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Research Projects You Should Know About 56

Posted by samzenpus from the listen-up dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Here is a look at 10 current IT and network research projects, from active cookies to faster wireless LANs to the latest anti-phishing schemes, that could be making their way out of labs and into companies and homes soon." Still no virtual sandwich I see.
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Research Projects You Should Know About More

Research Projects You Should Know About

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  • Huh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkhitman ( 939662 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @10:49PM (#15625523)
    Those are the ones that weren't censored out, I assume. The real list goes something like this: 1- Virtual pr0n 2- More of the above 3- See one and two 4- Identity-theft wizard 5- 1,2,3.

  • Here's a cool one (Score:5, Funny)

    by slashbob22 ( 918040 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:11PM (#15625605)
    "Sharing Wi-Fi with your neighbors" - Sign me up for my Doctorate. I've been doing research into this for years. So far I have determined that it works fairly well.

    I RTFA and I don't believe this is anything new; it is essentially a software based SLA with your neighbors. Frankly, I have been doing this with neighbors for a while now, albeit I do know them well.
    • Sod the neighbors we were selling this in 2003 to whole villages. The local pub would have a sat dish and an omni antennae on the roof, with a rackmount PC to join them together. We put access points with small directional plate antennaes into project boxes from maplin. silicone sealed them up. bolted them to poles. bolted the poles to peoples chimneys and ran cat5 with a power-over-network adapter through the attic into their computer/hub. Bish bash bosh. Requlated connections via the fixed IP addresses o
    • Sharing Wi-Fi with your neighbors

      I may as well.

      After all, they've been sharing theirs with me for months now---thanks to AirSnort and them thinking a good password is their dog's name follwed by a "1".

      • Is that only possible with WEP? I've been using WPA (PSK) with SSID broadcast disabled though I'm not 100% confident that it's crackproof.

        Isn't there another more secure way of doing WPA, involving a separate server to issue keys? I have an unmodified WRT54G (v3) and a 400MHz P3 linux box collecting dust. How can I put them to use to make my wireless connection more secure? I started looking into dd-wrt and I'm interested though I need to read more about it. Ideally I'd like to be able to offer any random

  • Already done... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kihjin ( 866070 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:13PM (#15625615)
    One of the ten research projects is "Human beings that live in computers."

    Interesting idea, but not original: /. started this in 1997.

  • Active cookies? (Score:5, Funny)

    by beavis88 ( 25983 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:17PM (#15625626)
    That one sounds like it's straight out of 1999. Quick, someone register a .com and call the VC firms!

    • Re:Active cookies? (Score:5, Informative)

      by smclean ( 521851 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @12:29AM (#15625818) Homepage
      The active cookie proposal actually didn't seem like such a bad idea. I dug through all the fluff and actually found the whitepaper on that one:

      http://www.ravenwhite.com/files/activecookies--28_ Apr_06.pdf [ravenwhite.com]

      From what I've gathered, basically, they seek to stop the threat of DNS poisoning and passive-snooping man-in-the-middle impersonation of a users' session by tagging cookies in the client's browser with an IP address rather than a domain name, then redirecting users from the DNS-resolved websites to that same IP (only to send their cookies), and ensuring (on the machine pointed to by that IP) that the IP address of the connection which was sent the redirection and the IP address that is now sending back the cookie to match up.

      This does seem like quite a bit of work to go through to stop what are probably relatively uncommon attacks though.

      • Re:Active cookies? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by illuminatedwax ( 537131 ) <stdrange@nOsPAm.alumni.uchicago.edu> on Thursday June 29, 2006 @04:02AM (#15626375) Journal
        So active cookies totally won't work for certain large sites like yahoo or google that have services like akadns which change the resolved IP addresses quite often?

      • Re:Active cookies? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )

        they seek to stop the threat of DNS poisoning and passive-snooping man-in-the-middle impersonation of a users' session by tagging cookies in the client's browser with an IP address rather than a domain name, then redirecting users from the DNS-resolved websites to that same IP (only to send their cookies), and ensuring (on the machine pointed to by that IP) that the IP address of the connection which was sent the redirection and the IP address that is now sending back the cookie to match up.

