October 2006 Archives

I'm starting a list with projects that have questionable ethics, which I decided to pompously call "The List of Dubious Research". Feel free to comment if you think these are kosher or if they 3v1l.

We will start with:

http://cs.ucsb.edu/~rsg/projects/smartphones/index.html

"Mobile phone viruses and worms are becoming more common and sophisticated. To better understand the threat posed by these class of malware, we developed a proof-of-concept mobile phone worm for the Symbian OS. Through the development of this proof-of-concept worm we gathered information about what is needed to develop a mobile phone worm, how mobile phone worms spread, and how targets are infected.

...

This research was supported by the Army Research Office, under agreement DAAD19-01-1-0484, and by the National Science Foundation, under grants CCR-0238492 and CCR-0524853."

Thanks to Roel for pointing this out to me.

Two more days left before Microsoft starts pushing IE7 as a security update through Automatic Windows Updates. FF 2.0 is also out but it breaks compatibility with SessionSaver and a few other goodies. A pitty that Microsoft and Mozilla didn't integrate session saving by default; Opera has been working like this for years.