More sharp notes on Palladium. Seth has posted further, in-depth notes about our meeting with Microsoft's Palladium team, going into great detail about the technical workings and intentions of the system -- and there's no Latin in sight this time! The closer you look at Palladium, the more civil liberties implications begin to surface. Again, Seth is the likely most technical person to have received a briefing like this without signing an NDA; his notes are lucid, accurate and well-informed.
When you want to start a Palladium PC in trusted mode (note that it doesn't have to start in trusted mode, and, from what Microsoft said, it sounds like you could even imagine booting the same OS in either trusted or untrusted mode, based on a user's choice at boot time), the system hardware performs what's called an "authenticated boot", in which the system is placed in a known state and a nub is loaded. A hash (I think it's SHA-1) is taken of the nub which was just loaded, and the 160-bit hash is stored unalterably in the PCR, and remains there for as long as the system continues to operate in trusted mode. Then the operating system kernel can boot, but the key to the trust in the system is the authentication of the nub. As long as the system is up, the SCP knows exactly which nub is currently running; because of the way the CPU works, it is not possible for any other software to modify the nub or its memory or subvert the nub's policies. The nub is in some sense in charge of the system at a low level, but it doesn't usually do things which other software would notice unless it's asked to.
Link Discuss [
Boing Boing Blog]
Russell Beattie has a new IM-based blog notifier called BlogAgent, written in Java and open source. [Scripting News]
» Just started using BlogAgent. The ability to see who else is watching pages you are watching is pretty cool.
James Robertson of [Column Two] has been musing about how complexity theory relates to business and knowledge management.
He's been drawing some interesting parallels between the complexity of human behaviour in organizations, the complexity of information in evolving systems and the behaviour of such complex systems as cellular automata, genetic algorithms and neural networks.
Read more at:
(I)
(II)
CMSs in summary. I've just come across another site provding a tabular listing of content management systems and their features. This brings the [Column Two]
» For my own reference.
Get up to speed on K-Logging..
brent ashley:
The thinking-out-loud style of writing a K-log journal of project activities allows every part of the process to remain available during and after the project. This allows detailed review and enables latecomers to the project to get up to speed. The dead-end attempts that provide the best opportunity for learning are documented and kept for others to learn from.
more great language for your team briefing...
[a klog apart] [McGee's Musings]
» Good posting, good points.
I'm on the look out for software that improves my lot as an information producer/consumer. I came across this article by Peter Morville which talks about software for Information Architects.
He identifies the following categories of tool:
- Automated Classification
- Automated Category Generation
- Search Engines
- Thesaurus Management
- Collaborative Filtering
- Portal Solutions
- Content Management
- Analytics
- Database Management
- Information Architecture Productivity
(Note some of the tool urls are now dead. This article was written in 2001)
As an individual I'm more interested in personal solutions than enterprise solutions. This means that I like tools like Copernic Summarizer and Personal Brain which put me in the driving seat. But I hope to have my own servers soon so I'll be interested in bigger solutions too.
Do you have a tool that you swear by?
Unstructured content. Martin Butler has written a brief and to-the-point article highlighting that 80% of the content in an organisation is "unstructured", [Column Two] [McGee's Musings]
Tools for mining text from the
OpenDirectory.
Anyone know what the music is for the T-Mobile advert for their new phone/digicam? [English TV]
Does fat make you fat?. Being fat sucks. I've always been a few pounds heavier than I wanted to be, and I've always been on a lose-weight-then-gain-back-more scallop curve. I'm not alone. Doc blogged that he was the heaviest he'd ever been; Dave just had a heart-attack. Go to a tech or science fiction conference, and at every turn you meet people who are rounder than they'd like to be; as Patrick Nielsen Hayden writes, "You can't miss me at any gathering of science fiction people. I'm the middle-aged pudgy guy with a beard." Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
» I thought, having just turned 30, that weight gain was now inevitable. I'd been "dieting" for about a year and still my weight and my waist kept on expanding.
However since I started using Weight Watchers MP5, just under 2 months ago, I have lost over 12lbs. It's slow and gradual, a little over a pound a week. But it's also predictable and very easy to stick to.
The next goal is regular exercise!
I've joined Joe Jennet's Radio Randomizer network.
Just click the 
to go to a Radio site somewhere!
13. "great column" (4.2 points). All the President's Enrons ... lambastes [( blogdex : recent )]
» But Bush will keep smiling and somehow it's all alright...
