No, Hawking radiation involves virtual particle pairs being created near the event horizon of a black hole, just as such pairs are created all the time everywhere (related to quantum physics and indeterminacy, this stuff is fun to work on but tricky to keep straight without hard math). But so close to the black hole, one member of the pair gets pulled in and the other does not. The result is that the member escaping removes energy from the system of the black hole, and the smaller the hole, the more likely such pairs are to be created with one half sucked in and the other not sucked in. The result is that like a lightbulb burning out, the black hole radiates more and more of its own energy as it gets smaller, which is why there aren't lots of small black holes left from the creation of the universe.
But big black holes, such as quasars are suspected to be, radiate energy from nearby matter being pulled in, spun up to ridiculous speeds by the spin of the hole, ripped apart by tidal forces, smashed into other matter as it approaches, and generally turning into fuel for incredibly intense radiation. The more matter fed to it, the brighter it gets, and such matter prevents the black hole from evaporating unless it goes on a serious diet for many, many billions of years.
I was making the distinction between laws written by Congress, and regulations decided on their own by whichever administrator of a regulatory agency happens to be in charge. Regulations are far more easily revised, repealed, created and discarded because they're essentially invented by a small executive group, rather than a large legislative one.
For how regulations are far more easily ignored than laws, take a look at the FDA, the SEC, the DEA, and Department of Commerce's enforcemtns of encryption regulations. Congress does make some of the laws they enforce, but a lot of it is made up by them out of their own internal policies.
It becomes a maintenance and billing problem for the routers or gateways to block such traffic and change the settings on the core routers at the flick of a user interface. That takes some hardware or intelligent design time, right up front where it's difficult to get the money to do.
AOL works around it by having their entire network NAT'ed to save the cost of IP space and block incoming probes, and by trying very hard to force all email to go through their mail systems. Many ISP's also block port 25 but not port 587, so that people off-site from their workplace can reach to an authenticating and stable, traceable SMTP server rather than directly running SMTP servers on their home networks.
You've misunderstood. Many ISP's are now blocking outgoing port 25, to block zombied spam machines on their own networks from being used to send spam and to block email worm attacks from spreading from inside their own networks. Many also block SMB ports for Windows file sharing, for similar reasons.
This is extremely reasonable for home users, who normally wouldn't run a direct mail server anyway. But it's a real burden for someone who runs a laptop and wants to be able to run their own mail server on it and not have to play games as they go from location to location, even if the spam blacklists will block them at most cable or DSL public address ranges.
It's more complex than that. There used to be a regulation in the US Customs department that forbade exporting encryption tools, classifying them as a "munition" or material of war. The result was that OS vendors would put the encryption tools on a separate tape or CD, to be shipped only if you swore on a stack of Constitutions that you were allowed to receive it. For years, the only way to be sure of getting your copy of PGP source code was to download it from Finland, which had no such silly laws.
This got fought in court for years, and was eventually ruled unconstitutional, so the regulation was immediately transferred to the Commerce department, where it is fighting its way through the courts !!!again!!!. In the meantime, the departments involved have relented enough to permit big corporate campaign contributors, like Microsoft and the other OS vendors, to include basic encryption capabilities.
But the US government still would strongly prefer that all such tools have some form of backdoor. That's why they developed the Clipper chip for use in cell phones, which was dropped when it turned out to work well but could be reprogrammed with a genuinely private key with a bit of work, and why the "Trusted Computing" initiative by Microsoft and their peers keeps the master encryption keys in the hands of "authorized distributors", mostly Microsoft. This means you can't use the Trusted Computing chips without someone signing off on your keys because the system won't accept unsigned keys, and that means handing over money to buy a key and identifying yourself so that law enforcement can find you if your key turns up anywhere they don't like it. It also gives a convenient central location to serve with a subpoena to get your keys, without your ever being notified of the subpoena.
