It seems to me as if this whole argument is based on the "fact" that the original crack was done against Xing technologies' software, which "prohibits reverse engineering". Does this not hinge on whether or not EULAs are enforceable?? AFAIK (and please correct me if I'm wrong), EULAs are _not_ enforceable, since they state something like since you opened the box and are running the install program, you have obviously agreed to the following....
Of course you are free to return the **unopened** software package to the retailer for a full refund... "Uh.. Yeah.. I wanted to return this software because I don't agree with the EULA... (... explanation to clerk what the heck an EULA is...) Yeah, I know it's open, but I had to do that to view the agreement... What do you mean I can't return opened software!?!"
So the defendant's major fact basically gets nullified since EULAs are not enforceable?? Am I making a logical mistake here (can you spot the fallacy:) )??
TheJet
P.S. Keep in mind that IANAL, so my comments amount to little more than raving lunacy as far as the US Justice system is concerned...
Just to let everyone know that the exciting thing about this chip is that it is made using the new.18u process. Yes, that means less heat and better OC possibilities abound!!
I may be just me, but I am waiting to see what KryoTech can pull off with this baby!
It's interesting that SharkyExtreme would post a review using the i820 (not available to the general public), and not use the GeForce256 DDR (also not available yet). It seems that if you are going to benchmark on a yet unavailable platform, you might as well not cripple the GeForce256 by forcing it to use SDRAM. This is especially apparent in the higher-resolution benchmarks, the GeForce simply doesn't have the memory bandwidth it was designed for with the SDRAM.
Secondly, as was pointed out in the article, the MAXX is not a truly revolutionary product, rather it seems more like a band-aid to aging graphics technology. While I applaud the use of the parallel processors, I would rather see them produce a decent chip in the first place. I mean imagine if you strapped 2 GeForce256 chips together, can you say 960MPxls/s??
I have two complaints, 1) That the "new" board does not contain T&L (obvious, since it is using an older chip), and 2) that the GeForce could even begin to stand up against it in any benchmarks at all.
Just thought I would bring this up as another possible contradiction. I recall that in the early 80's (at least in the church my parents went to at the time), there was a big furor about the D&D games providing a short road to satanism. This is the same mentality that the most vocal Christians (not necessarily the majority) attest to about 'Quake'ish games today.
I see this as the classic if you can't beat 'em-join 'em mentality. When it was decided that things like rock music were 'unholy' or 'unethical' eventually the pop culture forced Christianity (and I don't speak of other religions because I just don't have experience there) to adapt and produce rock musicians singing about Christian themes.
Again as others have said, the idea of killing is far from new as far as Christians are concerned, so I see these types of games as a logical extension of Christianity into realms they just haven't ventured into yet.
Let's face it, there aren't going to be any ultra-christian grandmothers fraggin' the devils. In my mind the only thing these types of games are going to do is provide well-meaning (if not well-thinking) parents an alternative to Quake for their kids. Now do parents actually think that have kids run around killing devils is better than killing mutant aliens?? I sincerely doubt it, but it provides them with an easy rationalization.
Sorry, I'll have to cut myself off now, I am babbling. Let's just hope that the open-minded will maintain and expand their leadership over the world's religions. The last thing we need are more zealots prancing around.
Let me assume that the government chooses to break up M$ (I am not sure this is the best idea, but we'll just leave that out for now). I won't even try to assume what divisions that it would be broken up into.
Why not enforce the standard code licensing that most companies use, force M$ to open its code to everyone on equal ground. If they want to be able to give people access to the WinNT codebase, then they have to make it a publicly available option (i.e. no special prices to other M$ companies/divisions). So if Netscape/RedHat wanted to take a look into the Windows code they would pay the same licensing fee that everyone else does (including other M$ divisions/corporations). It wouldn't be open source, but it would level the playing field, there would be no more favoritism for M$ apps running in Windows.
