Could contemporary technology be used to build a Gibson-esque implant that could connect a human brain to a computer? Maybe more practical, what would it take to curve spinal cord injuries like Christopher Reeve’s using this kind of technology?
DNS-based identification
I’ve written before about how the failure of source routing created the need for NAT, but that post didn’t address the basic security problem with source routing that caused ISPs to disable it. It allows a man-in-the-middle attack where a machine can totally fabricate a packet that claims to come from a trusted source. There’s no way that the destination machine can distinguish between such a rogue packet and a genuine packet that the source actually requested be source routed through the fabricating machine. At the time, Internet security was heavily host-based (think rsh), so this loophole became perceived as a fatal security flaw that led to source routing being derogated and abandoned.
A quarter century later, I think we can offer a more balanced perspective. Host-based authentication in general is now viewed as suspect and has largely been abandoned in favor of cryptographic techniques, particularly public-key cryptosystems (think ssh) which didn’t exist when TCP/IP was first designed. We are better able to offer answers to key questions concerning the separation of identity, address, and route. In particular, we are far less willing (at least in principle) to confuse identity with address, if for no other reason than an improved toolset, and thus perhaps better able to judge source routing, not as a fundamental security loophole, but as a design feature that became exploitable only after we began using addresses to establish identity.
Can we “fix” source routing? Perhaps, if we will completely abandon any pretext of address-based authentication. What, then, should replace it? I suggest that we already have our address-less identifiers, and they are DNS names. Furthermore, we already have a basic scheme for attaching cryptographic keys to DNS names (DNSSEC), so can we put all this together and form a largely automated DNS-based authentication system?
Corrupt Education
I recently toyed with going back to school for graduate study in mathematics, going so far as to apply to a university. I won’t parade all the details, but I think it was a positive experience. I reached an epiphany, a conclusion that I’ve been resisting for years, but have finally accepted:
A university is a corrupt institution.
iDictionary
Apple’s recent announcement of the iPhone has inspired me to reconsider how IT can be used to support foreign language studies. According to Apple, the iPhone will have a microphone (it’s a phone, after all), run OS X, and have 4 to 8 GB of memory. That should be a sufficient platform to load a voice activated dictionary. After training a voice recognizer, you could speak a word into the device which it would then lookup in a dictionary and display the dictionary entry on the screen, providing language students with the detail of a full sized dictionary in something that could fit in their pocket.
Could pocket Spanish-English dictionaries be a thing of the past?
Dynamic DVD
As streaming video has become more commonly available, it is now plausible to discuss offering a video interface to a website. A user could connect to a site using a video client and “navigate” on-line video content using a DVD-style user interface – video menus, highlighted on-screen buttons, fast-forward, subtitles. Alternately, such an interface could augment conventional TV broadcasts, offering a nightly news program with video hyperlinks to hours of detailed coverage of events we currently see only in sound bites.
Building chess tablebases over the Internet
I’ve read some stuff on the Internet about using pre-computed tablebases to solve complex endgames. Apparently you can load a five- or six- piece tablebase into a program like Fritz and it will then know how to mechanically solve any endgame with five (or six) pieces on the board.
I starting thinking about this, but more along the lines of building the tables dynamically, using a pool of cooperating computers on the Internet. The idea would be to direct your search towards certain game positions that you wanted to analyze. This would work well in static analysis and also in relatively slow correspondence time controls (like Gary Kasparov vs The World, or the upcoming The World vs Arno Nickel).
Continue reading “Building chess tablebases over the Internet”
Java Caches
I’ve been thinking for several years about the flaws in the Internet’s (nearly non-existant) caching model, and have reached several conclusions. First, caching policy is very difficult, basically impossible, to specify in some arbitrary protocol. This is one of the biggest problems we’ve got with caching – the cache manager has a lot of settings he can adjust, but the data provider has almost none – basically cache or don’t cache (oh yeah, he can specify a timeout, too). So, I’m led to conclude that data providers need a very flexible way to inform caches of their data’s caching policy, like a remote executable format, i.e. Java. My second conclusion is that what limited caching we’ve got is destroyed when people want to provide dynamic content. The only way I can see to cache dynamic content is to cache not the data, but the program used to create the data, and expect the client to run the program in order to display the data. And we don’t want to do that on the caches (if we can help it) for performance reasons. Again, a remote executable format, this time on the client, i.e. Java. My third major conclusion is that caching is a multicast operation and requires multicast support to be done, but that’s for a diferent paper. Thus, I’m proposing an integrated Java-based caching architecture using what I call “cachelets” on the caches to provide a flexible and usable caching architecture.
Software Checkpointing using Networking
If we design our operating system so that processes perform all external operations using networking, in particular IP packets, then we can easily checkpoint processes.
Demand TV… we could have it today
What would it take to offer a demand video service based on local cable TV? Let’s consider how to build a bank of computers that would record and save the last week of video on each of sixty cable TV channels, then deliver any part of the recorded video on a demand basis.
My Response to Thomas Friedman
In his best seller “The World is Flat”, Thomas Friedman identifies ten “flatteners” that are leveling the global economy; forces such as outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining, and the collapse of the Soviet empire. His fourth flattener is open source software. None of his issues are particularly new, but it is Friedman’s treatment of them, notably both his and Bill Gates’s shocking misunderstanding of free software, that raises some of the most provocative questions of a provocative book.