Various computer companies are willing to accept the centralized key and subpoena burdens in order to actually get robust encryption and authentication for their tools, but we need to be aware of the little details and their potential for abuse. Trusted Computing won't change the US regulations, but since they're regulations and not law, it's easy for the government to turn a blind eye at its own whim to its export, especially to prevent the general use of more robust or subpoena-safe encryption.
Think again about competitors swooping in. The start-up costs for chip-making are massive: factories that can precision manufacture devices with processes that involve some very toxic chemicals do not come cheap. Even if another small company starts up, the motherboards have to be created, and supported by OS manufacturers, that will run that CPU.
This is exactly what was attempted with the PowerPC architecture, which has basically failed for a number of reasons including Intel's huge market presence and ability to drive down costs on low end chips, and some companies still do with their own CPU's such as Sun, even though Sun's usage of their own CPU's is fading even as we speak.
Also, that "average price per chip" and its discrepancy with the price for the latest, greatest, hottest CPU's leaves out all the CPU's for portable devices, printers, elevators, and other embedded systems that run modest little Intel CPU's. As exciting as the new P4 smoking hot CPU might be, they're vastly outnumbered by the printer CPU's.
There's not even a need for the tinfoil hat. The creeping features of modern cars have actually destabilized their design: the computer systems are so complex, so interwoven into basic functions that a few bits wrong here or a bad solder-joint there can produce absolutely hair-raising debugging problems, or even cause system failures at the worst possible moment.
Remember, computers are vulnerable to various bit errors due to simple thermal noise, electrical noise in an environment as noisy as a car with cell phones, home-wired stereos, corroded alternators, laptops plugged into the 12-volt jack, and even cosmic radiation which cannot be reasonably shielded against. The extra error-checking bits and redundant computation to avoid such errors costs money and consumes power: serious mistakes are going to be made where a computer glitch disables the acceleration or fires an airbag at a very, very bad moment, and it will simply not be possible to trace the bugs back to the computer error if they're not frequent enough.
This is quite true. For systems that do development or web caching, or that don't know what they're going to be doing next such as a typical geek-owned Linux box, I'd recommend against it for the reasons of having such limits on the re-write operation on flash drives.
But for a live CD or a router sending its logs elsewhere, it sounds fabulous.
Replacing disk with flash RAM is not feasible: flash isn't fast enough, and doesn't survive enough re-writes to the same blocks. Various tmp files, web caches, and frequently written logfiles would destroy the flash quite quickly the same way they used to be the most common failure points on hard drives. But for tunning a live DVD image of a full OS where writing to the drive doesn't normally occur, or doing OS installations from a USB drive instead of from a CD, this is absolutely fabulous.
There are some fascinating megnetic storage technologies in the works that might provide easily preserved live OS's that don't need that lengthy "bootstrap" procedure on every boot, but none have yet hit the commercial market.
If he's on slashdot, he's probably not getting any anyway, so heterogenius or homogenius is pretty irrelevant.
Maybe ambigenius if he downloads his pr0n with both hands.
I'm afraid the API's really are not open. They're open only under very restrictive licensing that very specifically prevents the developers from releasing an updated version of the Microsoft tool with the developer's desired features added.
Microsoft has also been caught, repeatedly, including unpublished operations in its kernels and its software that do specific functions much faster than the published API for those functions. It's fraudulent and deceitful and monopolistic to do so, since it's like having a secret back door for your airline that lets your customers skip going through customs, thus making your overall trip time much shorter.
Skype knew this was coming: they have enough people with clues who've worked in telephony and web content providing and dealing with the unconstitutional US government restrictions on the RSA encryption at the core of their technology that their lawyers and techas *must* have thought about it.
Avoiding the political censors is a laudable and reasonable goal, but getting clever this way makes it that much tougher to have a real phone policy in a secure environment where you are *not* supposed to have un-logged phone calls.
