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ItsIllak writes
"The BBC are reporting that PayPal is the latest company to abandon WikiLeaks. The list now includes their DNS providers (EveryDNS) and their hosts (Amazon). PayPal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company, as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices."
Adds reader jg21:
"As open source freedom fighter Simon Phipps writes in his ComputerWorldUK blog, behavior like this by Amazon and Tableau [and now PayPal] 'informs us as customers of web services and cloud computing services that we are never safe from intentional outages when the business interests of our host are challenged.'"
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walrabbit writes
"Wang et al (2009) (from Albert-László Barabási's lab) modeled the spread of mobile phone viruses based on anonymised call and text logs of 6.2 million customers spread over 10,000 towers. Their simulations shows that the spread is dependent on the market share of a particular handset, human mobility and mode of spread: bluetooth or MMS or hybrid. 'We find that while Bluetooth viruses can
reach all susceptible handsets with time, they spread slowly due to human mobility, offering ample
opportunities to deploy antiviral software. In contrast, viruses utilizing multimedia messaging services could
infect all users in hours, but currently a phase transition on the underlying call graph limits them to only a small
fraction of the susceptible users. These results explain the lack of a major mobile virus breakout so far and predict
that once a mobile operating system's market share reaches the phase transition point, viruses will pose a
serious threat to mobile communications.' You can read the full text (PDF) and supporting online information (PDF) (with interesting modelling data and diagrams)."
(Also
summed up in a short article at CBC.)
