This is (as far as I know) the very first Trusted Computing platform that we can put our hands on.
Actually TCG hardware has been in deployment for a long time. Search for "TPM" in the specifications of your high-end laptop. But the Xbox 360 is certainly indeed the first wide-scale TC-like platform aimed at reducing the freedom of consumers.
It goes even further, actually: While TC does not claim to provide protection against physical attacks, it looks like the Xbox 360 has the TPM integrated into the CPU in order to protect the platform against its owner.
I'm finding it hard to believe you've finished all the games you own on your current system
Uh ??? It's almost 20 years since I last got stuck in a game (a text-based adventure). I had to learn electronics to build an autofiring joystick and complete a few side-scrolling shooters of the early 1990s, though.
All the recent games are dumbed-down so as not to frustrate customers. Can anyone recommend a challenging one ?
The article says the receiver antenna is 20 feet up. That's still 144 db according to your formula.
Also, the receive antenna is "the size of a small paperback book", which is pretty big when compared to a 900MHz phone. So maybe the transmitter actually is omnidirectional, and it's the receiver that has directional gain.
this is a bit optimistic too because other wireless devices are transmitting there too.
You bet ! If you assume 10 active transmitters per square kilometer in a 29 km radius, then the receiver is getting at least -54 dBm of additional noise, and the theoretical maximum capacity drops from 45 Mbit/s to 50 kbit/s. And that might still be optimistic for a metro/suburban area.
Isn't that an obvious, inherent problem with shared-spectrum modulations ?
As usual the early adopters will get a free ride. Then the bands will get crowded, and customers will have to purchase new technologies on new bands or with more aggressive frequency hopping. See 802.11b versus Bluetooth versus 802.11g in dense office areas.
Of course wideband modulations could still be useful for broadcasting - but it would be totally unfair to compare that with GSM and CDMA/EV-DO.
BTW some textbooks use R^2*(4pi)^2/lambda^2 as the formula for FSL. Dunno which is right, but that would be 120 dB instead of 115. Apart from that, your calculations seem to be correct, and I enjoyed redoing them.
Even more interesting than the photos is this statement at the end of the second article:
ZDNet UK saw that the bitstream vanished when the receiving antenna was moved out of alignment with the distant transmitter
In other words, this is a highly directional transmission. That's why they need a GPS to make the demo work. And when they say "omnidirectional antenna", either they are lying, or they mean it's a phase-array antenna that can be tuned to transmit in any direction (but not all directions).
The bullshit about a revolutionary modulation technique is probably just that. There's no way you can beat state-of-the-art modulations by 1000x.
Oh, and the demo seems to be a one-way transmission. Dunno how hard it is to do a phase-array receiver with the same gain as a phase-array transmitter.
How much does Microsoft clear in profit every month, over one billion dollars?
Well, if you are a profitable business, the only way to evade income tax is to temporarily transfer profits to someone else, right ? Hints:
- License your own patents from an off-shore subsidiary in a tax haven.
- Or get sued by a fellow oligopolist, settle for a huge amount, and make sure you have a secret agreement so they'll return the favour later.
This explanation makes sense in a lot of patent cases, but frankly I don't think this is what's happening between Microsoft and UCLA. In order to repay MS, they'd have to purchase a million copies of Windows.
1. Microsoft provides security software for free.
2. Symantec & al go bankrupt.
3. No more jobs for retired virus writers.
4. Viruses mysteriously disappear.
5. Profit !
And for this to happen, Microsoft doesn't even have to build security software that actually works, it just needs to be free ! Beautiful, isn't it ?
the qualifying rules (...) should have prohibited non-learning systems.
On Judgement Day, you'll fell sorry you wrote that.
Joke aside, what's the difference between a learning system and a non-learning system ? Aren't the DARPA entries already immensely more "intelligent" than factory-floor robots operating in a predictable environment ?
Is a Bayesian algorithm a learning system ? Is it AI ?
Does AI have to be some kind of automagic algorithm that we can't analyze with the concepts of computer science ?
Just make sure the corporate users can only write to their home directory and mount/home with noexec
"mount/home noexec" ? Come on, we are talking about the "other" operating system here.
Since they don't have the root password (this is a corporate environment, remember?)
Yeah, right... Users will boot single-user from a floppy or reinstall Windows the minute they feel corporate security policies are preventing them from doing their job. TCPA prevents that (and other things too, but this is another story).
