Today I learned that hagiography is the study of saints.

Also, Gravity's Rainbow is exceedingly well-written and perplexing to peruse without a Google page handy. I should stop buying so many books.

I briefly interviewed Georgia Weidman this afternoon; she's a security nerd who recently presented her Android botnet at ShmooCon 2011, the latest in a long line of hacker-centric security conferences held annually in D.C. I'll be writing up our interview this weekend for a Privacy Watch column so I won't bore you with the details here (plus I'm itching to dig back into Alpha Protocol, but what's so interesting about her work is that she's developed one of the first Android botnets that communicates via SMS instead of IP. This is important because SMS messaging places much less strain on the battery than constantly checking in with the C&C via your Android smartphone's modem, and her code operates within the base OS beneath the application layer so the user has no idea he or she has been infected.

Essentially, if Georgia can get you to download a bot builder on your phone (either packaged inside a cool-looking app or from a third-party website) she can build a malicious program in your phone that can access all the data going in or out of your phone and communicate with everyone in your contact list without you ever having a clue. It's pretty cool shit.