Temporal Complex Network Measures for Mobile Malware Containment
Picture the scene: you've bought a shiny new smartphone and have been customising it all weekend by installing various apps from the app store, however the following week you encounter a run of bad luck...
...first your house is burgled when you're at work, next your credit card is maxed out, your friends have been receiving spam text messages from you and to top it off, weeks later, some of your colleagues have had the same experience; what is going on?
Little beknown to you, within one of these seemingly innocuous apps lurks a piece of mobile malware (mobware) which has access to a wealth of personal information which an attacker can access remotely. Â
A Data Center in every Car
There's some people who have pointed out that electric cars will be dotted about our landscapes soon at charging piints (outside work, home, shops). This represents a great way to sink electricity that is being generated nearby (e.g. from microgenerators on houses) which would otherwise be wasted in long haul transmission or simply thrown away (if there's no easy affordable/deployable way to reverse the stream and send a lot of power up the electricity distribution network). THen when local demand picks up again (opposite end of the day) you just pull the power from the cars - Typical figures for the uk suggest 30% of electricty generated could be stored at any time, whch is a big change from current (pun intended) architectures.
But why not go one more step and distribute data centers to every car? then we could serve the world from the stored power when local data/processing demands are high. One should build a high speed wireless link (e.g. new wireless HDMI link can do 5-10Gbps) into every charging point, and put a petabyte of storage and a few terahz of multicore in each new car. That'd work well - 20M cars in the UK would dwarf what current data centers have and would have zero heat dissipation problems...
Safety in “numbers”?
Two projects wrapped up recently with highly successful final reviews in the European Commission's process - one is Trilogy, which we were tangentially involved in and mainly features some nifty work on multipath (TCP and IP).
The other was SocialNets which we were very involved in - what I wanted to post is that the partner at Eurecom in that project has now released a privacy preserving social networking tool, called safebook - viz:
http://www.safebook.us/home.html