The IM fone allows you to use your cell phone and its contacts as usual
If this is true, then Bluetooth CTP (Cordless Telephony Profile) must be involved. Last time I checked, no manufacturer was implementing CTP in their mobile phones, and you needed an expensive smartphone and an additional Symbian application to pull this off. Of course telcos prefer to sell their proprietary versions at a premium (e.g. BT Bluephone).
Either that, or it's a hack involving downloading the contacts to the PC over Bluetooth, or maybe even a Java applet.
In any case the hardware is probably just a regular Bluetooth dongle, and you can do it yourself as long as you have a suitable phone.
These "electricity shooting" weapons usually use ultra-violet lasers to ionize a column of air to the target, which acts as a conducting pathway for the electricity.
Well, the guy with the tesla-coil-in-a-suitcase and blinding laser pointer is nowhere near having these high-intensity pulsed UV lasers. The technique is only briefly mentioned at the end of the article.
We'll all have fiber-to-the-home (or at least to the office) by the time grid computing comes of age.
Renderman installed? (at $5k/CPU I highly doubt it).
I'm sure software vendors will be more than happy to adjust their licensing models to any standards-based national grid infrastructure. Especially if the infrastructure does DRM for them.
get approval to send _anything_ out of the studio? You obviously have never worked in the industry.
Indeed. Possible approaches:
In theory, Trusted Computing (TCPA/TCG) could allow customers to ensure that their tasks are running on secure grid servers. "Secure" means secure against software attacks. You could use some kind of anonymizing front-end to make it hard for anyone to find out which servers they should target. Does your threat model include movie pirates plugging logic analyzers into millions of servers hosted in nuclear-plant-like data centers ?
Have the servers process your data in encrypted/obscured/anonymized form. Might not work for rendering, but there are plenty of applications where it would help.
you can never have a universal "CPU grid"
I bet Sun's answer begins with the letter J.
If that's not fast enough, think virtualized operating systems. And for any compute-intensive project, the overhead of cross-compiling for a few architectures would be negligible. I once had to throw away several cpu-days of Povray output though, because the pseudo-random textures didn't come out the same across all platforms.
As expected most comments about "who's gonna pay for this" and "it's cheaper to run your own server".
But think about business models where the grid provider sells not only CPU cycles, but also trust.
Scalable web hosting: Your PHP code is replicated on-demand to as many grid server as needed to handle your peak loads. The grid provider guarantees that server-side code and data remains confidential. End of the slashdot effect as we know it.
MMORPG: Small startups can deploy worldwide networks of game servers in no time and compete with the big boys.
The next Google: Anyone with a smarter search algorithm can go online without investing in huge datacenter first.
Rendering farm: Your CG movie is due to premiere next month, and your 10,000-node rendering farm can complete the job in time. Wouldn't you pay extra $$ to anyone who can save the day and guarantee that screenshots won't be leaked to the Net ?
Combine this with a micropayment infrastructure where the grid provider sends bills to end-users on behalf of the service provider. Huge potential.
Counsel: Hey Steve, Bill says he 0wns our iPod and he wants $1 billion.
CEO: Damn, let's fight back. Isn't that your job, by the way ?
Counsel: Well, they just litigated this small phony company to death, so their patent must be valid.
CEO: Nooooooooo, we're screwed.
Counsel: Oh wait, Bill's lawyer is my old friend Bob, we were in law school together, so he's willing to settle for just $100 million.
CEO: Phew, it's good to have you on board. I'll tell the good news to our shareolders.
Later...
Counsel: Hey Bob, the deal is done. See you at the club next weekend.
(Any resemblance to existing persons and companies blah blah)
What's the difference between licensing a bogus patent for millions and using invoice fraud to get money out of your company ?
Someday corporate officers will be held accountable for these monetary diversions.
Due to technical constraints, the Xbox designers had to implement a secure virtual machine in 175 bytes of x86 code, and failed (there are at least two execution paths leading out of the sandbox). But congratulations for trying.
They also used a non-cryptographically-secure hash function for authentication (or maybe they didn't have enough space left).
Nice attempt at a TCPA-like architecture, though. And cheers to the xbox-linux guys for their amazing achievements and enlightening write-up.
