Slashdot Mirror

Hucko writes "Ars Technica has a story about a study by Cambridge law professor Patricia Akester that suggests (declares?) that DRM and its ilk does persuade citizens to infringe copyright and circumvent authors' protections. The name of the study is 'Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment.'" The study itself is available for download (PDF); there's also a distillation here.

homesalad writes "Researchers in Toronto have discovered a huge international electronic spying operation that they are calling 'GhostNet.' So far it has infiltrated government and corporate offices in 103 countries, including the office of the Dalai Lama (who originally went to the researchers for help analyzing a suspected infiltration). The operation appears to be based in China, and the information gained has been used to interfere with the actions of the Dalai Lama and to thwart individuals seeking to help Tibetan exiles. The researchers found no evidence of infiltration of US government computers, although machines at the Indian embassy were compromised. Here is the researchers' summary; a full report, 'Tracking "GhostNet": Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network' will be issued this weekend." A separate academic group in the UK that helped with the research is issuing its own report, expected to be available on March 29. Here is the abstract. They seem to be putting more stress on the "social malware" nature of the attack and ways to mitigate such techniques.

MojoKid writes "A recent study (PDF) by Richard Clayton at Cambridge University determined that the first letter of a someone's email address directly affects how much spam they receive. As shown in the graph at either link above, email addresses with numbers as their first characters receive even fewer spam emails. The corpus used in the study was 8 weeks' worth of email from the UK ISP Demon Internet, just over half a billion messages, of which 56% was deemed to be spam."

I don't believe in imaginary property writes "The flagship physics journal Physical Review Letters doesn't allow authors to submit material to Wikipedia, or blogs, that is derived from their published work. Recently, the journal withdrew their acceptance of two articles by Jonathan Oppenheim and co-authors because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia and the Quantum Wikipedia. Currently, many scientists 'routinely do things which violate the transfer of copyright agreement of the journal.' Thirty-eight physicists have written to the journal requesting changes in their copyright policies, saying 'It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible.' The protest may be having an effect. The editor-in-chief of the APS journals says the society plans to review its copyright policy at a meeting in May. 'A group of excellent scientists has asked us to consider revising our copyright, and we take them seriously,' he says."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered flaws in the card payment systems used by millions of customers worldwide. Ross Anderson, Saar Drimer, and Steven Murdoch demonstrated how a simple paper clip can be used to capture account numbers and PINs from so-called 'tamper-proof' equipment. In their paper (PDF), they warn how with a little technical skill and off-the-shelf electronics, fraudsters could empty customers' accounts. British television featured a demonstration of the attack on BBC Newsnight."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered flaws in the card payment systems used by millions of customers worldwide. Ross Anderson, Saar Drimer, and Steven Murdoch demonstrated how a simple paper clip can be used to capture account numbers and PINs from so-called 'tamper-proof' equipment. In their paper (PDF), they warn how with a little technical skill and off-the-shelf electronics, fraudsters could empty customers' accounts. British television featured a demonstration of the attack on BBC Newsnight."

bedahr writes "The first version of the open source speech recognition suite simon was released. It uses the Julius large vocabulary continuous speech recognition to do the actual recognition and the HTK toolkit to maintain the language model. These components are united under an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Simon can import dictionaries directly from wiktionary (a subproject of wikipedia) or from files formated in the HADIFIX- or HTK format and grammar structures directly from personal texts. It also provides means to train the language model with new samples and add new words."

Mortimer.CA writes "As discussed on Slashdot previously, there is a proposal to remove leap seconds from UTC (nee 'Greenwich' time). It will be put to a vote to ITU member states during 2008, and if 70% agree, the leap second will be eliminated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. The proposal calls for a 'leap-hour' in about 600 years, which nobody seems to believe is a good idea. One philosophical point opponents make is that the 'official' time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens."

marcan writes "Comcast users are reporting 'connection reset' errors while loading Google. The problem seems to have been coming and going over the past few days, and often disappears only to return a few minutes later. Apparently the problem only affects some of Google's IPs and services. Analysis of the PCAP packet dumps reveals several injected fake RSTs, which are very similar to the ones seen coming from the Great Firewall of China [PDF]. Did Google somehow get caught up in one of Comcast's blacklists, or are the heuristics flagging Google as a file-sharer due to the heavy traffic?"