Of course the hard part of this plan would be making sure that M$ doesn't do anything underhanded (like that's never happened before...)
Speaking as one who has been a part of the on-line education craze, I welcome? Microsoft's involvement. I say this because it scares me whenever Microsoft becomes involved and the word "patent" comes into play. Could this mean that Microsoft is trying to move to patent on-line education (or parts of it). I think about the only thing worse than software patents are Internet software patents.
Will Microsoft again try to propriatize something that doesn't belong to them?? I am growing afraid that the answer is a resounding YES.
I hold out a lonely hopeful flame however, maybe with Microsoft's involvement in EDUCAUSE, there can be some sort of collaboration to make both the IMS standard (one of EDUCAUSE's offerings to the on-line education arena) and on-line education in general more accessible to everyone. The field really needed some big bucks from somewhere to get it a kick in the pants, unfortunately (or so it seems) that money came from the reigning king of closed non-standards.
Please Microsoft, for once, do the right thing and make on-line education an open (and thus pervasive) standard.
Make sure that all your OS information can fit into ~8GB (this translates to cylinder 1024 for most HDs) of space.
Create FreeBSD install floppies (probably 3.3-RELEASE is a good one)
Start the FreeBSD install, ignore the kernel config (if you don't have special hardware), then choose "Custom" from the initial menu. Then choose "Partition" to partition your drive.
Create 2 partitions (you choose the size (~250MB each)), for Win95 and Win98 (3 partitions if you want Win98SE also). They should be created as FAT partitions (can't recall the number, but I think it will tell you).
Type "W" (can't see this menu choice, but it's there). It will warn you, but write the changes anyway.
Reboot and use a Win95 boot floppy
Open FDisk and verify that the two partitions are there. If they aren't, you did something wrong, try again with step 2. If they are, then format drive C: and run the Win95 Setup.
Reboot _2_ times after the Win95 install is done (you should only need one, but try 2 anyway)
Reboot with a Win98 setup disk and format drive D:. Then run Win98 Setup.
Reboot _2_ times after Win98 install is completed (again, one should do, but do it twice)
Repeat last two steps for Win98SE if desired. (Exchanging D: with E:)
Reboot with WinNT boot disks (WKS or SVR)
Run through the WinNT install creating a brand new partition (in the "Unpartitioned Space")for each installation of WinNT SVR/WKS. Note: These partitions should also be ~250MB each, and You don't have to have the same size pagefile as RAM, you'll need at least 2MB of pagefile on the boot drive and that's it.
Reboot a few times and ensure that NT is working.
Now Reboot with FreeBSD installation disks again. This time run through the Entire Install creating a brand new FreeBSD partition after all the others (make sure that it stays within the first 8GB of space). When it asks you to provide a boot manager, choose the "BootEasy" choice.
Commit all the changes (If you so choose, you can even abort the FreeBSD installation after the drives have been formatted and the stuff downloads ( I've never actually aborted it at this point, but I believe the MBR has been written at that point ).)
Congratulations, you now have a working multi-OS setup. When the computer reboots, you should just choose the OS you want to run (keep in mind that Win9x will show up as DOS in the menu, and I think NT shows up as ??, so it would be a good idea to write down which OS's correspond to which F? keys. Hint: It goes in the order that the partitions are, so partition 1 is F1, partition 2 is F2, etc...
Linux users will be happy to know that you can also install Linux before FreeBSD and FreeBSD's bootloader will catch them all (not sure how Linux shows up in the BootEasy menu, I can't remember).
A texel (which fillrate is measured in) is different than a pixel.
But are not texels just textured pixels? My point was that you don't get extra texels/pixels if you add more triangles.
Thanks for pointing out the difference though, it does make a difference if you say that one card can push through 4 texels/cycle and another can do 2 texels/cycle. I am going under the assumption that 3dfx is also going to do 4 pixel pipelines as nVidia does.