Interesting. But if I understand correctly, the PrivEK is useless without the matching PubEK.
So if manufacturers are not providing the endorsement certificates either to the user or directly to the media companies, it doesn't matter if there is a PrivEK. The only thing you can do with the chip is reset it to generate a new PubEK/PrivEK pair. That's still useful for securing your own computer, or for a corporate security infrastructure, but not for DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually TCG hardware has been in deployment for a long time. Search for "TPM" in the specifications of your high-end laptop. But the Xbox 360 is certainly indeed the first wide-scale TC-like platform aimed at reducing the freedom of consumers.
It goes even further, actually: While TC does not claim to provide protection against physical attacks, it looks like the Xbox 360 has the TPM integrated into the CPU in order to protect the platform against its owner.
Uh ??? It's almost 20 years since I last got stuck in a game (a text-based adventure). I had to learn electronics to build an autofiring joystick and complete a few side-scrolling shooters of the early 1990s, though.
All the recent games are dumbed-down so as not to frustrate customers. Can anyone recommend a challenging one ?
AC
Also, the receive antenna is "the size of a small paperback book", which is pretty big when compared to a 900MHz phone. So maybe the transmitter actually is omnidirectional, and it's the receiver that has directional gain.
AC
You bet ! If you assume 10 active transmitters per square kilometer in a 29 km radius, then the receiver is getting at least -54 dBm of additional noise, and the theoretical maximum capacity drops from 45 Mbit/s to 50 kbit/s. And that might still be optimistic for a metro/suburban area.
Isn't that an obvious, inherent problem with shared-spectrum modulations ?
As usual the early adopters will get a free ride. Then the bands will get crowded, and customers will have to purchase new technologies on new bands or with more aggressive frequency hopping. See 802.11b versus Bluetooth versus 802.11g in dense office areas.
Of course wideband modulations could still be useful for broadcasting - but it would be totally unfair to compare that with GSM and CDMA/EV-DO.
BTW some textbooks use R^2*(4pi)^2/lambda^2 as the formula for FSL. Dunno which is right, but that would be 120 dB instead of 115. Apart from that, your calculations seem to be correct, and I enjoyed redoing them.
AC
Excellent point. But does CDMA EV-DO use directional antennas too ?
AC
Nothing: The journalist reveals that the transmission is highly directional. You could beat that with laser-based communications.
AC
ZDNet UK saw that the bitstream vanished when the receiving antenna was moved out of alignment with the distant transmitter
In other words, this is a highly directional transmission. That's why they need a GPS to make the demo work. And when they say "omnidirectional antenna", either they are lying, or they mean it's a phase-array antenna that can be tuned to transmit in any direction (but not all directions).
The bullshit about a revolutionary modulation technique is probably just that. There's no way you can beat state-of-the-art modulations by 1000x.
Oh, and the demo seems to be a one-way transmission. Dunno how hard it is to do a phase-array receiver with the same gain as a phase-array transmitter.
In other words - nothing new here.
AC
Well, if you are a profitable business, the only way to evade income tax is to temporarily transfer profits to someone else, right ? Hints:
- License your own patents from an off-shore subsidiary in a tax haven.
- Or get sued by a fellow oligopolist, settle for a huge amount, and make sure you have a secret agreement so they'll return the favour later.
This explanation makes sense in a lot of patent cases, but frankly I don't think this is what's happening between Microsoft and UCLA. In order to repay MS, they'd have to purchase a million copies of Windows.
AC
Even their recent patenting frenzy can't protect them against people who have nothing to loose.
Microsoft could definitely die from a thousand small wounds (and a 500 million US$ lawsuit is not a small wound, even for them).
AC
1. Microsoft provides security software for free.
2. Symantec & al go bankrupt.
3. No more jobs for retired virus writers.
4. Viruses mysteriously disappear.
5. Profit !
And for this to happen, Microsoft doesn't even have to build security software that actually works, it just needs to be free ! Beautiful, isn't it ?
On Judgement Day, you'll fell sorry you wrote that.
Joke aside, what's the difference between a learning system and a non-learning system ? Aren't the DARPA entries already immensely more "intelligent" than factory-floor robots operating in a predictable environment ?
Is a Bayesian algorithm a learning system ? Is it AI ?
Does AI have to be some kind of automagic algorithm that we can't analyze with the concepts of computer science ?
