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That's a good question. The paper describing xen is here. I'm not sure what the implementation differences are between the two, but xen managed to achieve much better performance on certain benchmarks. So, it's functionally equivilent to UML, but faster (YMMV). Maybe someone who's not too lazy to read the paper right now can tell us what they did different.

1.3 Which OSes run on Xen?

To achieve such high performance, Xen requires that OSes are ported to run on it. So far we have stable ports of Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, and NetBSD. Ports of FreeBSD and Plan 9 are nearing completion.

1.4 Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?

Unfortunately there are no plans to support any versions of Windows in the near future. Furthermore, a port of Windows would be encumbered by licensing issues. Longer term, virtualisation features in next-generation CPUs should make it much easier to support unmodified OSes: at that time we will reconsider Windows support.

1.3 Which OSes run on Xen?

To achieve such high performance, Xen requires that OSes are ported to run on it. So far we have stable ports of Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, and NetBSD. Ports of FreeBSD and Plan 9 are nearing completion.

1.4 Does Xen support Microsoft Windows?

Unfortunately there are no plans to support any versions of Windows in the near future. Furthermore, a port of Windows would be encumbered by licensing issues. Longer term, virtualisation features in next-generation CPUs should make it much easier to support unmodified OSes: at that time we will reconsider Windows support.

http://xen.terrabox.com/index.php/What%20is%20xen

or this:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

???

there are too many xen pages out there?

anyone knows?

I can't find a website for this 'Xen'... I guess if it is that new G00gle hasn't indexed it yet? Oh wait, here it is XEN WEBSITE

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

"No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly!"

Ah, but which came first, the ISO date format, or the need for a fix to the problem of computers that can't sort dates properly?

From the main advocate of that format:

"Advantages of the ISO 8601 standard date notation compared to other commonly used variants:
* easily readable and writeable by software
* easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison"

So the ISO date format seems to have been developed as a workaround to the deficiencies of computer software.

And yes, I consider "m/d/y" to be as moronic as everyone else. "Middle-endian" I believe is the name for it. Do these people write a hundred and twenty three as 231?

Also, don't forget about these Linux based methods:

Linux Vserver:
http://www.linux-vserver.org/

Xen
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/

User Mode Linux:
http://usermodelinux.org/

Linux Vserver appears to be almost the same thing as FreeBSD jails. I have not ran either so I cannot speak with authority on them.

I have ran Xen and UML, however.

Xen and UML are completely virtualized environments that boot a whole seperate machine inside of the host. UML is good to run on a server that has some 'extra' resources to dedicate to a VM as you can spec total ram on the command line and there are no modifications to the host machine kernel. Xen's hypervisor takes over the machine by only occupying the first 64-128M of ram, with the rest of ram dedicated to VMs, which makes it hard, but not impossible, to slap Xen onto an existing machine. Xen also requires that a patched kernel is installed on the host.


-ft

However, the pdf has some nice pictures and a more details of how it works.

Gneo*: That sounds like a really good deal. But...I think I've got a better one. How 'bout I give Microsoft the finger, and I start replacing ALL my crappy installations of Microsoft Windows with GNU and free software, FREE...as in freedom... That way we'll all be free of the evil tyrrany.

Agent Smith^WGates:Hmmm, Mr. Anderson, you disappoint me.

Gneo: You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights, I want to use my free software.

Agent Smith^WGates:Tell me, Mr. Anderson. What good is your free software if you can't use a computer without our (evil unpronouncable) NGSCB...Next-Generation Secure Computing Base...?

(If you don't get this, read the Trusted Computing FAQ (incidentally by a guy called Mr. Anderson) and google for trusted (aka trecherous) computing. Also, this study on effects on free software in PDF (also by Mr. Anderson). Also, the FSF's summary.)

[* blend of GNU and Neo. Also note that Gnu sounds like new which is English for `neo'...uhhh...I need a life]

Parts of this post are fair-use copies of The Matrix screenplay and/or parent post.

