Pinning Down the Spread of Cell Phone Viruses 53
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.)
This is why... (Score:5, Funny)
... I use the old fashioned method of communication [textually.org].
Phase transistion (Score:4, Funny)
Wouldn't reversing polarity on the flux capacitor and diverting all power to the medical/av deflector prevent the spread of a virus?
Re:Phase transistion (Score:5, Funny)