Whether or not hardware T&L is of any benefit to current or future games is yet to be seen though. Games lately have been getting more and more fillrate bound and less geometry bound, as game creators take advantage of higher resolutions and larger textures.
This is because in the past the CPU has been the limiting factor. Developers were forced to limit the triangle count and rely on large textures to make games realistic. With the triangle limit somewhat lifted, you can use smaller textures to produce the same (and better) effects.
The GeForce also introduces a new feature, cube environment mapping, that allows for more realistic, real-time reflections in games.
Similar to the Matrox G400's env mapped bump mapping but not quite the same
This is actually not the case, while the GeForce does support bump mapping (I think dot product??) the cube environment mapping has to do with clipping out reflections that shouldn't be there due to obstructions, and basically making the scene more like it would be in real life.
limit of 8 lights in hardware (what happens when a scene requires more than eight? They don't say.. hmmm......)
The same that has been done in the past, render in software.
Basically nVidia is gambling with hardware geometry. The gamble is, that future host cpu's (Pentium-4's or whatever) will not be able to beat them in doing transformation and lighting, and that if they don't, gamers are going to really even benefit from T&L. We'll see if that pans out. Unless they have a very sophisticated ALU on that chip, it will doubtlessly only speed up certain types of scenes. (We've all seen the "tree" demo).
They are _not_ gambling at all, this is going to be a feature that is _very_ important to games in the future (listen to Carmack if you don't believe me). nVidia is just hoping that developers will pick it up sooner rather than later. Secondly the whole point of T&L is _not_ to outdo your CPU, but to free up the CPU for other things (i.e. AI, 3D sound, etc.). This would allow for much more immersive games than are currently available (and then would be available if you stick to fillrate only). Secondly (and please someone correct me if I am mistaken) the GeForce 256 has _more_ transistors than the Pentium III's!! A geometry engine is built to handle any scene you throw at it, and (because it is so specialized) can probably out-render any CPU available today (and probably for the next 6-8 months). Plus the whole point is to make it so the CPU doesn't have to worry about geometry calculations (which is always a "Good Thing")
I think this card will perform as advertised. Unfortunately, software must be written specifically to take advantage of the hardware and there is no way to test this at the moment.
Actually OpenGL has had support for onboard T&L for quite some time. When these guys are developing these games, you can bet that their rigs have boards with T&L (If they aren't a poor startup).
What will be interesting in the future, will be the test results of the Voodoo4 (or whatever it will be called). This card should be able to do more with a lower framerate due to it's support of motion blur.
If you are talking about T-Buffer technology, you may be grossly overestimating its power. In the demos that I have seen (and granted, these are 3dfx demos and they are nasty, why wouldn't a company trying to sell its product produce decent demos to show it off???, but I digress) all your motion blur will get you is a loss framerate since your CPU has to fill the T-Buffer with x images, which then get blended to produce the effect. While it may look purdy, it is going to require one hell of a CPU to pull it off. I think the fullscene anti-aliasing is going to be the selling point on that board.
I think something that will be interesting to point out is that 3dfx has done a really good job at throwing their marketing prowess at consumers with in respect to the GeForce 256. While I don't quite believe everything that nVidia says, I find it hard not to support them when 3dfx has gone so far out of their way to make nVidia look bad. I will paraquote a developer (can't remember his name):
3dfx has tried to convince users that somehow a higher triangle count amounts to needing a higher fillrate. This is completely untrue, a scene with 5000 triangles at 1024x768x32 has the exact same _pixel_ count as the same scene rendered with 1,000,000 triangles. So why not use onboard T&L to up the triangle count if it costs you nothing in terms of fillrate?
What makes you think this is possible? By storing the private key in hardware, it becomes impossible to access via software.