Gneo*: That sounds like a really good deal. But...I think I've got a better one. How 'bout I give Microsoft the finger, and I start replacing ALL my crappy installations of Microsoft Windows with GNU and free software, FREE...as in freedom... That way we'll all be free of the evil tyrrany.

Agent Smith^WGates:Hmmm, Mr. Anderson, you disappoint me.

Gneo: You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights, I want to use my free software.

Agent Smith^WGates:Tell me, Mr. Anderson. What good is your free software if you can't use a computer without our (evil unpronouncable) NGSCB...Next-Generation Secure Computing Base...?

(If you don't get this, read the Trusted Computing FAQ (incidentally by a guy called Mr. Anderson) and google for trusted (aka trecherous) computing. Also, this study on effects on free software in PDF (also by Mr. Anderson). Also, the FSF's summary.)

[* blend of GNU and Neo. Also note that Gnu sounds like new which is English for `neo'...uhhh...I need a life]

Parts of this post are fair-use copies of The Matrix screenplay and/or parent post.

Maybe you were seeing Eurions?

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf

The Europeans got their act together over prevention of photocopying cash a LONG time ago. All European notes (including the ones phased out when the Euro came in) contain Eurions ;-)

I'm not buying it for a second. Millimetre-sized dots are much larger than the resolution of the printer. Perhaps the author meant "millimetre-sized font." Or perhaps the author was only thinking of the so-called Eurion constellation, discovered by Markus Kuhn. The circles (dots?) making up the constellation are exactly one millimetre in diameter.

GNU/Linux may not have Solaris containers (which allow applications to run in virtual instances of Solaris, isolated from the rest of the OS), but it does have Usermode Linux (UML) which provides similar functionality using a different technique.

UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers. If you're going to compare a server virtualization feature, compare to something like the Xen Virtual Machine, in this performance comparison, you can see the performance of UML is rather appalling, especially compared to Xen.

The performance of Solaris Grid Containers is more akin to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, the advantage N1 Grid Containers have over Xen is that they are portable to every platform Solaris runs on (SPARC, IA32, AMD64) whereas Xen only emulates one platform (IA32). Also, other Solaris features to which there are currently no Linux counterparts such as the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows a N1 Grid Container to be bound to certain processors, and given a dedicated percentage (or share) of available processor resources. This provides an advantage over Xen and UML which can't even use multiple CPUs. It has an advantage over FreeBSD jails where monopolization of system resources by a single jail cannot be easily avoided.

While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.

GNU/Linux may not have Solaris containers (which allow applications to run in virtual instances of Solaris, isolated from the rest of the OS), but it does have Usermode Linux (UML) which provides similar functionality using a different technique.

UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers. If you're going to compare a server virtualization feature, compare to something like the Xen Virtual Machine, in this performance comparison, you can see the performance of UML is rather appalling, especially compared to Xen.

The performance of Solaris Grid Containers is more akin to Xen or FreeBSD jails. However, the advantage N1 Grid Containers have over Xen is that they are portable to every platform Solaris runs on (SPARC, IA32, AMD64) whereas Xen only emulates one platform (IA32). Also, other Solaris features to which there are currently no Linux counterparts such as the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows a N1 Grid Container to be bound to certain processors, and given a dedicated percentage (or share) of available processor resources. This provides an advantage over Xen and UML which can't even use multiple CPUs. It has an advantage over FreeBSD jails where monopolization of system resources by a single jail cannot be easily avoided.

While Linux may have counterparts to various Solaris features, in terms of maturity, feature set, and performance of these features Solaris has Linux trumped.

That's what the smartcard manufacturers say. It's not what security researchers say.

It sounds like a trusted system, not a secure system. Keep in mind that those aspects of the system are completely orthogonal--e.g. I would not expect Microsoft Palladium to be secure, but it will be trusted. On the other hand I expect Linux to be secure, but never trusted. (In the US Department of Defense where the term 'trusted system or component' originated, it means 'one which can break the security policy'--see TCPA FAQ 24.) Very unfortunate name. It may turn out to be disastrous for an otherwise promising project. Too bad.