        OK, so as I

      • Toss Active Cookies (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tqbf ( 59350 )

        I wrote about this [matasano.com] after reading the white paper. I don't think this is a particularly useful idea.

        The key "insight" of the paper is that if you associate cookies with IP addresses, and not domain names, attackers can't spoof DNS to steal cookies. So a server and client have a facsimile of a "trusted channel"; if the server can recover a proper IP-tagged cookie, it knows it's talking to a client and not a man-in-the-middle.

        Apart from the fact that this whole scheme is aimed at a relatively exotic exp

  • Attention Givers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joebert ( 946227 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:18PM (#15625628) Homepage
    Spammers are expected to start mining for familiar e-mail addresses via secretly overtaken "zombie" computers and replicating patterns seen in messages such as common abbreviations, misspellings and signatures.

    There is somthing kinda funny about that.

    Quite a few business people pay top dollar to resorts that pay that much attention to datails about them.

    Maybe the spammers could quit looking for pennies & devolop software that uses their skills for people who actually want it.
    • Sadly, in the end, they'd be making 1/10th of what they currently make by annoying the hell out of us.

      The problem is not that spammers are innately evil bastards, the problem is that their line of work is so profitable. As long as the money is there to be made, we will suffer through the spam.

  • Politicks (Score:4, Funny)

    by crazyjeremy ( 857410 ) * on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:21PM (#15625639) Homepage Journal
    #8 is "Human beings that live in computers".... it says
    Politicians could one day determine the results of elections before they take place
    Isn't that already how it is now? At least in Florida...
  • On the first read, I thought two of these projects had oppositional goals:

    Human beings that live in computers

    Fighting spam zombies from outer space

  • The BIG 3D imaging problem is... (Score:5, Informative)

    by geerbox ( 855203 ) on Wednesday June 28, 2006 @11:59PM (#15625720)

    ...not really bandwidth, but storage.

    I've been lucky to head to a couple of optics conferences, and with the keynote presentations that has been the one surprising thing (to me as a layman) that comes up time after time.

    10Gbps throughput via optics is great; in fact, with the use of optics, the amount of data that can be collected for, say, scanning living tissue, is enormous. Finding a storage mechanism large enough and fast enough to store seemingly infinite amount of information, though, have been the researchers' concern.

    What did they think was a solution for this? You guessed it, optical storage.

  • The key to going where Google isn't... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by b0r1s ( 170449 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @12:01AM (#15625724) Homepage
    Is to explore the content that Google ignores. The next 'breakthrough' in search engines will advance on Google Images and Google Video by being able to discover objects in images and understand text in video.

    Being able to search video [vobbo.com] hosting [youtube.com] sites [google.com] for a phrase without requiring manual entry of the script (if one even exists) would be incredibly useful.

    • Yeah, it would be 'incredibly useful'. You know what else would be 'incredibly useful'? Flying cars. Cold Fusion. Honest Politicians. Seriously, people have been trying to make good object identification from picture systems for as long as there have been pictures stored on computers. It has never worked very well. Hell, if these technologies ever did become available and processor-cheap enough to use for youtube, there would be better things to do with them. Like cars that can tell the difference between
      • Seriously, people have been trying to make good object identification from picture systems for as long as there have been pictures stored on computers. It has never worked very well.

        So, what are you saying people doing research in these fields should do?
    • All google has to do now is query their (osti.org) deep-web search engine and add those results to the current list as suplemental results.

  • Knock knock... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cephei ( 966093 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @12:18AM (#15625784) Homepage
    "Sir, we have a warrent to get any encryption keys you have on your computer. You cleared your cookies in IE? Well that's too bad." -handcuff-

    It gets easier and easier to get arrested.

  • 10 projects, 11 pages, 55 ads (Score:5, Informative)

    by drDugan ( 219551 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @12:59AM (#15625910) Homepage
    title says it all. yet another web presentation optimized for ad presentation.

    yuk.

  • truly pathetic article (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29, 2006 @01:17AM (#15625959)
    Wow, what a TERRIBLE article.

    First, it is piles of advertising and links you have to click through to get to even the very first page.

    Second, the articles are written by marketing droids, it appears. "Human beings that live in computers" is a stupid marketer code for sim city.

