Ten members of the spy ring were found guilty last week in New York and deported.  They had admitted carrying coded messages and communicating with Russian officials.

So what would this mean for Microsoft?  Probably nothing to be honest as the Redmond giant will already be battling with corporate intrigue and a Russian spy wouldn’t have been able to get any information out of the company that would have been of use to the Russian government.

This is despite the fact that the alleged spy would have had access to Windows and Office source code and, hypothetically, access to information on how to use back doors with these products to infiltrate US Government computers running Microsoft’s products.

In reality however the continued reluctance of Microsoft to even hand over sensitive Bitlocker data to their own government highlights just how secret this all is, so a software tester would be unlikely to have ever been able to get their hands on anything juicy.

Still, a spy story is a spy story and this one rumbles on.  Perhaps the 13th spy was working for Apple and was secretly the man who left the iPhone 4 prototype in a bar… who knows.

The service displays keyword trends and examples like iPhone, Obama or Superbowl that can be clicked on to perform the search as well. Spy will search its index for occurrences of the entered or clicked on keyword. It uses Ajax to update the search screen automatically. Search results are ordered by relevance.

The service makes use of two display modes. Poster mode makes use of speech bubbles displaying user avatars and the messages.

While Spy is not the most thorough search engine out there it can be used for several purposes. It can be used to read reactions on blog posts or follow conversations about recent events.

Words are chosen by probability and suggest alternatives which more often than not make more sense than the first word. This introduces a new technique to spy on users without having to actually access the computer at all, all that is needed is a good view of the hands and the measure of the keyboard.

The second spy tech could come right out of the latest James Bond movie. The researchers at Saarland University managed to write a computer algorithm that is capable of interpreting reflections of the computer screen on objects. The quality of the telescope plays an important role, a normal $500 telescope was able to read 12 point fonts of a reflection that was 5 meters away from the computer and 198 point fonts from a distance of ten meters.

A more powerful Dobson telescope for $27500 was able to yield the same results from a maximum distance of 30 meters. Other tests allowed the researchers to view the monitor from a white wall that was 2 meters away from the computer screen.

The best way to defeat the techniques ? Don’t access a computer in public, always close the curtains when working with your computer and make sure no cameras are installed in the room with a computer.