It sounds like a trusted system, not a secure system. Keep in mind that those aspects of the system are completely orthogonal--e.g. I would not expect Microsoft Palladium to be secure, but it will be trusted. On the other hand I expect Linux to be secure, but never trusted. (In the US Department of Defense where the term 'trusted system or component' originated, it means 'one which can break the security policy'--see TCPA FAQ 24.) Very unfortunate name. It may turn out to be disastrous for an otherwise promising project. Too bad.

For those of you who, like me, cannot afford vmware, and want better performance than vmware anyhow, might I suggest Xen:http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen /index.html

Which is very interesting, given that that project is sponsered by the EPSRC (Engineering and physical sciences research council) and Microsoft UK. See page 11 of the White paper for details.

Yes, yes... MS bought out Virtual PC. That was a sad day. There's also VMWare and Virtuozzo if you're looking for any way to "run" 2 OSes at once. I'd have to say that VMWare and VirtualPC are in a class seperate from Xen if for no other reason than performance.

Xen is designed to run the client operating system as peers. No single vm can steal the whole machine away from the others and the performance overhead of the virtulization is almost nothing as indicated here. No Virtual PC in that graph but in my experience VMWare performs slightly better than Virtual PC and my observations are supported by these guys. VMWare and VirtualPC run the OS as just another processes in the real OS. Something terrible happens to the host OS and the VPC/VM slows to a crawl. Something major happens in the virtual OS and the host slows to a crawl. They're more emulation that virtualization.

GPLed virtualization software that according to the benchmarks achieves performance unseen in current approaches - sounds like a dream come true.

It would be astonishing if those benchmark numbers hold true in a production environment, which might well be as the selected benchmarks (SPECint, Postgres, Apache, ..) should give a fair picture of the overall performance hit for the virtualized systems.

Being able to partition your OS without serious performance implication would open a whole lot of new possibilities for developers that previously where only possible with huge investments in high-end hardware and expensive virtualization software licenses.

I've already decided: My price for the most useful opensourced application in 2004 goes to..... Xen :)

Direct link: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/scr eenshots/index.html

Dasher. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/. The right tool for the job. Use the joystick to control motion,

I used to be a Wells Fargo customer in the US, and got fed up enough with their customer service to leave. I have no doubt that any disputed ATM transaction would be held up in so much red tape and department-shifting that the customer would be lucky to get so much as a status report on their claim.

This is, of course, despite the fact that Federal Reserve regulations require banks to give the customer the benefit of the doubt. (I expect that this is why WF has this policy: they have to.)

I have no doubt that, regardless of the public policy of WF, getting them to own up would be like pulling teeth.

As an aside, I anybody interested in ATM security in particular, or large-system security in general, read Why Cryptosystems Fail. It has excellent descriptions of the non-technical problems that ATM security faces. (The author discusses the technical issues in other papers, but I think that we geeks tend to forget the non-technical problems.)

Certainly as you say the ATMs "should not be running unnecessary services", but as long as they're on a general purpose operating system they'll be doing just that. Some OS's are worse than others but all of them offer far more attack surface than an ATM needs.

I'm willing to believe you worked for a bank that did security well, but that's not the norm. Ross Anderson's research has found a steady stream of blunders

Bad Idea(TM)

Here's why:

"Trusted Computing" provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up.

