Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker

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What Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker actually does

Studies how fingerprints change over time and how long a browser stays linkable across those changes, which is a different and more practically important question than how unique it is at one instant.

What can and cannot be measured about Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker

This entry has no repository, so none of the usual repository fields exist for it — no push date, no release tag, no archive flag, no licence identifier. Its state comes from one measurement only: the register requested the address and recorded what came back. Anything in the range 200 to 399 makes a non-repository entry ACTIVE, and that clause is the one the first edition of the rubric did not have at all, which is why paper entries carried no state under it.

Read that for exactly what it is. It says the thing is reachable. It does not say the paper is current, because no HTTP status can carry that. Where a stronger signal exists — a repository, a version, a dated revision — this register prefers it, and where one does not, it prints the weaker signal and names it as weak rather than dressing it up.

Where Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker sits in this catalogue

Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker is filed in section 05, academic papers & technical writeups, whose scope is this: The peer-reviewed and specification-grade literature this field is built on, preferring open mirrors over publishers that block automated clients. An entry sits in exactly one section here. Where a project could defensibly go in two, it is placed where a reader would look for it first rather than where it fits most tidily, and that is an editorial decision rather than a measured one.

Filed beside it in the same section: Laperdrix et al. — Beauty and the Beast (ACTIVE), Iqbal et al. — Fingerprinting the Fingerprinters (ACTIVE), Vastel et al. — FP-Scanner (ACTIVE). Comparing an entry against its own section-mates is more informative than comparing it against the catalogue as a whole, because everything in a section is answering roughly the same question and the differences left over are the ones that matter.

There is no licence field, because there is no source to licence — this is a paper rather than a code repository. It is grouped instead with every other entry the rubric marks ACTIVE, which is the axis that actually distinguishes entries of this kind from one another.

What to settle before you adopt Vastel et al. — FP-Stalker

Evolution and linkability are what matter when you keep a profile alive for months, which is the actual use case for most of this catalogue. A profile that is unique today and differently unique next week may still be one profile to an observer.