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Pinning Down the Spread of Cell Phone Viruses

Posted by timothy on from the promiscuous-mode dept.

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.)

3 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Wear protection! by Samschnooks · · Score: 2, Informative
    Here! Wear this!

    And don't share your phone promiscuously!

    Abstinence is the way - don't use cell phones!

    1. Re:Wear protection! by A12m0v · · Score: 2, Informative

      or have a kill switch, disable background processes and practice full control of the software distribution

      --
      GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  2. Lesson Du Jour... by DavidShor · · Score: 2, Informative
    This is a peeve of mine, a consequence of spending too long being tested on french grammar.

    It's "n'est-ce pas?".

    Word for word, that is "is it not?". Figuratively, it's the equivalent of "No?". The "ce", or "it", is usually silent.