TC will also make it much harder for you to run unlicensed software. In the first version of TC, pirate software could be detected and deleted remotely. Since then, Microsoft has sometimes denied that it intended TC to do this, but at WEIS 2003 a senior Microsoft manager refused to deny that fighting piracy was a goal: `Helping people to run stolen software just isn't our aim in life', he said. The mechanisms now proposed are more subtle, though. TC will protect application software registration mechanisms, so that unlicensed software will be locked out of the new ecology. Furthermore, TC apps will work better with other TC apps, so people will get less value from old non-TC apps (including pirate apps). Also, some TC apps may reject data from old apps whose serial numbers have been blacklisted. If Microsoft believes that your copy of Office is a pirate copy, and your local government moves to TC, then the documents you file with them may be unreadable. TC will also make it easier for people to rent software rather than buy it; and if you stop paying the rent, then not only does the software stop working but so may the files it created. So if you stop paying for upgrades to Media Player, you may lose access to all the songs you bought using it.

For years, Bill Gates has dreamed of finding a way to make the Chinese pay for software: TC looks like being the answer to his prayer.

There are many other possibilities. Governments will be able to arrange things so that all Word documents created on civil servants' PCs are `born classified' and can't be leaked electronically to journalists. Auction sites might insist that you use trusted proxy software for bidding, so that you can't bid tactically at the auction. Cheating at computer games could be made more difficult.

There are some gotchas too. For example, TC can support remote censorship. In its simplest form, applications may be designed to delete pirated music under remote control. For example, if a protected song is extracted from a hacked TC platform and made available on the web as an MP3 file, then TC-compliant media player software may detect it using a watermark, report it, and be instructed remotely to delete it (as well as all other material that came through that platform). This business model, called traitor tracing, has been researched extensively by Microsoft (and others). In general, digital objects created using TC systems remain under the control of their creators, rather than under the control of the person who owns the machine on which they happen to be stored (as at present). So someone who writes a paper that a court decides is defamatory can be compelled to censor it - and the software company that wrote the word processor could be ordered to do the deletion if she refuses. Given such possibilities, we can expect TC to be used to suppress everything from pornography to writings that criticise political leaders.

The gotcha for businesses is that your software suppliers can make it much harder for you to switch to their competitors' products. At a simple level, Word could encrypt all your documents using keys that only Microsoft products have access to; this would mean that you could only read them using Microsoft products, not with any competing word processor. Such blatant lock-in might be prohi

• Dasher is very different from T9. T9 is basically a lexicon lookup system, and has to be abandoned for words not in the dictionary. Dasher lets the user write any string in the language, though some are considered more likely than others. There is a good analysis of T9 here.
• Dasher does not constrain the writer.Dasher calculates the likelihood of symbols in the string based on the patterns it sees in the symbols of a training corpus. This allows the program to be tailored for various applications. (e.g. train it on a corpus of 10000 text messages, & itll strt 2 ryt lyk dis tho ppl cud stl ryt prpr nglsh. gr8.).
• Statistical modelling does not enforce anything. I suspect that the intent behind the statement about 'correctness' is that spellings present in the training corpus will be preferred. For example, a dasher user is unlikekly to misspell 'receipt' (assuming that the word appears in the training text) because once you 'rec' has been written, 'ei...' will be shown with a higher probability than 'ie'.
• Apropos does not aim to replace TeX. The intent of the two programs is different: Tex is a typesetting program, geared towards representing the notation of mathematics, while Apropos uses MathML in order to capture the meaning of mathematical expressions. Apropos does display the notation to the user, but only because people use notation to understand mathematics. Meaning of a mathematical expression is independent of the notation (e.g. f'(x) vs. df(x)/dx), and humans use a lot of context to parse notation. This is why conversion from Content MathML to TeX (and other display formats) is straightforward, but TeX to Content MathML is ambiguous.
• Apropos' model operates at a higher level thancharacters or words. Apropos predicts based on the grammar of Content MathML. It does not 'exploit' the redundancy in the syntax of XML - that should be obvious by trying it out once. It does not ask the user to create symbols of XML, rather it aids in constructing the mathematical expression by representing it as a (prefix) tree. So there is no question of Apropos predictions being based on inefficiencies in XML.
• Finally, both Dasher & Apropos do not try to stifle creativity, free speech, geekiness or bad spelling. (well, maybe bad spelling). They are only designed to seek out redundancies in languages and exploit them to make repetitive tasks a little easier.

