Privacy seems to be the Achilles’ heel of today’s web. Most web services make continuous efforts to track their users and to obtain as much personal information as they can from the things they search, the sites they visit, the people they contact, and the products they buy. This information is mostly used for commercial purposes, which go far beyond targeted advertising. Although many users are already aware of the privacy risks involved in the use of internet services, the particular methods and technologies used for tracking them are much less known. In this survey, we review the existing literature on the methods used by web services to track the users online as well as their purposes, implications, and possible user’s defenses. We present five main groups of methods used for user tracking, which are based on sessions, client storage, client cache, fingerprinting, and other approaches. A special focus is placed on mechanisms that use web caches, operational caches, and fingerprinting, as they are usually very rich in terms of using various creative methodologies. We also show how the users can be identified on the web and associated with their real names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, or even street addresses. We show why tracking is being used and its possible implications for the users. For each of the tracking methods, we present possible defenses. Some of them are specific to a particular tracking approach, while others are more universal (block more than one threat). Finally, we present the future trends in user tracking and show that they can potentially pose significant threats to the users’ privacy.

Light-field imaging and holographic imaging are currently the two mostly investigated 3-D imaging technologies because of their potentials to create the viewing environment conforming to a natural viewing condition. The basic optical geometries for image display in these imaging are not different from that of integral photography. The images in the two type of imaging are a set of different view images. These images are arranged as a 2-D point image array, and each point image is expanded with a certain angle to form a viewing zone. The differences between the two types of imaging are the number of point images in the array and the physical entities forming the images. Holographic imaging has many more point images than light-field imaging, and each image in the array consists of coherent right rays from different positions of an object. In light-field imaging, an array of pixels represents a direction view of the object. Despite these differences, they share the same goal of providing a continuous parallax to viewers and require display panels of almost the same characteristics. It is expected that in the future these two imaging techniques will be integrated into the same flat panel along with the plane image.

In the fields of networked virtual environments we meet the limitation of real-time event processing in the shared virtual workspace for massively and globally participated users on the internet. In this paper, we design an architecture of event servers that supports light-weight event messaging and guarantees real-time event processing for distributed virtual environments on the internet with large scale workspace and multi-participants. In the design concept of event servers we focus on the event server components in the part of distributed virtual environments. Using the stand alone event server on the internet we maintain the information of multiple user connections and the shared states information for real-time event management. The event server component will be able to apply the distributed virtual workspace server to the scalable server architecture for maintaining the consistency of shared workspace and real-time updating of shared state information in the virtual worlds.