    How pathetic a slashdot article -- slashdot for sub-intelligent children...

  • Active Cookies (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29, 2006 @01:20AM (#15625964)
    You can download the Active Cookies whitepaper from the front page of http://www.ravenwhite.com./ [www.ravenwhite.com]

    It appears that Raven White, in association with RSA Laboratories, are proposing an extension to the HTTP cookie scheme whereby a cookie could be associated with an IP address rather than a domain. This would, according to them, allow a site to store a shared secret on the client which could not be obtained by third parties via a "pharming" (DNS/browser location spoofing) attack.

    I'm not going to argue about the merits of the scheme they are proposing - it appears to be relatively functional.

    What I don't understand is why, if what they're proposing requires extensions to the existing behavioural specification, they don't look at a challenge-response style method of cookie acquisition. This would remove the tying of cookie "ownership" to the DNS hierarchy and permit a more robust scheme of sharing information between the client and server.

    A valid anology to the current system might be:
    Me: Hi, my name's Malcolm, can I have the secret documents?
    You: You walked in when I asked for Malcolm - here they are.

    White Raven's scheme:
    Me: Hi, can I have the secret documents?
    You: I recognise you from the last time I spoke to Malcolm - here they are.

    Cookie auth scheme:
    Me: Hi, can I have the secret documents? Here's the password we agreed on earlier.
    You: I recognise that password, you must be the entity I spoke to earlier or an agent thereof. Here's the documents!

    I concede that the IP based cookie distribution system is simpler - but it's not much simpler, it is still open to attacks and it is less flexible. Is there something I'm missing?

    Malcolm
    • Where are the flying cars? No, ones that work and aren't stupid and expsnive?

      I can't say I'm really impressed with this "research" and the active cookies is really lame. Stare at SSH long enough, play with it and you'll discover as I have there's already a much better way to do this that doesn't care about IP's or domains. Plus it has the benefit of actually working. Today. With no mods.

      If innovation isn't dead it's seriously wounded lying in the corner bleeding from both ends.

  • Fighting spam zombies from outer space (Score:3, Funny)

    by MonkeyBot ( 545313 ) on Thursday June 29, 2006 @01:36AM (#15626003)
    Dammit, I read this article and I am VERY concerned. Are the spam zombies actually FROM outer space, or am I supposed to fight them from outer space? If they're FROM outer space, then at least I know where to look (you know, up towards space...I hijack the SETI satellites or something). If I'm just supposed to fight them from outer space, then where the hell do I need to start looking for them? I mean, outer space is a big battleground.
    Can someone please clarify? I can only hope that they choose to face us on our home turf...but then again, spam zombies can't be hard to beat up. They're made of friggin' spam, and they move pretty slow. Furthermore, if we have to fight them FROM outer space, and they're not coming here, why are we fighting them in the first place? Isn't that more of an attack on the spam zombies? I have no beef with the spam zombies. Well, maybe some highly processed beef...
  • What? No research in preventing inadvertant goatse image encounters? Those people have no sense of priorities. Nobody deserves to see those. Not even Gitmo terrorists.
  • to get it off the frontpage or Slashdot altogether, please let me know.
  • Oh my god that article title totally gave me /.-wood.

    Can you do a conjunction with abbreviations?
  • With all the network research out there that is actually groundbreaking and new, why did they choose to write about spam and phishing? They are merely proposing solutions to minor inconveniences or slight modifications to existing technology. Less catchy titles, more innovation please.
  • I don't know about you, but this list of projects is kind of... borning.

    Where is the new and exciting stuff?
  • I was reading through and the one project that stuck out was the emulation of people... Uhh isn't that the Sims?

    Another question, it isn't a society until they create artificial politicians and artificial traffic jams to artificial dissatisfying jobs with artificial undersized paychecks. Then we get to the artificial trade agreements that give those artificial jobs away to artificial third world countries and then they need to code in artificial welfare and artificial unemployment and artificial utility sh

  • ads (Score:2)

    by ryen ( 684684 )
    Can we get some more ads on those pages please? The 10-page/50-ads-per-page clickthru marathon isn't grabbing my attention enough.
    lame.

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