Glyn Moody writes "Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press's website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. As he writes, the journal in question was "selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the license (no commercial use)." In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"

Glyn Moody writes "Peter Murray Rust, a chemist at Cambridge University, was lost for words when he found Oxford University Press's website demanded $48 from him to access his own scientific paper, in which he holds copyright and which he released under a Creative Commons license. As he writes, the journal in question was "selling my intellectual property, without my permission, against the terms of the license (no commercial use)." In the light of this kind of copyright abuse and of the PRISM Coalition, a new FUD group set up by scientific publishers to discredit open access, isn't it time to say enough is enough, and demand free access to the research we pay for through our taxes?"

igny writes "Astronomers from the University of Cambridge and Caltech have developed a new camera that gives much more detailed pictures of stars and nebulae than even the Hubble Space Telescope, and does it from the ground. A new technique called 'Lucky imaging' has been used to diminish atmospheric noise in the visible range, creating the most detailed pictures of the sky in history."

Fearful Bank Customer writes "When British banks introduced the Chip-and-Pin smartcard-based debit and credit card system three years ago, they assured the public it was impervious to fraud. However, the EMV protocol it's based on requires customers to type their bank account pin number into store terminals in order to make any purchase. Security researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory derided the system as insecure at the time, as it gave access to customer's bank account pin numbers to every store they bought from. Despite these objections, the system was deployed, so researchers Steven Murdoch and Saar Drimer recently modified a straight-off-e-bay chip-and-pin terminal to play Tetris, with a video on YouTube, demonstrating that devices are neither tamper-resistant nor tamper-evident, and that even students with a spare weekend can take control of them. The banks are claiming that this can be reproduced only "in the laboratory" but seem to have missed the point: if customers have to type their bank account pin into every device they see, then the bad guys can capture both critical card information *and* the pin number for the bank account, leaving customers even more vulnerable than they were under the old system."

kmaclean writes, "VoxForge collects free GPL Transcribed Speech Audio that can be used in the creation of Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. We are essentially creating a user-submitted repository of the 'source' speech audio for the creation of Acoustic Models to be used by Speech Recognition Engines. The Speech Audio files will then be 'compiled' into Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition engines such as Sphinx, HTK, CAVS and Julius." Read on for why we need free GPL speech audio.

Why free GPL Speech Audio?

Speech Recognition Engines require two types of files to recognize speech. The first is an Acoustic Model, which is created by taking a very large number of audio recordings of speech and their transcriptions (called Speech Corpus or Corpora) and 'compiling' them into statistical representations of the sounds that make up each word. The second is a Language Model or Grammar file. A Language Model is a very large file containing the probabilities of certain sequences of words. A Grammar is a much smaller file containing sets of predefined combinations of words.

Most Acoustic Models used by 'Open Source' Speech Recognition engines are 'closed source'. They do not give you access to the speech audio (the 'source') used to create the acoustic model, or if they do, there are licensing restrictions on the distribution of the 'source' (i.e. you can only use it for personal or research purposes). The reason for this is because there is no free Speech Corpora in a form that can readily be used to create Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition Engines. Open Source projects are required to purchase Speech Copora which has restrictive licensing — i.e. they are not permitted to distribute the 'source' speech audio, but they are permitted them to distributed the 'compiled' Acoustic Model.

Why GPL?

A GPL-style license will ensure that user contributions will always benefit the open source community, since it requires any distribution of derivative Acoustic Models to include access to the 'source' speech audio.