By the way, the US export encryption regulations were already ruled unconstutional once, but got transferred to another federal department and are wending their way back through the court challenges once again. Those are what blocked a similar quality encryption that was absolutely end-to-end secure almost 20 years with the PGPPhone published for Macintosh modem users.
They're the wrong kind of solid state for speed, and repeated "write" operations will wear them out far faster than a typical disk.
They're extremely useful for occasional boot use, transferring data, and running an OS like the Knoppix live CD os that writes nothing to the bootable media itself.
You missed an important one. Round-robin DNS doesn't work that way: presented with a set of IP addresses for one hostname, it's almost entirely a client software decision on which IP address to reach out to. Couple that with DNS caching on the clients or their local DNS servers, and round-robin and DNS based failover servers can easily take more than 24 hours to reach even the next IP address of a round-robin set.
You wrote:
Your receivers will be a bank of servers running sendmail. They will do appropriate spam processing to reduce the amount of mail actually received.
That's 2 tasks. This requires absolutely robust, absolutely lightest weight email servers, with serious caching. Sendmail can do it: Postfix can do it, and is vastly easier to manage. The syntax of configuring sendmail configurations is just too arcane for most of us to deal with.
Definitely add blacklist filtering and SPF on the front end, to reduce the load on all your other servers of handling and processing the spam, and very definitely create an SPF record for your own domain: much of your email will be to and from people inside your own domain, and being able to throw out all forgeries and inappropriately sent emails before wasting time on sophisticated virus or spam checking is a huge, huge, huge CPU win.
This is in fact a big enough project that I'd contact Novell: they have support for those hardcase Outlook clients, they have good calendaring for Linux with their latest Evolution email clients and matching servers, and they've worked very hard on things this scale.
I'd give a lot to Dagger in that pretty-white-girl-skimpy outfit, being folded into Cloak's big scary black folds and spurting little white things at people, just so I can laugh like crazy at the mixed sexuality and why people feel so strange at every step watching it.
But it's enough confusing sexuality that it will never, never, never hit the big screen without all the good stuff being ripped clean out.
Not at all. Cap got amazingly good plotlines when his loyalty to the American ideal, and to real human people, was in direct conflict with his "Yes, sir!" attitude towards authority.
Like a really, really honest cop, digging his way out of the resulting mess led to some good stories. I like to think that Cap would vastly enjoy the freeware development world, where we argue like crazy but generally work peacefully as individuals towrds some pretty lofty goals.
You've got it backwards. What would you do if you wanted to invest in a new global market? Cooperate with Chinese demands to hire people there. What would you do if you wanted to hire engineers who are cheaper and more likely to do what they're told? Hire in China and keep the wage pressure on your US engineers. What would you do to avoid negative publicity about blatant off-shorinig? Complain about a lack of US engineers, when the engineers are requiring from the excesses of the dotbombs and starting to demand decent salaries again.
Also, you've missed a critical difference. American workers are more likely to talk back to their managers when they see something stupid or criminal going on. Underpaind Chinese workers getting paid in American dollars, whether on H1B's that can be revoked by being fired or getting paid real American dollars in China are much less likely to talk back.
This is good for management, but bad for software development. Your manager cannot always be expected to know the right technical solutions, he's usually older, goes to too many meetings, and doesn't get a chance to play with the tools and see where they break. I've seen too many imported engineers produce complete crap because they're following the specs of a manager who didn't realize where it would fail, where I had to go in and clean up the mess. And they just went ahead and did it, without saying "I can't do this" or "this won't work" when it was completely obvious even to them it would fail.
Markets don't "decide". They choose, the same way evolution chooses. Some of those choices are very dangerous and imperil other things later on. Then governments become part of that evolution and part of the market, the same way that intelligence has become part of the evolution of smarter species.