I will state that all things (this is stated liberally, I am sure that I am wrong in certain cases) that has to do with hardware can be discerned/extracted using software. Even if it means writing your own OS to do it. With the rampant presence of Virii on the Net today, who is to say that someone can't grab your private key from the hardware and send it to Joe Schmoe's email address?? Even if it couldn't be reached in this fashion, anyone with access to the computer you use could access your key (unlike PGP where a password is required).
Uhh, the same way that people do it today with software encryption products (like PGP). Just pass out your new public key and stop using the old key pair.
I grant this, and have misstated my objection. What I meant to say was how could those people downstream know that this is a legit new key, and not one that someone bogusly generated to pretend to be you. Plus, being able to replace your key would imply a software interface to modify the hardware, which would make the system intrinsically insecure.
You assume that this chip can be "upgraded". It's quite likely that this chip is entirely hardware-based. No "flash" upgrade at all. That would leave it open to the attack you mentioned. The whole idea is to keep the chip completely isolated from software.
I don't know of a method to keep a chip completely isolated from software. There must be some software interface or the hardware couldn't talk with the servers to perform the encryption. Plus as stated above, you can always access hardware from software (again being liberal).
Will we be able to tweak the transcoding process? Since _no one_ can know the one-best solution for every enterprise, will it be possible to tweak the output of such a transcoder to your application?? Or possibly modify the IBM-supplied defaults for each browser type??
Will the framework be available as an API (or preferably an open standard), so that in the future programs (RealEncoder, generator, etc..) could be written to automatically include information in their output for specific formats (i.e. text-only, audio-only, mixed).
This could be a huge step forward, especially in the days of PCS-based browsers, but can it be done in such a way as to not lock a company down to a specific vendor??
So are they planning on storing a "private" key in hardware??
1. What happens if your key gets compromised??
2. Are they going to have software which allows you to regenerate a private key?? How are you going to be able to communicate to the powers that be that your key has changed, and not only that, you could just change your key and all your new transmissions would be unreadable...
3. Better yet, J. Smith over here invents a utility to reflash the chip with an arbitrary "identifier" and people can now pose as you:(...
Is this type of thing ever going to become a feature that anyone wants?? And even if people wanted it, how could you possibly make it more secure than a software based solution??
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me as if this whole argument is based on the "fact" that the original crack was done against Xing technologies' software, which "prohibits reverse engineering". Does this not hinge on whether or not EULAs are enforceable?? AFAIK (and please correct me if I'm wrong), EULAs are _not_ enforceable, since they state something like since you opened the box and are running the install program, you have obviously agreed to the following....
...) Yeah, I know it's open, but I had to do that to view the agreement... What do you mean I can't return opened software!?!"
:) )??
Of course you are free to return the **unopened** software package to the retailer for a full refund... "Uh.. Yeah.. I wanted to return this software because I don't agree with the EULA... (... explanation to clerk what the heck an EULA is
So the defendant's major fact basically gets nullified since EULAs are not enforceable?? Am I making a logical mistake here (can you spot the fallacy
TheJet
P.S. Keep in mind that IANAL, so my comments amount to little more than raving lunacy as far as the US Justice system is concerned...
Hey everyone,
.18u process. Yes, that means less heat and better OC possibilities abound!!
Just to let everyone know that the exciting thing about this chip is that it is made using the new
I may be just me, but I am waiting to see what KryoTech can pull off with this baby!
TheJet
It's interesting that SharkyExtreme would post a review using the i820 (not available to the general public), and not use the GeForce256 DDR (also not available yet). It seems that if you are going to benchmark on a yet unavailable platform, you might as well not cripple the GeForce256 by forcing it to use SDRAM. This is especially apparent in the higher-resolution benchmarks, the GeForce simply doesn't have the memory bandwidth it was designed for with the SDRAM.
Secondly, as was pointed out in the article, the MAXX is not a truly revolutionary product, rather it seems more like a band-aid to aging graphics technology. While I applaud the use of the parallel processors, I would rather see them produce a decent chip in the first place. I mean imagine if you strapped 2 GeForce256 chips together, can you say 960MPxls/s??