Please read my report for a detailed description of how Apropos works. I have contrasted the system with both T9 & TeX.

Wrong. The Mobile phone interface is nothing like Dasher. It's not as fluid and as usable as Dasher. Dasher is really something that you should download and actually try before you comment on it.

And if you're not up to downloading it, at the very least you should look at its demos (available in either animated gifs or mpeg/avi/asf movies).

More info in the same dasher web site here

For real anti-aging research, check out the following:

http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/index.html/

http://www.methuselahfoundation.org/

Furthermore, taking anti-oxidants has little effect on the time-increasing probability of a person dying soon (simply, aging), since it does not repair the damages that have occurred through aging, but simply prevents some types from happening.

Last year I co-authored a paper - Covert Channels for Collusion in Online Computer Games (PDF 151K) which dealt with a similar subject. Rather than IPD, it deals with a Connect-4 competition, but many of the ideas are the same.

It also discusses the link between communication in games like this and the concern of covert channels in (generally military) multi-level secure systems. Another interesting area is the link between these types of competitions and voting algorithms, since they may be a good way of designing collusion resistant competitions, or proving that they are impossible.

What's new on the Web was hosted as SAIC, I think, required daily reading. Ah yes, I remember when the Cambridge University Trojan Room coffee-pot cam was put on-line, how cool was that?

I'd like to take issue with the original poster's assertion that Netscape was the first major piece of commercial software to go Open... It may have been available for sale, but Netscape would never reveal how many licenses were sold. I don't think you could call it 'major commercial' judged from the commercial revenues.

I must have smarter ISPs or something. I've gotten fewer than 5 spams this year, and never more than 50/year across the past decade. That's not to say it isn't a problem- the public has lost an important ability to freely hang out your email address for unsolicited correspondence on topics of interest. But it's not apocalyptic.

You are kind of insinuating I am just unlucky. But this is purely a factor of your address's age and what you've done with it. My address is old (1992) and I haven't kept it secret or changed it. All this means is that it has been published on websites, associated with some usenet posts, and given during purchases to many retailers, some of which are bound to be shady with regards to their privacy policy.

Spam filters are great, right? Half the time you never see the false positivies, so we tend to overestimate their acurracy. But no matter, now they're required for me and millions of other people to use their email every day.

But if you read back I made a point of saying "for many applications." This is because the process is greatly accelerated for many kinds of email addresses - i.e. those which must be published on the web, where they can be picked up by crawlers. I made some money this year helping two major online news sites (who will be comfortably anonymous by virtue of how common this process is) sanitize away every internal email address on their site (i.e. info@ editor@ citydesk@ writerxy@) and replace them with HTML forms because the volume of spam for any non-secret address increases rapidly until it is impossible work to sort through it all without a spam filter.

Hence, for many applications email is becoming useless. And if you check again, you will see that I never claimed this is was apocalyptic - only that it was an example of the problem of scale. Most people didn't think about it until it happened.

Statements like that aren't worth the time to refute.

Certainly, you're not required to. Keep in mind, though: I have backed this statement up carefully and in detail, so I put forth that it is only not worth the time to refute because it is very difficult, if at all possible, to do so.

WHAT encumbered country? They're rare today, and another one dies every few years. It's called WIPO. Even though some Banana Republics will host regenade programmers, executing that code inside WTO nations will earn you a BSA audit, or worse.

You mean what unencumbered country? Most! Europe is currently debating about whether or not to recognize software patents - they currently do not. Similar situation in India. If China does in any real capacity, regardless of what they say officially, it's news to me.

They're not twisted today, and it's theoretically possible for a non-event to "continue". All that happens is they spend $300,000 on legal fees every couple years. No problem for a megacorp, especially in exchange for having destroyed all small/start-up software houses.