An anonymous reader writes "Ross Anderson, author of 'Security Engineering', notifies in a message to comp.risks that he just got permission from Wiley to let anyone download the full content of his book for free. This is one of the best books on computer security and it is used as textbook in many University courses (I teach two of them)."

pdscomp writes "VMware has just announced at today's Apple WWDC 2006 Conference that they are developing a port of VMware to Mac OS X. People interested in beta testing the product later this year can visit this link to sign up for the public test. It will be interesting to see how things play out between VMware and Parallels. Will Microsoft bother porting Virtual PC now that there will be two other Intel OS X virtualization solutions available? Now all we need is to get Mac OS X running under Xen."

Scyld_Scefing writes "In his June 29, 2006 Wired News article, 'It's the Economy, Stupid,' Bruce Schneier covers the content of the 2006 Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. Schneier says that economic analysis of IT security issues is relatively new, and links to one of the significant earlier papers from 1991, 'Why Information Security Is Hard -- An Economic Perspective' (.pdf). This article states: 'According to one common view, information security comes down to technical measures. Given better access control policy models, formal proofs of cryptographic protocols, approved firewalls, better ways of detecting intrusions and malicious code, and better tools for system evaluation and assurance, the problems can be solved. In this note, I put forward a contrary view: information insecurity is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of microeconomics: network externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, adverse selection, liability dumping and the tragedy of the commons.'"

nerdlygirl writes "In a development that would probably even puzzle Claude Shannon, information can be negative -- at least when the information is quantum. The discovery, by Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, appears in the current edition of the leading journal Nature. If I tell you negative information, you'll know less. Apparently, researchers hope to use this to gain deeper insights into phenomena such as quantum teleportation and computation, as well as the very structure of the quantum world. More details can be found here and here A popular account of the article can be found on Oppenheim's homepage, and a free version of the article can be found in the arxiv for those of us without subscriptions to Nature."

nerdlygirl writes "In a development that would probably even puzzle Claude Shannon, information can be negative -- at least when the information is quantum. The discovery, by Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, appears in the current edition of the leading journal Nature. If I tell you negative information, you'll know less. Apparently, researchers hope to use this to gain deeper insights into phenomena such as quantum teleportation and computation, as well as the very structure of the quantum world. More details can be found here and here A popular account of the article can be found on Oppenheim's homepage, and a free version of the article can be found in the arxiv for those of us without subscriptions to Nature."

daria42 writes "Is Windows cheaper to patch than open source software? Of course this Microsoft-commissioned report thinks so - but a number of people disagree, including a key Novell Asia-Pac exec, Paul Kangro. Kangro highlights problems with the report including the fact that it refers to problems faced by administrators before 2003: before significant improvements were made to Linux patching tools. 'We didn't have tools like Xen for Linux then,' says Kangro. 'When I patch my Linux box I don't need to bring it up and down any number of times.' Kangro also points out the report doesn't mention costs associated with rebooting systems after a patch is applied."

f5hacka writes "Four students at Clarkson University developed a new linux distribution based on the Xen kernel. The distribution is called Xenophilia. Xenophilia is a derivative of Debian Linux and uses the new Debian installer to install its packages. Its homepage is available at http://cosi.clarkson.edu/xen/. The distribution is available for download at http://mirror.clarkson.edu/pub/distributions/xenop hilia/"

llywelynelysium writes "Mad Penguin has an excellent review of the upcoming SuSE 9.3 Professional release. The review is mostly positive, commenting on SUSE's improved speed, improved Gnome suppport, inclusion of Xen, and interestingly, the use of Firefox as the default browser. On the other hand, the review states that Novell has futher crippled the multimedia capabilities of their distribution by removing MP3 playback support. SUSE scores three stars in the end."

lhdentra writes "A few friends and I got bored one weekend and decided to build a contraption. Remember the Honda advert? We think ours is better." This took dedication.

lhdentra writes "A few friends and I got bored one weekend and decided to build a contraption. Remember the Honda advert? We think ours is better." This took dedication.

daria42 writes "The next version of SuSE, to be shipped in mid-April, will ship with the Xen virtualization software, letting users run multiple versions of the operating system simultaneously, the company said on Thursday. The article says that Red Hat has also begun adding Xen support to Fedora."

