Ah, the groundbreaking revelation that combining pictures and words in programming is somehow new and exciting đ€Šââïž. Meanwhile, scientists at arXiv redefine how to churn out jargon-filled PDFs faster than you can say "Simons Foundation" đ.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15855 #programminginnovation #arXivresearch #jargonbusters #SimonsFoundation #techhumor #HackerNews #ngated
Mixing Visual and Textual Code
The dominant programming languages support nothing but linear text to express domain-specific geometric ideas. What is needed are hybrid languages that allow developers to create visual syntactic constructs so that they can express their ideas with a mix of textual and visual syntax tailored to an application domain. This mix must put the two kinds of syntax on equal footing and, just as importantly, the extended language must not disrupt a programmer's typical workflow. This means that any new visual syntax should be a proper language extension that is composable with other language features. Furthermore, the extensions should also preserve static reasoning about the program. This paper presents Hybrid ClojureScript the first such hybrid programming language. Hybrid ClojureScript allows programmers to add visual interactive syntax and to embed instances of this syntax within a program's text. An enhanced hybrid IDE can then display these embedded instances as mini-GUIs that programmers interact with, while other IDEs will show a textual representation of the syntax. The paper argues the necessity of such an extensibility mechanism, demonstrates the adoptability of the design, and discusses what might be needed to use the design in other languages.
Every Keystroke You Make: A Tech-Law Measurement and Analysis of Event Listeners for Wiretapping
The privacy community has a long track record of investigating emerging types of web tracking techniques. Recent work has focused on compliance of web trackers with new privacy laws such as Europe's GDPR and California's CCPA. Despite the growing body of research documenting widespread lack of compliance with new privacy laws, there is a lack of robust enforcement. Different from prior work, we conduct a tech-law analysis to map decades-old U.S. laws about interception of electronic communications--so-called wiretapping--to web tracking. Bridging the tech-law gap for older wiretapping laws is important and timely because, in cases where legal harm to privacy is proven, they can provide statutory private right of action, are at the forefront of recent privacy enforcement, and could ultimately lead to a meaningful change in the web tracking landscape.
In this paper, we focus on a particularly invasive tracking technique: the use of JavaScript event listeners by third-party trackers for real-time keystroke interception on websites. We use an instrumented web browser to crawl a sample of the top-million websites to investigate the use of event listeners that aligns with the criteria for wiretapping, according to U.S. wiretapping law at the federal level and in California. We find evidence that 38.52% websites installed third-party event listeners to intercept keystrokes, and that at least 3.18% websites transmitted intercepted information to a third-party server, which aligns with the criteria for wiretapping. We further find evidence that the intercepted information such as email addresses typed into form fields are used for unsolicited email marketing. Beyond our work that maps the intersection between technical measurement and U.S. wiretapping law, additional future legal research is required to determine when the wiretapping observed in our paper passes the threshold for illegality.
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