I am currently attending CodeCon 2006 in San Francisco. Interesting talks, as usual. Really atrocious folding chairs that look OK at first glance, but then you sit on them for an hour and realize everything down there is numb.

Three talks on Friday about fighting Malware/Spyware/Phishing. The first two, on Daylight Fraud Prevention and SiteAdvisor had in common that they were about commercial offerings and did not include any code. TRUMAN, The Reusable Unknown Malware Analysis Net, is available under the GPL.

SiteAdvisor combines automated analysis of potentially malicious websites with “a bunch of guys in India??? to produce a rating of the malice these sites wreak on the user’s computer. They put a red/green status indicator in the browser status bar, and inject red and
green icons in Google search result pages. This is pretty interesting and I’d like to see where this goes. The presenter seems to have a good grasp of the fact that they don’t know all the consequences of offering this service on a large scale, how it will be abused etc. Watch that
space.

The other two talks on Friday were about the P2P space: VidTorrent is a P2P streaming application out of the MIT Media Lab. Finally, I think Localhost essentially slaps a file system onto BitTorrent.

The presentations this year seem to have a noticable practical slant. These are actual products that are shipping or close to shipping, not vague unpractical ideas hatched in someone’s basement and destined to never venture beyond.