Reason writes "William Haseltine of Human Genome Sciences (the 'father of regenerative medicine') has pushed the M Prize for anti-aging research - a project cofounded by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey and Dave Gobel - over the $1,000,000 mark in pledges. Congratulations to all involved! Read the press release here."

Cougem writes "BBC News is reporting on how an episode from the brand new series of the old science fiction TV show, Doctor Who, has been leaked onto the Internet. 'A 45-minute episode, called Rose, has appeared three weeks before the series is expected to begin on BBC One. Rose is the name of the character played by pop singer Billie Piper, who will be the assistant to the Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston.' With people saying sci-fi appeals more to the technical minded viewer, will this TV show's release onto the Internet damage the ratings considerably for the BBC? Or is it a minor problem for a corporation whose role is just to provide the public with entertainment?" Maybe it will boost ratings, instead; the public buzz about "leaks" is still far ahead of the average viewer's ability to actually find and download.

agent dero writes "With NetBSD 2.0, the NetBSD Foundation also released support for a new port, NetBSD/xen. A version of NetBSD meant to run on top of the Xen virtual machine monitor. In this press release the foundation has announced that it is using the port and Xen for much of its internal development, citing security, and ease of use as main reasons for its adoption."

robstah writes "The Debian project have announced the opening of nominations for this year's Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections. The first nomination, that of Matthew Garrett (of Dasher fame) has also been announced on Debian Planet."

An anonymous reader writes "Looking for a suitable VoIP phone, I came across these Full-Screen Thin-Client Phones. Not only do they do voice, but they also have a 480x640 screen running at 65K colors and run a number of apps remotely via VNC. They seem to allow a lot more functionality than normal phones, and look really cool too. The site says they have 70 phones running in their office. This seems the way forward for telephony-computer convergence in the 21st century. A document at the end of the page explains their approach and has some cool pictures as well."

An anonymous reader writes "Looking for a suitable VoIP phone, I came across these Full-Screen Thin-Client Phones. Not only do they do voice, but they also have a 480x640 screen running at 65K colors and run a number of apps remotely via VNC. They seem to allow a lot more functionality than normal phones, and look really cool too. The site says they have 70 phones running in their office. This seems the way forward for telephony-computer convergence in the 21st century. A document at the end of the page explains their approach and has some cool pictures as well."

Matthew asks: "Now that the Internet has become an integral part of many people's lives, it has also become the place where many of us get our daily news reports (think Slashdot, New York Times, etc). The decentralization of the Internet offers many advantages over traditional media such as newspapers and television, as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look? With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free? Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend? How do DRM and Trusted Computing play into the role? What does Darwin say will happen to newspapers, radio, television?"

putko asks: "Intel has a new line of chips with DRM built in. This appears to be the very first DRM-enabled chip to hit the streets. This microprocessor is unlike others available, because the user doesn't have complete control over the thing, and your computer can (theoretically) betray you. For a while now, there have been computers (IBM ThinkPad) that won't boot unless you give the password, but you could always rip out the hard drive and read it, right? With this chip, the keys and RAM are on the chip, and the flash is encrypted, so this really looks locked up tight. Has anyone worked with this chip, and is possible to build your own device that uses the Intel Trusted Wireless Platform to protect your secrets (like your software, perhaps)?" "I'm reminded of this due to Slashdot's recent story on the iPAQ, which uses the chip (and has some neat security features too). Somewhat surprisingly, nobody brought up the Doomsday scenarios, there. It should also be mentioned that there are companies selling incredibly tiny boards for it. Maybe you can run Linux on them?

Wouldn't it suck if the chip had the capabilities and you couldn't use them in your own projects -- e.g. if that was just reserved to big companies like Microsoft? On the other hand, if you can use the features, you might see some neat applications. Assuming you can program the DRM stuff, how do you avoid locking yourself out of the chip while developing? What extra pitfalls may developers run into using it?"