That set aside, look for the madness to change quite a lot with the advent of so-called "Trusted Computing", formerly called the Palladium Project by Microsoft. They're working with Intel to get actual encryption/decryption and especially software/hardware authentication right into the CPU itself, and into device controllers. This allows locking out write or read capabilities of DVD drives that haven't had that function unlocked for that particular DVD by the Trusted Computing software, irrelevant of the DVD playback or burning software used. It also gives tremendous control over "Digital Rights Management" of both software and hardware by integrating genuinely robust software unlocking keys with the motherboard or CPU itself. This also means the DRM can be used to detect non-signed boot records or unauthorized hardware or kernels, to attempt to preven the hardware from being used with certain types of emulators or booted with different operating systems.
There are real benefits to the Trusted Computing software: getting a robust and reliable software license, along with the message encryption layer that is built into the mathematical requirements of any good encryption based authentication tool, is useful. But the key handling of it is blatantly aimed at corporate control of user's software, not user protection from unauthorized access, and at least in the announcements Trusted Computing is also aimed at easing government access to private keys.
If the Onion actually wrote something funny, it would be worth it for the surprise value alone. The Onion hasn't written anything funny since the Volkswagen Beetle ad with the Beetle floating on a pond (the orignal Beetle design floated quite well). It had the caption:
"If Teddy Kennedy drove a VW, he would be President".
Please. Rent a clue. It's much cheaper to hire one person to "assist" the police and help them feel "secure" about their own Windows purchases, to leave law enforcement dangling and angry and much more happy to get subpoenas against you and refuse to use your fundamentally insecure products on a governmental level.
There are certainly good people who do such even work: this guy may be one of them. But with Microsoft's long history of patent theft, copyright theft, and major criminal anti-trust behavior, it's clear that Microsoft's focus is ot on protecting its users. This is worsened by Microsoft's history of adding features at the expense of security, including the changes in.NET that caused Peter LaMacchia to reason from the project after writing Microsoft's book on the software.
Slashdot Mirror
The charred plastic bag under his butt had an entirely separate excuse involving Boy Scouts, a supper of burritos, and making smores.
But their jokes are why we inducted them to Slashdot.
No, Hawking radiation involves virtual particle pairs being created near the event horizon of a black hole, just as such pairs are created all the time everywhere (related to quantum physics and indeterminacy, this stuff is fun to work on but tricky to keep straight without hard math). But so close to the black hole, one member of the pair gets pulled in and the other does not. The result is that the member escaping removes energy from the system of the black hole, and the smaller the hole, the more likely such pairs are to be created with one half sucked in and the other not sucked in. The result is that like a lightbulb burning out, the black hole radiates more and more of its own energy as it gets smaller, which is why there aren't lots of small black holes left from the creation of the universe.
But big black holes, such as quasars are suspected to be, radiate energy from nearby matter being pulled in, spun up to ridiculous speeds by the spin of the hole, ripped apart by tidal forces, smashed into other matter as it approaches, and generally turning into fuel for incredibly intense radiation. The more matter fed to it, the brighter it gets, and such matter prevents the black hole from evaporating unless it goes on a serious diet for many, many billions of years.
I was making the distinction between laws written by Congress, and regulations decided on their own by whichever administrator of a regulatory agency happens to be in charge. Regulations are far more easily revised, repealed, created and discarded because they're essentially invented by a small executive group, rather than a large legislative one. For how regulations are far more easily ignored than laws, take a look at the FDA, the SEC, the DEA, and Department of Commerce's enforcemtns of encryption regulations. Congress does make some of the laws they enforce, but a lot of it is made up by them out of their own internal policies.
It becomes a maintenance and billing problem for the routers or gateways to block such traffic and change the settings on the core routers at the flick of a user interface. That takes some hardware or intelligent design time, right up front where it's difficult to get the money to do. AOL works around it by having their entire network NAT'ed to save the cost of IP space and block incoming probes, and by trying very hard to force all email to go through their mail systems. Many ISP's also block port 25 but not port 587, so that people off-site from their workplace can reach to an authenticating and stable, traceable SMTP server rather than directly running SMTP servers on their home networks.