1) They are absolutely getting twisted today. Eolas just won a stunning half-billion dollar judgement against Microsoft. That's not "sued for." That's "awarded." Now this caused a lot of heartburn, and already it's falling apart - I'm pretty sure Microsoft has the beans to make it go away. But the point is, look how close they got. There are now three dozen others who saw dollar signs from that headline. How long before one of these plaintiffs succeeds?

2) $300,000 on legal fees does not seem like a sane assessment of patent-related legal costs. Frankly I've been on both sides of litigation, and count many lawyers among my friends. With a good legal team working against you they can tie you up in court procedures till your eyes bleed and your ears fall off. You will spend $300,000 in one month of serious civil litigation. I'll cite Stallman, referenced in this very article in fact: "I heard of one patent case, the defendant I remember was Qu

Using a slightly-modified version of Dasher, the patient would almost be able to use every function of a computer. The article states he can play pong fairly well, so it should not be a big leap to be able to use Dasher for text input. It's great to see this technology advancing this far so fast; just imagine 10 or 20 years in the future utilizing thousands of sensors and vastly more powerful computers.

So little, if any, D and Li should have been available at the time pp fusion ceased.

You're right that the D and Li phases wouldn't last much longer afterward pp stopped, though it depends on the mass loss rate. But there would've been a fair amount of D and Li available.

Actually, the D burning would continue probably for quite some time due to hydrodynamics, now that I think about it. While fusion was occurring, the turbulence inside the star would dominate the hydrodynamics, so D would remain mixed throughout the star. Once the fusion stopped, deuterium, being denser than hydrogen, would naturally sink slowly to the core. So you probably would have "fits" of deuterium burning (which remixed the deuterium) as the star slowly burned up its deuterium.


It will be able to pick up absorption lines, as this thing does have an atmosphere.

That's what I meant, though again it depends on the density profile of the object. The core of the object is likely too dense to let anything pass through it. We don't know what the core of Jupiter is made of - this object is something like 50 times denser.

The core composition is the interesting part, unfortunately. For that we'd need to be there.

If it's defined as a "star that is no longer burning", though, this would qualify.

That's what a stellar remnant is, not a black dwarf. A white dwarf is also a star that's no longer burning - it's white because it's still hot. Black dwarves are white dwarves that have crystallized. There's a specific definition because there's a phase transition (crystallization) that they have to go through, so there's a clear dividing line between white dwarves and black dwarves.

I even seem to recall that there was a white dwarf at around 11 LY that we could study.

Sirius B. First white dwarf ever discovered. Problem is it's sitting right by Sirius A, which is *not* a white dwarf - it's a blue-white supergiant. That must've been a hell of a system when it was active... The nice thing about this system is the fact that it's a bare white dwarf. Plus it has an interesting companion. Bonus.

That would let us image stellar atmospheres

We actually already can image stellar atmospheres. Only big stars, but stellar atmospheres nonetheless.

Here's an example. I used Betelgeuse because I think it was the first and only star for a while. I think there've been more by now...

We're working on a system that can get 0.15" resolution in the optical. And the isoplanatic patch for our technique comes out to about 30". We've got a website at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~optics/Lucky_Web_Site/

Not only is optical interferometry possible in principle, it is possible with todays technology.

Very simply, this aperture synthesis experiment is not the same as being able to resolve a house on the moon, unless the house was emitting radio waves. Optical aperture synthesis is harder, but it has been done, at COAST, among others.

While I can sympathize with you having to read the same objections repeatedly, this information is repeated for a good reason: it is not a part of the public's common understanding of computers and it should be. Common computer users are under threat too even if they don't know it (I refer you to Paul Heckel's threatening Apple Hypercard users with patent infringement if Apple didn't see things his way; RMS talks about it in his talk on the danger of software patents when Heckel attended one of RMS' talks). Read the transcript:

We are not the only ones threatened by software patents. All software developers are threatened by software patents and even software users are threatened by software patents. For instance, Paul Heckel, when Apple wasn't very scared of his threats, he threatened to start suing Apple's customers. Apple found that very scary. They figured they couldn't afford to have their customers being sued like that, even if they would ultimately win. So the users can get sued too, either as a way of attacking a developer or just as a way to squeeze money out of them on their own or to cause mayhem.

