance applications. 

A robot bug that can land when no one is around and then stay quietly attached to the ceiling, without the need for audible motors, and that can wait to take off until no one is around, could be quite a boon for would-be spies.

Obviously, this is still a research project with numerous challenges ahead of it, most notably the need to remove the tether wires and integrate power and flight control-technology on the tiny robot. 

This work alone could take a few years, and even then these robot bugs won’t be ready to swarm. Wood said that in five-to-10 years “they could be ready for more widespread development and use.”

That’s kind of a buzzkill.