You've misunderstood. Many ISP's are now blocking outgoing port 25, to block zombied spam machines on their own networks from being used to send spam and to block email worm attacks from spreading from inside their own networks. Many also block SMB ports for Windows file sharing, for similar reasons. This is extremely reasonable for home users, who normally wouldn't run a direct mail server anyway. But it's a real burden for someone who runs a laptop and wants to be able to run their own mail server on it and not have to play games as they go from location to location, even if the spam blacklists will block them at most cable or DSL public address ranges.
It's more complex than that. There used to be a regulation in the US Customs department that forbade exporting encryption tools, classifying them as a "munition" or material of war. The result was that OS vendors would put the encryption tools on a separate tape or CD, to be shipped only if you swore on a stack of Constitutions that you were allowed to receive it. For years, the only way to be sure of getting your copy of PGP source code was to download it from Finland, which had no such silly laws.
This got fought in court for years, and was eventually ruled unconstitutional, so the regulation was immediately transferred to the Commerce department, where it is fighting its way through the courts !!!again!!!. In the meantime, the departments involved have relented enough to permit big corporate campaign contributors, like Microsoft and the other OS vendors, to include basic encryption capabilities.
But the US government still would strongly prefer that all such tools have some form of backdoor. That's why they developed the Clipper chip for use in cell phones, which was dropped when it turned out to work well but could be reprogrammed with a genuinely private key with a bit of work, and why the "Trusted Computing" initiative by Microsoft and their peers keeps the master encryption keys in the hands of "authorized distributors", mostly Microsoft. This means you can't use the Trusted Computing chips without someone signing off on your keys because the system won't accept unsigned keys, and that means handing over money to buy a key and identifying yourself so that law enforcement can find you if your key turns up anywhere they don't like it. It also gives a convenient central location to serve with a subpoena to get your keys, without your ever being notified of the subpoena.
Various computer companies are willing to accept the centralized key and subpoena burdens in order to actually get robust encryption and authentication for their tools, but we need to be aware of the little details and their potential for abuse. Trusted Computing won't change the US regulations, but since they're regulations and not law, it's easy for the government to turn a blind eye at its own whim to its export, especially to prevent the general use of more robust or subpoena-safe encryption.
Think again about competitors swooping in. The start-up costs for chip-making are massive: factories that can precision manufacture devices with processes that involve some very toxic chemicals do not come cheap. Even if another small company starts up, the motherboards have to be created, and supported by OS manufacturers, that will run that CPU.
This is exactly what was attempted with the PowerPC architecture, which has basically failed for a number of reasons including Intel's huge market presence and ability to drive down costs on low end chips, and some companies still do with their own CPU's such as Sun, even though Sun's usage of their own CPU's is fading even as we speak.
Also, that "average price per chip" and its discrepancy with the price for the latest, greatest, hottest CPU's leaves out all the CPU's for portable devices, printers, elevators, and other embedded systems that run modest little Intel CPU's. As exciting as the new P4 smoking hot CPU might be, they're vastly outnumbered by the printer CPU's.
"Soylent Diesel is PEOPLE!!!!"
There's not even a need for the tinfoil hat. The creeping features of modern cars have actually destabilized their design: the computer systems are so complex, so interwoven into basic functions that a few bits wrong here or a bad solder-joint there can produce absolutely hair-raising debugging problems, or even cause system failures at the worst possible moment.
Remember, computers are vulnerable to various bit errors due to simple thermal noise, electrical noise in an environment as noisy as a car with cell phones, home-wired stereos, corroded alternators, laptops plugged into the 12-volt jack, and even cosmic radiation which cannot be reasonably shielded against. The extra error-checking bits and redundant computation to avoid such errors costs money and consumes power: serious mistakes are going to be made where a computer glitch disables the acceleration or fires an airbag at a very, very bad moment, and it will simply not be possible to trace the bugs back to the computer error if they're not frequent enough.
