News Summary for September 12th by Stefan Saroiu. 1. "Putting Tech to Work, on the Cheap". Summary: ======== FreeConferenceCall.com offers free conference calls for up to 99 people. They give you a phone number where callers call to join the conference. They claim they use unused portions of POTS to route their calls. They sign up different telcos which in turn make money from their users calling long-distance into the FreeConferenceCall's number to join conferences. Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research: ========================================== - Design a scalable Internet system for VoIP supporting conference calls. (Skype's conference calls support up to 5 people only.) 2. "The Wide, World of Genetic Testing" Summary: ======== Huge grown in genetic testing online. User visits Web page, signs up to buy a genetic kit, it gets shipped home, users takes saliva samples, ships it back and finds out results later. The article starts with a motivating example: a recent study shows that people are at an increase of hearth attack if drinking coffee only if they have a certain gene. Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research: ========================================= The important of online privacy will grow in the future. Right now, SSL doesn't protect users from disclosing what websites they visit. A better alternative to SSL is to use Tor (onion-routing). However, recent news report that German police has broke-in and confiscated several Tor servers whose logs can reveal users' identities. - Come up with a way to extend SSL so that users are protected from disclosing what websites they visit (perhaps a combination between Tor and SSL.) 3. "Speed of Spread Flu is Linked to Airline Travel". Summary: ======= Research study has shown: - inverse correlation between speed of spread of influenza and airline travel. Less people travel, slower the influenza spreads. - inverse correlation between peak number of influenza infections and airline travel - domestic airline travel is the best predictor of the influenza speed. Better than average temperature of strain of virus. - Recommendation: if anti-viral stockpile is low, restrict travel on Thanksgiving. Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research: ========================================= A recent project in our department has looked at how computer worms spread over Bluetooth radios from one cell-phone to another. We found that the spread of Bluetooth worms is likely to be similar to the spread of the influenza virus. - Project idea: incorporate epidemiology spread models of influenza to understand, propose models of Bluetooth worm infections. Higher-level question: - How can we use the epidemiologists' understanding of viral propagation in the context of computer worm propagation for low-range radios?