I agree. But these cloud services are so new, that people are not aware of the risks they are taking. They don't realize the needs they actually have. Since the customers don't know their needs, neither do the service providers. But if you want to stay ahead of the curve, I think you should as a consumer, request reliable service providers, or self host. As a service provider you should provide reliable services. At least, that is where I think we are heading.
Now I feel bad, maybe I should have voiced it in a way that sounded less sure. I base it on two things. 1. Similar genes do similar things in different species. 2. There are an incredible amount of possible proteins.
Very cool idea! I think you should think carefully about the use cases.
Is it for someone who wants to take a gene from one organism, move it to another and then order that organism?
Is it for people wanting to manually tweak genes to improve efficiency, slightly change function? What kinds of manual tweaks?
Is it for someone who wants to understand how an organism works?
When /I/ look at it, I think it could benefit from being more abstract, but I am not your target audience, so take this with a grain of salt. I don't think looking at individual base pairs is useful. Amino acids might be, but are still too emphasized in the interface. The most abstract view, showing genes in order is not abstract enough. I want to see genes grouped by function (e.g. reproductory system, energy production, acidity regulation etc). For each gene I want to see:
a) High level description of function (already there, but in a single line text field. Give more screen estate).
b) What activates the gene? i) Directly (e.g high concentration of Na+) ii) Indirectly (e.g. genes a, b, c) iii) Very Indirectly (environmental stress)
c) As exact specification as possible of what happens when it is activated: i) What does it activate in turn? ii) What does it catalyze?
My prediction: We can find a subset of proteins such that they do not interfere with each other, and still large enough that they can perform useful functions.
It is possible to write threaded software in a way that everything interacts with everything and it is almost impossible to make out how anything works. That's why we don't. The halting problem never stopped us from writing software.
No it's incorrect. Compare "these truths... that all men are created equal, (...)" with "these kittens... that all kittens are created hungry". The that in the second sentence is wrong.
I don't now much about Flame, but I would assume that messages are sent using public-key cryptography in such a way that they can't be spoofed. Maybe a replay attack would be possible though.
In the best of worlds, developers could make an effort not to do anything shady, like self modifying code, dll-injection etc, making heuristics complaining about such behaviours viable.
Maybe I misunderstood how the xml/xslt-paradigm works, but my idea was that you have a serverside api serving up raw data, and the display is controlled by some code on the clientside that can be easily customised. So the server could serve up something like
<shoe>
<images>
<image>foo.com/x.jpg</image>
<image>foo.com/y.jpg</image>
</images>
<description>This shoe is very advanced bla bla bla</description>
<fancyintroanimation>foo.com/intro1.swf</fancyintroanimation>
</shoe>
<shoe>
....
and the client could use the default xslt if they were happy with that, and a custom otherwise.
I know for a fact that the average bad guy does this. Google "fud crypter", they are programs that take malware and makes it Fully UnDetectable by encrypting it, similar to how upx does it. Even skiddies use them.