This is quite true. For systems that do development or web caching, or that don't know what they're going to be doing next such as a typical geek-owned Linux box, I'd recommend against it for the reasons of having such limits on the re-write operation on flash drives.
But for a live CD or a router sending its logs elsewhere, it sounds fabulous.
Replacing disk with flash RAM is not feasible: flash isn't fast enough, and doesn't survive enough re-writes to the same blocks. Various tmp files, web caches, and frequently written logfiles would destroy the flash quite quickly the same way they used to be the most common failure points on hard drives. But for tunning a live DVD image of a full OS where writing to the drive doesn't normally occur, or doing OS installations from a USB drive instead of from a CD, this is absolutely fabulous.
There are some fascinating megnetic storage technologies in the works that might provide easily preserved live OS's that don't need that lengthy "bootstrap" procedure on every boot, but none have yet hit the commercial market.
If he's on slashdot, he's probably not getting any anyway, so heterogenius or homogenius is pretty irrelevant. Maybe ambigenius if he downloads his pr0n with both hands.
I'm afraid the API's really are not open. They're open only under very restrictive licensing that very specifically prevents the developers from releasing an updated version of the Microsoft tool with the developer's desired features added.
Microsoft has also been caught, repeatedly, including unpublished operations in its kernels and its software that do specific functions much faster than the published API for those functions. It's fraudulent and deceitful and monopolistic to do so, since it's like having a secret back door for your airline that lets your customers skip going through customs, thus making your overall trip time much shorter.
Skype knew this was coming: they have enough people with clues who've worked in telephony and web content providing and dealing with the unconstitutional US government restrictions on the RSA encryption at the core of their technology that their lawyers and techas *must* have thought about it.
Avoiding the political censors is a laudable and reasonable goal, but getting clever this way makes it that much tougher to have a real phone policy in a secure environment where you are *not* supposed to have un-logged phone calls.
By the way, the US export encryption regulations were already ruled unconstutional once, but got transferred to another federal department and are wending their way back through the court challenges once again. Those are what blocked a similar quality encryption that was absolutely end-to-end secure almost 20 years with the PGPPhone published for Macintosh modem users.
They're the wrong kind of solid state for speed, and repeated "write" operations will wear them out far faster than a typical disk.
They're extremely useful for occasional boot use, transferring data, and running an OS like the Knoppix live CD os that writes nothing to the bootable media itself.
You missed an important one. Round-robin DNS doesn't work that way: presented with a set of IP addresses for one hostname, it's almost entirely a client software decision on which IP address to reach out to. Couple that with DNS caching on the clients or their local DNS servers, and round-robin and DNS based failover servers can easily take more than 24 hours to reach even the next IP address of a round-robin set.
You wrote: Your receivers will be a bank of servers running sendmail. They will do appropriate spam processing to reduce the amount of mail actually received. That's 2 tasks. This requires absolutely robust, absolutely lightest weight email servers, with serious caching. Sendmail can do it: Postfix can do it, and is vastly easier to manage. The syntax of configuring sendmail configurations is just too arcane for most of us to deal with. Definitely add blacklist filtering and SPF on the front end, to reduce the load on all your other servers of handling and processing the spam, and very definitely create an SPF record for your own domain: much of your email will be to and from people inside your own domain, and being able to throw out all forgeries and inappropriately sent emails before wasting time on sophisticated virus or spam checking is a huge, huge, huge CPU win. This is in fact a big enough project that I'd contact Novell: they have support for those hardcase Outlook clients, they have good calendaring for Linux with their latest Evolution email clients and matching servers, and they've worked very hard on things this scale.
Use an automatic.