I have two complaints, 1) That the "new" board does not contain T&L (obvious, since it is using an older chip), and 2) that the GeForce could even begin to stand up against it in any benchmarks at all.
Just my $.01,
TheJet
Hey all,
Just thought I would bring this up as another possible contradiction. I recall that in the early 80's (at least in the church my parents went to at the time), there was a big furor about the D&D games providing a short road to satanism. This is the same mentality that the most vocal Christians (not necessarily the majority) attest to about 'Quake'ish games today.
I see this as the classic if you can't beat 'em-join 'em mentality. When it was decided that things like rock music were 'unholy' or 'unethical' eventually the pop culture forced Christianity (and I don't speak of other religions because I just don't have experience there) to adapt and produce rock musicians singing about Christian themes.
Again as others have said, the idea of killing is far from new as far as Christians are concerned, so I see these types of games as a logical extension of Christianity into realms they just haven't ventured into yet.
Let's face it, there aren't going to be any ultra-christian grandmothers fraggin' the devils. In my mind the only thing these types of games are going to do is provide well-meaning (if not well-thinking) parents an alternative to Quake for their kids. Now do parents actually think that have kids run around killing devils is better than killing mutant aliens?? I sincerely doubt it, but it provides them with an easy rationalization.
Sorry, I'll have to cut myself off now, I am babbling. Let's just hope that the open-minded will maintain and expand their leadership over the world's religions. The last thing we need are more zealots prancing around.
TheJet
Let me assume that the government chooses to break up M$ (I am not sure this is the best idea, but we'll just leave that out for now). I won't even try to assume what divisions that it would be broken up into.
Why not enforce the standard code licensing that most companies use, force M$ to open its code to everyone on equal ground. If they want to be able to give people access to the WinNT codebase, then they have to make it a publicly available option (i.e. no special prices to other M$ companies/divisions). So if Netscape/RedHat wanted to take a look into the Windows code they would pay the same licensing fee that everyone else does (including other M$ divisions/corporations). It wouldn't be open source, but it would level the playing field, there would be no more favoritism for M$ apps running in Windows.
Of course the hard part of this plan would be making sure that M$ doesn't do anything underhanded (like that's never happened before...)
Hey all, Does anyone know if the Oct. 9th Python stuff will be carried by anybody in the US (save satellite-only stuff)?? I would hate to miss it...
Thanks
Speaking as one who has been a part of the on-line education craze, I welcome? Microsoft's involvement. I say this because it scares me whenever Microsoft becomes involved and the word "patent" comes into play. Could this mean that Microsoft is trying to move to patent on-line education (or parts of it). I think about the only thing worse than software patents are Internet software patents.
Will Microsoft again try to propriatize something that doesn't belong to them?? I am growing afraid that the answer is a resounding YES.
I hold out a lonely hopeful flame however, maybe with Microsoft's involvement in EDUCAUSE, there can be some sort of collaboration to make both the IMS standard (one of EDUCAUSE's offerings to the on-line education arena) and on-line education in general more accessible to everyone. The field really needed some big bucks from somewhere to get it a kick in the pants, unfortunately (or so it seems) that money came from the reigning king of closed non-standards.
Please Microsoft, for once, do the right thing and make on-line education an open (and thus pervasive) standard.
Make sure that all your OS information can fit into ~8GB (this translates to cylinder 1024 for most HDs) of space.
Create FreeBSD install floppies (probably 3.3-RELEASE is a good one)
Start the FreeBSD install, ignore the kernel config (if you don't have special hardware), then choose "Custom" from the initial menu. Then choose "Partition" to partition your drive.
Create 2 partitions (you choose the size (~250MB each)), for Win95 and Win98 (3 partitions if you want Win98SE also). They should be created as FAT partitions (can't recall the number, but I think it will tell you).
Type "W" (can't see this menu choice, but it's there). It will warn you, but write the changes anyway.