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has a long article by wonderfully be-whiskered Aubrey de Grey of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) on how we may all live to be 1,000 years old... as this is the balanced BBC they are also running the opposing view."

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has a long article by wonderfully be-whiskered Aubrey de Grey of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) on how we may all live to be 1,000 years old... as this is the balanced BBC they are also running the opposing view."

A reader writes:"First there was Dasher, a novel application of statistical theory that lets free texts be written using only a pointing device. Dasher works by predicting the continuations of the text being written, based on what has been written so far; there is a probability associated with each offered continuation and the presentation is designed to make it easier to choose more probable continuations. A big advantage of statistics-based interfaces is that they automatically enforce correctness, because correct strings are more probable than incorrect ones. Now the same approach has been extended to writing maths. Apropos is a Javascript application (it supports IE6 & Firefox) to create mathematical expressions. It represents the math using MathML, the official XML spec for mathematics. It is definitely clunky when compared to Dasher, but better than MS Equation Editor etc. It is interesting to consider if this approach can be extended to other XML vocabularies (for example, a model for HTML that suggests the markup as you go along - a properly trained one will make it harder to create pages with blinking text, loads of images etc.), or to formal languages other than XML (e.g. programming languages). Stochastic modeling can also be used as a basis for speech recognition, with the recognizer using the model to choose a continuation when the speech signal is ambiguous or indistinct."

Today we return to our Slashdot interview roots with a "Call for questions" for Rob "Commander" Pike, who has been involved in the development of many modern programming concepts, GUI advances, character sets, and operating systems. We'll email 10 - 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Rob and post his answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

madprof writes "A researcher at Cambridge University has developed a usefully efficient thermofluidic pump to benefit some of the world's poorest people by performing irrigation and other tasks. Tom Smith has been awarded Science Graduate of the Year by the Royal Institution of Great Britain for this breakthrough and is giving a public lecture on 6th October in London. A great example of scientific innovation directly benefiting people."

prisonernumber7 writes "X.org is showing a lot of progress! The combination of the XFixes extension, Damage extension, Composite extension and XEvIE (X Event Interception Extension) present in X11R6.8 present user interface designers with a wide range of here-to-fore difficult to achieve possibilities. What does this mean for the enduser? That's window shadows and window shadows within windows as well as true translucency for the OSS community. Good samples of Gnome and KDE desktops with drop shadows, and so on can be found here, here, here, here, here, translucency here, here and here, and its use on handhelds running Linux."

Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"

Reason writes "Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has put forward a biological engineering plan to end human aging and co-founded the Methuselah Mouse Prize in recent years. Now he is finally getting some of the public recognition he deserves in an excellent David Stipp article at Fortune Magazine. If you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year - and how to bring about a sea change in the scientific establishment - then this is the place to start. As an added bonus, I don't think you'll find a more succinct (and utterly British) answer to overpopulation objections to life extension than the one at the end of this article!"

NonNullSet writes "Who would have thought that that something new could be said about how best to select passwords? Ross Andreson of Cambridge University and some of his colleages have performed new empirical studies and found some pretty non-intuitive results. For example: 1. The first folk belief is that users have difficulty remembering random passwords. This belief is confirmed. 2. The second folk belief is that passwords based on mnemonic prases are harder for an attacker to guess than naively selected passwords. This belief is confirmed. 3. The third folk belief is that random passwords are better than those based on mnemonic phrases. However, each appeared to be just as strong as the other. So this belief is debunked. 4. The fourth folk belief is that passwords based on mnemonic phrases are harder to remember than naively selected passwords. However, each ap- peared to be just as easy to remember as the other. So this belief is debunked. 5. The fifth folk belief is that by educating users to use random passwords or mnemonic passwords, we can gain a significant improvement in security. However, both random passwords and mnemonic passwords suffered from a non-compliance rate of about 10% (including both too-short passwords and passwords not chosen according to the instructions). While this is better than the 35% or so of users who choose bad passwords with only cursory instruction, it is not really a huge improvement. The attacker may have to work three times harder, but in the absence of password policy enforcement mechanisms there seems no way to make the attacker work a thousand times harder. In fact, our experimental group may be about the most compliant a systems administrator can expect to get. So this belief appears to be debunked."