I'd give a lot to Dagger in that pretty-white-girl-skimpy outfit, being folded into Cloak's big scary black folds and spurting little white things at people, just so I can laugh like crazy at the mixed sexuality and why people feel so strange at every step watching it. But it's enough confusing sexuality that it will never, never, never hit the big screen without all the good stuff being ripped clean out.
Not at all. Cap got amazingly good plotlines when his loyalty to the American ideal, and to real human people, was in direct conflict with his "Yes, sir!" attitude towards authority.
Like a really, really honest cop, digging his way out of the resulting mess led to some good stories. I like to think that Cap would vastly enjoy the freeware development world, where we argue like crazy but generally work peacefully as individuals towrds some pretty lofty goals.
You've got it backwards. What would you do if you wanted to invest in a new global market? Cooperate with Chinese demands to hire people there. What would you do if you wanted to hire engineers who are cheaper and more likely to do what they're told? Hire in China and keep the wage pressure on your US engineers. What would you do to avoid negative publicity about blatant off-shorinig? Complain about a lack of US engineers, when the engineers are requiring from the excesses of the dotbombs and starting to demand decent salaries again.
Also, you've missed a critical difference. American workers are more likely to talk back to their managers when they see something stupid or criminal going on. Underpaind Chinese workers getting paid in American dollars, whether on H1B's that can be revoked by being fired or getting paid real American dollars in China are much less likely to talk back.
This is good for management, but bad for software development. Your manager cannot always be expected to know the right technical solutions, he's usually older, goes to too many meetings, and doesn't get a chance to play with the tools and see where they break. I've seen too many imported engineers produce complete crap because they're following the specs of a manager who didn't realize where it would fail, where I had to go in and clean up the mess. And they just went ahead and did it, without saying "I can't do this" or "this won't work" when it was completely obvious even to them it would fail.
Markets don't "decide". They choose, the same way evolution chooses. Some of those choices are very dangerous and imperil other things later on. Then governments become part of that evolution and part of the market, the same way that intelligence has become part of the evolution of smarter species.
That set aside, look for the madness to change quite a lot with the advent of so-called "Trusted Computing", formerly called the Palladium Project by Microsoft. They're working with Intel to get actual encryption/decryption and especially software/hardware authentication right into the CPU itself, and into device controllers. This allows locking out write or read capabilities of DVD drives that haven't had that function unlocked for that particular DVD by the Trusted Computing software, irrelevant of the DVD playback or burning software used. It also gives tremendous control over "Digital Rights Management" of both software and hardware by integrating genuinely robust software unlocking keys with the motherboard or CPU itself. This also means the DRM can be used to detect non-signed boot records or unauthorized hardware or kernels, to attempt to preven the hardware from being used with certain types of emulators or booted with different operating systems.
There are real benefits to the Trusted Computing software: getting a robust and reliable software license, along with the message encryption layer that is built into the mathematical requirements of any good encryption based authentication tool, is useful. But the key handling of it is blatantly aimed at corporate control of user's software, not user protection from unauthorized access, and at least in the announcements Trusted Computing is also aimed at easing government access to private keys.
If the Onion actually wrote something funny, it would be worth it for the surprise value alone. The Onion hasn't written anything funny since the Volkswagen Beetle ad with the Beetle floating on a pond (the orignal Beetle design floated quite well). It had the caption: "If Teddy Kennedy drove a VW, he would be President".
Please. Rent a clue. It's much cheaper to hire one person to "assist" the police and help them feel "secure" about their own Windows purchases, to leave law enforcement dangling and angry and much more happy to get subpoenas against you and refuse to use your fundamentally insecure products on a governmental level.
.NET that caused Peter LaMacchia to reason from the project after writing Microsoft's book on the software.
There are certainly good people who do such even work: this guy may be one of them. But with Microsoft's long history of patent theft, copyright theft, and major criminal anti-trust behavior, it's clear that Microsoft's focus is ot on protecting its users. This is worsened by Microsoft's history of adding features at the expense of security, including the changes in