This year Gordon Mohr had the devious idea to do preemtive reviews of CodeCon presentations. I’ll probably link to his entries and have less to say here than last year.

Daylight Fraud Prevention. I missed most of this presentation but it seems they have a set of non-open source Apache modules each of which could make phishers and malware creators work slightly harder.

SiteAdvisor. Tests a website’s evilness by downloading and running software offered by the site and filling out forms requesting an email address on the site. If virtual Windows machine running downloaded software becomes infected or email address set up for test is inundated with spam the site is considered evil. This testing is mostly automated and expensive (many Windows licenses). Great idea, surprising it is new (to me). I wonder how accurate evil readings one could obtain at much lower cost by calculating a “SpamRank” for sites based on links found in email classified as spam and links found on pages linked to in spams? (A paper has already taken the name SpamRank, though at a five second glance it looks to propose tweaks to make PageRank more spam-resistant rather than trying to measure evil.) Fortunately SiteAdvisor says that both bitzi.com and creativecommons.org are safe to use. SiteAdvisor’s data is available for use under the most restrictive Creative Commons license — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5.

VidTorrent/Peers. Streaming joke. Peers, described as a “toolkit for P2P programming with continuation passing style” I gather works syntactically as a Python code preprocessor, could be interesting. I wish they had compared Peers to other P2P toolkits, e.g., JXTA.

Localhost. A global directory shared with a modified version of the Azureus BitTorrent client. I tried about a month ago. Performance was somewhere between abysmal and nonexistent. BitTorrent is fantastic for large popular files. I’ll be surprised if localhost’s performance, which depends on transferring small XML files, ever reaches mediocrity. They’re definitely going away from BitTorrent’s strengths by uploading websites into the global directory as lots of small files (I gather). The idea of a global directory is interesting, though tags seem a more fruitful navigation method than localhost’s hierarchy.

Truman. A “sandnet” for investigating suspected malware in. Faux services (e.g., DNS, websites) can be scripted to elicit the suspected malware’s behavior, and more.