"mount /home noexec" ? Come on, we are talking about the "other" operating system here.
Since they don't have the root password (this is a corporate environment, remember?)
Yeah, right... Users will boot single-user from a floppy or reinstall Windows the minute they feel corporate security policies are preventing them from doing their job. TCPA prevents that (and other things too, but this is another story).
Hence the technology formerly known as TCPA.
Well, I had much more fun with Minerva and Antlion Troopers, but I would agree those are not so much mods as sophisticated maps and scripting.
If this is true, then Bluetooth CTP (Cordless Telephony Profile) must be involved. Last time I checked, no manufacturer was implementing CTP in their mobile phones, and you needed an expensive smartphone and an additional Symbian application to pull this off. Of course telcos prefer to sell their proprietary versions at a premium (e.g. BT Bluephone).
Either that, or it's a hack involving downloading the contacts to the PC over Bluetooth, or maybe even a Java applet.
In any case the hardware is probably just a regular Bluetooth dongle, and you can do it yourself as long as you have a suitable phone.
Well, the guy with the tesla-coil-in-a-suitcase and blinding laser pointer is nowhere near having these high-intensity pulsed UV lasers. The technique is only briefly mentioned at the end of the article.
The "laser lightning rod" was patented in 1992.
Well, there is more footage from Star Wars than anything else in this video. You probably saw a cheap SW1 prop.
We'll all have fiber-to-the-home (or at least to the office) by the time grid computing comes of age.
Renderman installed? (at $5k/CPU I highly doubt it).
I'm sure software vendors will be more than happy to adjust their licensing models to any standards-based national grid infrastructure. Especially if the infrastructure does DRM for them.
get approval to send _anything_ out of the studio? You obviously have never worked in the industry.
Indeed. Possible approaches:
you can never have a universal "CPU grid"
I bet Sun's answer begins with the letter J.
If that's not fast enough, think virtualized operating systems. And for any compute-intensive project, the overhead of cross-compiling for a few architectures would be negligible. I once had to throw away several cpu-days of Povray output though, because the pseudo-random textures didn't come out the same across all platforms.
I won't care until they starting calling themselves "ministry of love" or something like that.
But think about business models where the grid provider sells not only CPU cycles, but also trust.
Scalable web hosting: Your PHP code is replicated on-demand to as many grid server as needed to handle your peak loads. The grid provider guarantees that server-side code and data remains confidential. End of the slashdot effect as we know it.
MMORPG: Small startups can deploy worldwide networks of game servers in no time and compete with the big boys.
The next Google: Anyone with a smarter search algorithm can go online without investing in huge datacenter first.
Rendering farm: Your CG movie is due to premiere next month, and your 10,000-node rendering farm can complete the job in time. Wouldn't you pay extra $$ to anyone who can save the day and guarantee that screenshots won't be leaked to the Net ?
Combine this with a micropayment infrastructure where the grid provider sends bills to end-users on behalf of the service provider. Huge potential.
AC
CEO: Damn, let's fight back. Isn't that your job, by the way ?
Counsel: Well, they just litigated this small phony company to death, so their patent must be valid.
CEO: Nooooooooo, we're screwed.
Counsel: Oh wait, Bill's lawyer is my old friend Bob, we were in law school together, so he's willing to settle for just $100 million.
CEO: Phew, it's good to have you on board. I'll tell the good news to our shareolders.
Later...
Counsel: Hey Bob, the deal is done. See you at the club next weekend.
(Any resemblance to existing persons and companies blah blah)
What's the difference between licensing a bogus patent for millions and using invoice fraud to get money out of your company ?
Someday corporate officers will be held accountable for these monetary diversions.
Nice attempt at a TCPA-like architecture, though. And cheers to the xbox-linux guys for their amazing achievements and enlightening write-up.
Well, it is definitely a solution for the happy few who can leave.
Oh wait, the TPM spec version 1.2 says:
So we are screwed.
Interesting. But if I understand correctly, the PrivEK is useless without the matching PubEK.
So if manufacturers are not providing the endorsement certificates either to the user or directly to the media companies, it doesn't matter if there is a PrivEK. The only thing you can do with the chip is reset it to generate a new PubEK/PrivEK pair. That's still useful for securing your own computer, or for a corporate security infrastructure, but not for DRM.
AC