Jefferson's Wheel

Congratulations to Adrienne Felt (BSCS 2008, now a PhD student at Berkeley) who won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! The award provides 3 years of funding along with lots of prestige and glory.

Four other UVa students one NSF Graduate fellowships in Computer Science this year (two of whom are BACS students):

• Sara Alspaugh, BACS 2009
• Erika Chin, BSCS 2007 (now at Berkeley)
• Linda Yang Liu, BS Biology 2008 (now at Stanford doing bioinformatics)
• Rachel Miller, BACS 2009

No other school had 5 of its graduates win CS NSF Graduate fellowships — Princeton was second with 4, followed by MIT and UC Berkeley with 3 each.

I found two of our former undergraduate researchers at a seminar at Dagstuhl (Germany) on Web Application Security.

Photo by Anh Nguyen-Tuong

Salvatore Guarnieri (UVa BS 2006, left in the picture) is now a PhD student at the University of Washington. He presented his work on (mostly) statically analyzing JavaScript that he did as an intern at MSR.

William G. J. Halfond (UVa BS 2002, right in the picture) is finishing a PhD at Georgia Tech this year. He presented his work on automatically generating inputs for web application penetration testing.

John Wilander has been blogging the workshop: Dagstuhl Seminar Final (or, if you can’t read Swedish try Google’s translation).

On his recent visit to England, President Obama presented the Queen with an iPod loaded with showtunes. Although one might question the diplomatic and musical judgment behind such a gift, it also raises some interesting questions about copyright law and computer security.

The EFF has an interesting article about the copyright issues: iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England, Fred von Lohmann, 2 April 2009. It starts,

President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England’s Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate the law when he did so?

You know your copyright laws are broken when there is no easy answer to this question.

The other question this raises is how effective of a malware vector this is when the Queen attaches the iPod to her PC (okay, the Queen probably runs ubuntu). I don’t know if there are any known vulnerabilities in the iPod/iTunes interface, but its a wide enough interface that it would be very unsurprising if there are ways to get malware from an iPod to a host machine. Perhaps, this is all part of a clever strategy to make heads of less friendly states than the Queen expect to receive electronic gadgets from our President and connect them to their systems.