Reboot and use a Win95 boot floppy
Open FDisk and verify that the two partitions are there. If they aren't, you did something wrong, try again with step 2. If they are, then format drive C: and run the Win95 Setup.
Reboot _2_ times after the Win95 install is done (you should only need one, but try 2 anyway)
Reboot with a Win98 setup disk and format drive D:. Then run Win98 Setup.
Reboot _2_ times after Win98 install is completed (again, one should do, but do it twice)
Repeat last two steps for Win98SE if desired. (Exchanging D: with E:)
Reboot with WinNT boot disks (WKS or SVR)
Run through the WinNT install creating a brand new partition (in the "Unpartitioned Space")for each installation of WinNT SVR/WKS. Note: These partitions should also be ~250MB each, and You don't have to have the same size pagefile as RAM, you'll need at least 2MB of pagefile on the boot drive and that's it.
Reboot a few times and ensure that NT is working.
Now Reboot with FreeBSD installation disks again. This time run through the Entire Install creating a brand new FreeBSD partition after all the others (make sure that it stays within the first 8GB of space). When it asks you to provide a boot manager, choose the "BootEasy" choice.
Commit all the changes (If you so choose, you can even abort the FreeBSD installation after the drives have been formatted and the stuff downloads ( I've never actually aborted it at this point, but I believe the MBR has been written at that point ).)
Congratulations, you now have a working multi-OS setup. When the computer reboots, you should just choose the OS you want to run (keep in mind that Win9x will show up as DOS in the menu, and I think NT shows up as ??, so it would be a good idea to write down which OS's correspond to which F? keys. Hint: It goes in the order that the partitions are, so partition 1 is F1, partition 2 is F2, etc...
Linux users will be happy to know that you can also install Linux before FreeBSD and FreeBSD's bootloader will catch them all (not sure how Linux shows up in the BootEasy menu, I can't remember).
A texel (which fillrate is measured in) is different than a pixel.
But are not texels just textured pixels? My point was that you don't get extra texels/pixels if you add more triangles.
Thanks for pointing out the difference though, it does make a difference if you say that one card can push through 4 texels/cycle and another can do 2 texels/cycle. I am going under the assumption that 3dfx is also going to do 4 pixel pipelines as nVidia does.
Whether or not hardware T&L is of any benefit to current or future games is yet to be seen though. Games lately have been getting more and more fillrate bound and less geometry bound, as game creators take advantage of higher resolutions and larger textures.
This is because in the past the CPU has been the limiting factor. Developers were forced to limit the triangle count and rely on large textures to make games realistic. With the triangle limit somewhat lifted, you can use smaller textures to produce the same (and better) effects.
The GeForce also introduces a new feature, cube environment mapping, that allows for more realistic, real-time reflections in games.
Similar to the Matrox G400's env mapped bump mapping but not quite the same
This is actually not the case, while the GeForce does support bump mapping (I think dot product??) the cube environment mapping has to do with clipping out reflections that shouldn't be there due to obstructions, and basically making the scene more like it would be in real life.
limit of 8 lights in hardware (what happens when a scene requires more than eight? They don't say.. hmmm......)
The same that has been done in the past, render in software.
Basically nVidia is gambling with hardware geometry. The gamble is, that future host cpu's (Pentium-4's or whatever) will not be able to beat them in doing transformation and lighting, and that if they don't, gamers are going to really even benefit from T&L. We'll see if that pans out. Unless they have a very sophisticated ALU on that chip, it will doubtlessly only speed up certain types of scenes. (We've all seen the "tree" demo).
