Well, my first impression on reading about this was, basically, "OK, so if somebody manages an exploit which gives them total control of the computer, they can use it to... have total control of the computer. This is news?"

If (that's a big if) this can be made practical, the fact that it depends on you already owning the machine before you use it seems to make it unattractive; if you've already got that access, there's more interesting stuff you can do.

Or with a USB key and 18seconds alone with a machine you can undetectably infect it in such a way that a full disk wipe and reinstall doesn't clean it.

More interesting now?

So now it's "someone who has unfettered physical access to the machine can take advantage of that"?

I'm just not impressed in general by hacks which begin with "first you must achieve a complete breach of the target machine's security..."

Maybe the title wasn't titillating enough? Or maybe it was the link to scribd (I avoid scribd, its just a personal annoyance thing though).

Or maybe people here would rather read a brief news summary than a paper? Who knows :)