Risky Business #135 -- Climategate and hacking scientists

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This week's show is brought to you by the fine folks at Sophos.

This week we're looking at what the mainstream media is calling "climategate".

As world leaders meet in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a coordinated response to global warming, the blogosphere and indeed the mainstream press are all in a tizz over thousands of hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia.

In all 13 years of e-mails were stolen from the CRU and leaked online, with some of the e-mails appearing to show scientists manipulating data to exaggerate warming. For their part, scientists say those e-mails have been taken out of context.

Either way, climategate has given climate sceptics a boost leading into Copenhagen, and as you'll hear, the scandal has certainly muddied the climate agenda at a critical time.

So we'll be chatting with scientist and climate change expert Professor Ian Enting from the University of Melbourne about climategate and its impact on the scientific community.

We'll also be having a chinwag with Paul Craig of Security-Assessment.com in New Zealand. Paul has done a whole bunch of research into hacking scientific software -- stuff like fluid dynamics packages, circuit modelling software and even chemistry modelling software. As it turns out, not many people have looked for bugs in this stuff, and they're everywhere. So it's our "hacking scientists" special edition of Risky Business this week.

Paul Ducklin will also be along later in the show for this week's sponsor interview. We'll be talking about that research into English language shellcode.

And Adam Boileau is this week's news guest!