newsbites: Hussein Kamal, memory errors vs. Java security

Summary of and link to what is apparently an UNSCOM interview of Hussein Kamal. In it he stated that Iraq's stocks of biological and chemical agents were destroyed before and after inspection began. Though why not destroy them openly, under UNSCOM? Deniability, presumably, but that was never a likely chance. He also said that technical data and blueprints were kept to enable later production, so based on this we can't rule out a later program designed to evade inspection, such as the bioweapons research trucks the U.S. has described. Still and all, an interesting bit of information for the intelligence agencies to be sitting on these last seven years.

A cute paper from a student of Appel's: "a single-bit error in the Java program’s data space can be exploited to execute arbitrary code with a probability of about 70%". They reportedly ran a live demo (took three trials) with the gooseneck-lamp faulting rig described in the paper.