Oily Pakora writes "Those of us in the United States are so used to our Letter and Legal paper sizes. We've seen the A4 paper size option in our printer trays and in printer preference menus. Metric sizes used almost everywhere in the world, save for the US and Canada. Here is an interesting article that discusses all of the aspects of metric paper. For those who enjoy a bit of math, did you know that in the Metric paper system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of 2? This means that you can place two sheets of A4 side-by-side and they will equal an A3 sheet exactly, and two sheets of A3 will equal an A2."

josh asks: "For my next project, I've decided I want to do something related to x86 virtualization (the way VMware does it or Plex86 not Xen/Bochs/etc.) but I really don't know where to start. Googling hasn't been helpful (just look at the results if you don't believe me). Are there any resources for learning about this kind of x86 virtualization? I know virtual 8086 mode wouldn't work, but without that what advantage does something like VMware have over something like Bochs? Are there any F/OSS projects aimed at something along the lines of my thinking? Please enlighten me with any references and resources you might have. Thanks!"

An anonymous reader writes "The Unlimited Freedom blog has published a new article describing 'interesting' uses of Trusted Computing. (Google cache here). Trusted Computing, as implemented in Microsoft's NGSCB (Palladium) or the Trusted Computing Group (TCPA), has been one of the most controversial technology proposals of recent years, to put it mildly. But the article on Unlimited Freedom offers a new perspective. The author examines 12 different applications which could benefit from access to Trusted Computing technology. And most of them are uncontroversial or would actually improve privacy and anonymity. Among the examples listed are multi-player games, online casinos, P2P networks, anonymous remailers, distributed computing and mobile agents. The analysis provides an interesting contrast to the usual focus on Trusted Computing's impact on control over digital content."

jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that Professor Alan H Windle has spun nanotube yarn by twisting nanotubes onto spinning rods as they come out of the furnace from which they are made. Professor Windle's team used ethanol (carbon source) with ferrocene (catalyst) and thiopene (for thread assembly) to create the structure. To create the tubes a mix of the above chemicals is inserted into a furnace in a jet of hydrogen gas. However, do not get your hopes up yet, the press release also indicates that the yarn has a strength comparable to that of most modern textiles but the groups does state that there is room for improvement. Yes, for those of you wondering, there is mention of a space elevator."

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Xen Team writes "The University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group is pleased to announce the open source release of Xen, a virtual machine monitor for x86. Xen lets you run multiple operating system images at the same time on the same PC hardware, with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Even under the most demanding workloads the performance overhead is just a few percent --- considerably less than alternatives such as VMware Workstation and User Mode Linux. This makes Xen ideal for use in providing secure virtual hosting, or even just for running multiple OSes on a desktop machine."

The Xen team continues: "Xen requires guest operating systems to be ported to run over it. Crucially, only the kernel needs to be ported, and all user-level application binaries and libraries can run unmodified. We have a fully functional port of Linux 2.4.22 running over Xen, and regularly use it for running demanding applications like Apache, PostgreSQL and Mozilla. Any Linux distribution should run unmodified over the ported kernel. With assistance from Microsoft Research, we have a port of Windows XP to Xen nearly complete, and are planning a FreeBSD 4.8 port in the near future.

"Visit the project homepage to find out more, and download the project source code or the XenDemoCD, a bootable 'live iso' image that enables you to play with Xen/Linux 2.4 without needing to install it on your hard drive. The CD also contains full source code, build tools, and benchmarks. Our SOSP paper gives an overview of the design of Xen, and evaluates the performance against other virtualization techniques.

"Work on Xen is supported by UK EPSRC grant GR/S01894, Intel Research Cambridge, and Microsoft Research Cambridge via an Embedded XP IFP award."