I doubt most people know that they could be violating the law even though they are using purchased software. I doubt most people know that some patent-unencumbered alternatives exist (Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3, for example) and work well (even on portable digital music players). We need to repeat these stories and spread awareness of free alternatives so people won't be threatened or lose a patent infringement lawsuit.

The main way to teach people new ideas is through repetition. So it behooves us to repeat the patent horror stories to help the newcomers to the free software community learn why they won't find MP3 encoders or decoders with free software OSes, for instance. It also serves as a reminder why one should use a free software system despite occasional practical difficulties--we want the freedom to share and modify software.

From the Trusted Computing FAQ:

24. So why is this called `Trusted Computing'? I don't see why I should trust it at all!

It's almost an in-joke. In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but just stop to think about it. The mail guard or firewall that stands between a Secret and a Top Secret system can - if it fails - break the security policy that mail should only ever flow from Secret to Top Secret, but never in the other direction. It is therefore trusted to enforce the information flow policy.

Or take a civilian example: suppose you trust your doctor to keep your medical records private. This means that he has access to your records, so he could leak them to the press if he were careless or malicious. You don't trust me to keep your medical records, because I don't have them; regardless of whether I like you or hate you, I can't do anything to affect your policy that your medical records should be confidential. Your doctor can, though; and the fact that he is in a position to harm you is really what is meant (at a system level) when you say that you trust him. You may have a warm feeling about him, or you may just have to trust him because he is the only doctor on the island where you live; no matter, the DoD definition strips away these fuzzy, emotional aspects of `trust' (that can confuse people).

During the late 1990s, as people debated government control over cryptography, Al Gore proposed a `Trusted Third Party' - a service that would keep a copy of your decryption key safe, just in case you (or the FBI, or the NSA) ever needed it. The name was derided as the sort of marketing exercise that saw the Russian colony of East Germany called the `German Democratic Republic'. But it really does chime with DoD thinking. A Trusted Third Party is a third party that can break your security policy.

25. So a `Trusted Computer' is a computer that can break my security?

That's a polite way of putting it.

"Trust" here has nothing to do with you trusting a chip or feeling warm and fuzzy about trust that was earned.

Yeah, paranoia is fun and all, but I wouldn't mind a few links to support the downsides claim.
You'ld think IBM would know better than to associate the word "Trust" with "Technology". That combination is like a buzzword for suspicion to the Tech-wise.

We already have the mark of the beast: the EURion constellation pattern, now found on US dollars.

http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/images/easoe/total_ozo ne.gif

"This is a myth, arising from a misinterpretation of an out-of-context quotation from a review article by Dobson."

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/antarctic /

The Earth is fairly resillient, much more so than we humans are. The Earth will survive just about anything we do to it, but we are at risk. The argument that there are no (or minimal) dangers ignores the fact that skin cancer exists. It ignores the fact that there is a hole in the ozone. The Montreal Protocol has been a major step forward to eliminating/minimizing those chemicals that we know deplete the Ozone layer.

The other thing that may contribute to the Ozone layer growing back would be global warming, as the ozone depletion effect requires very cold temperatures to do the spectacular damage it has done to the pole. (see Univeristy of Cambridge.)

Some interesting facts:

• 1 person dies of melanoma every hour.
• One in five people will develop skin cancer.
• UV exposure increases your risk of going blind, causing cateracts and macular degeneration.

InnerWeb

Here's a PDF detailing the "EURiOn constellation": http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/eurion.pdf

And it's proeminently visible in the $50 back picture of the new US bills.

And it's proeminently visible in the $50 back picture of the new US bills.

Indeed, as a Brit I can confirm that they are on all of our banknotes.

Here's some more info about it.

Maybe you like the Cambridge HTK better, then ;-)

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