They are _not_ gambling at all, this is going to be a feature that is _very_ important to games in the future (listen to Carmack if you don't believe me). nVidia is just hoping that developers will pick it up sooner rather than later. Secondly the whole point of T&L is _not_ to outdo your CPU, but to free up the CPU for other things (i.e. AI, 3D sound, etc.). This would allow for much more immersive games than are currently available (and then would be available if you stick to fillrate only). Secondly (and please someone correct me if I am mistaken) the GeForce 256 has _more_ transistors than the Pentium III's!! A geometry engine is built to handle any scene you throw at it, and (because it is so specialized) can probably out-render any CPU available today (and probably for the next 6-8 months). Plus the whole point is to make it so the CPU doesn't have to worry about geometry calculations (which is always a "Good Thing")
Actually OpenGL has had support for onboard T&L for quite some time. When these guys are developing these games, you can bet that their rigs have boards with T&L (If they aren't a poor startup).
What will be interesting in the future, will be the test results of the Voodoo4 (or whatever it will be called). This card should be able to do more with a lower framerate due to it's support of motion blur.
If you are talking about T-Buffer technology, you may be grossly overestimating its power. In the demos that I have seen (and granted, these are 3dfx demos and they are nasty, why wouldn't a company trying to sell its product produce decent demos to show it off???, but I digress) all your motion blur will get you is a loss framerate since your CPU has to fill the T-Buffer with x images, which then get blended to produce the effect. While it may look purdy, it is going to require one hell of a CPU to pull it off. I think the fullscene anti-aliasing is going to be the selling point on that board.
I think something that will be interesting to point out is that 3dfx has done a really good job at throwing their marketing prowess at consumers with in respect to the GeForce 256. While I don't quite believe everything that nVidia says, I find it hard not to support them when 3dfx has gone so far out of their way to make nVidia look bad. I will paraquote a developer (can't remember his name):
What makes you think this is possible? By storing the private key in hardware, it becomes impossible to access via software.
I will state that all things (this is stated liberally, I am sure that I am wrong in certain cases) that has to do with hardware can be discerned/extracted using software. Even if it means writing your own OS to do it. With the rampant presence of Virii on the Net today, who is to say that someone can't grab your private key from the hardware and send it to Joe Schmoe's email address?? Even if it couldn't be reached in this fashion, anyone with access to the computer you use could access your key (unlike PGP where a password is required).
Uhh, the same way that people do it today with software encryption products (like PGP). Just pass out your new public key and stop using the old key pair.
I grant this, and have misstated my objection. What I meant to say was how could those people downstream know that this is a legit new key, and not one that someone bogusly generated to pretend to be you. Plus, being able to replace your key would imply a software interface to modify the hardware, which would make the system intrinsically insecure.
You assume that this chip can be "upgraded". It's quite likely that this chip is entirely hardware-based. No "flash" upgrade at all. That would leave it open to the attack you mentioned. The whole idea is to keep the chip completely isolated from software.
I don't know of a method to keep a chip completely isolated from software. There must be some software interface or the hardware couldn't talk with the servers to perform the encryption. Plus as stated above, you can always access hardware from software (again being liberal).
Will we be able to tweak the transcoding process? Since _no one_ can know the one-best solution for every enterprise, will it be possible to tweak the output of such a transcoder to your application?? Or possibly modify the IBM-supplied defaults for each browser type??
Will the framework be available as an API (or preferably an open standard), so that in the future programs (RealEncoder, generator, etc..) could be written to automatically include information in their output for specific formats (i.e. text-only, audio-only, mixed).
This could be a huge step forward, especially in the days of PCS-based browsers, but can it be done in such a way as to not lock a company down to a specific vendor??
So are they planning on storing a "private" key in hardware??
:(...
1. What happens if your key gets compromised??
2. Are they going to have software which allows you to regenerate a private key?? How are you going to be able to communicate to the powers that be that your key has changed, and not only that, you could just change your key and all your new transmissions would be unreadable...
3. Better yet, J. Smith over here invents a utility to reflash the chip with an arbitrary "identifier" and people can now pose as you
Is this type of thing ever going to become a feature that anyone wants?? And even if people wanted it, how could you possibly make it more secure than a software based solution??