Monday, December 22, 2003

uLocate now shipping http://www.ulocate.com I saw that ulocate now offers a service that displays a cell phone's location on a map in real time over the web. It works with some model cell phones with integral GPS, and costs about $13/mo. U.K. cell phone users (and probably the Japanese) have had this option for awhile, but here in the U.S. we're just getting over having cameras in phones. Although this has it's benevolent uses for tracking down stray Alzeheimer's patients, I suspect the real market is to take the concept of 'trust, but verify' a bit deeper into the parent-child relationship (based on this press release.) 1:48:35 PM      comment []  trackback []

fupids? Fuzzy User Profiling I think the idea of applying statistical methods (think Bayesian spam filters) to implement intrusion detection in desktop computers is overdue. There was a Waltham-based startup called Okena that had been doing this for several years, but I haven't really heard much about the product category since Cisco acquired them. Credit card company fraud detection is a good model for what I'd like to see. "Dear John, I noticed that you ( sent out 300 emails | polled 2000 IP addresses of nearby cable modem users ). Did you mean to do that?" While I acknowledge the possibilities for a Bob- or Clippy-like annoying system, with lots of false positives making your computer useless, I think limiting the nagging to the few types of behaviors that virii take most advantage of would be a workable trade-off. (Again, credit card companies deal with the same trade-off ). A related effort, mynetwatchman - has been doing something like this for a few years now -- its agent runs on your firewall and sends traffic info to a centralized computer. These aggregate logs are polled for suspicious traffic that originates from the same source IP address, and use this to identify compromised computers. What I envision would not have to be similarly rolled up to a central source to be useful, but it would definitely benefit from that type of architecture (rolled up either at the lan or 'net wide level to someone you trust). I hope we can get past the rules- and checksum- based systems we use to fight a reactive battle against virii, in the same way we've evolved our spam filters to, well, evolve themselves at the desktop. I think evolving defenses in real time, and uniquely on each computer, is the only way to escape the failings of the monoculture that we have today. 12:55:39 PM      comment []  trackback []