There’s a security hole (which has now been fixed) in the Google desktop search tool.
The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what computer scientists call a composition flaw – a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact. “When you put them together, out jumps a security flaw,” said Dan Wallach, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice in Houston, who, with two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and Seth Nielson, discovered the flaw last month. “These are subtle problems, and it takes a lot of experience to ferret out this kind of flaw,” Professor Wallach said.
Just so you know that Dan isn’t only about watchdogging electronic voting mishaps.