Mood-tracking apps already exist but the team from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory think this is the first time that user-input data and phone information sources have been combined.
By entering certain strings of text into userinput boxes on Web sites, cybercriminals are able to confuse their commands with data in a site's Structured Query Language (SQL) database and gain control of it, says Grossman.
Just as homomorphic encryption allows people to aggregate two functions without knowing the original input, new data mining technologies may allow meaningful statistical results without access to original raw userdata.
We hesitate to bring up anything to do with the ongoing debacle that is SPOT, but the guys over at Microsoft's most left-of-center division helped popularize the concept of "glanceable" information -- ubiquitous, high-demand data (weather reports, for instance) that can be gleaned quickly and with little or no userinput.