MIT emerging technology mentioned Trusted Computing
Do not know if this has been posted but here is some cut out from the conference summary:
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MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
Cambridge, MA 26th 28th September 2006
This two day conference was arranged by the Technology Review magazine at the MIT campus to discuss the emerging technologies over the next several years, there were several breakout sessions on topics such as NanoToxicity, Online Applications war, Hack-proofing Hollywood and $1000 Human genome and Software Defined Radio.
The keynote sessions came from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, Jonathan F. Miller, Chairman and CEO of AOL, Sebastian Thrun Director Stanford AI Lab and Marc Chapman, IBM’s Global leader of strategy and change practice. Of note also was a keynote panel lead by Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Motorola, on the
Innovators View.
Executive Summary
The consensus of opinion from those I met at the conference and my own view too is that overall the conference failed to deliver on it’s promise to unveil the emerging technologies
made in the opening keynote by Jason Pontin, editor in Chief and publisher for the Technology Review magazine. A number of opinions were ventured on the reasons for this.
At the time my personal view was that what I was listening to was more a showcase of emerged technologies. Having distilled the copious notes and discussions that took place
over the course of the conference I have formed some views that should prove valuable though, so whilst the content seemed lacklustre at the time I think the greatest value was in
helping spur new thinking based on this fact and the subsequent ‘hallway sessions’ that took place.
Technologies that have been much discussed, used and in fact created in the ‘geek community’ were discussed by Academia and industry leaders as emerging technology, one showcase example was the bookmarking service del.icio.us including an on stage interview with the founder and creator Joshua Schacter, a talk I have seen several times over the last year, Pontin speculated that Schacter had changed the way people use the web with his
‘webtags’ which is quite a stretch as tagging as it’s more normally known has hardly reached mass market adoption yet even if it is a standard feature of most Web2.0 services now.
Jeff Bezos ran through the new web services from Amazon (EC2, S3 and the new Fulfiullment API - FBA) which have all been launched before the event, in fact Orange has a live project using these webservices already (Sleevenotez), anyone in the web services application development area is very familiar with these services, however his comments on how delivery, storage and the actors in the value chain will change were insightful.
Key Findings
He following list is a set of thoughts on what we may see emerging over the next 3-10 years, none of these were set out at the conference but are my personal views based on the facts
stated above, the reasoning for each one is set out over the following pages
�� Nanotechnology – battery development and standards for control
�� Virtualisation – client OS and trusted application environment
�� ‘Real World’ APIs – accessing humans programmatically
�� Green as a differentiator – when differentiation runs low
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Virtualisation
There wasn’t a specific session on virtualisation, however the topic came up in the ‘Hack-Proofing Hollywood’ session and again during the fireside chat with Jeff Bezos.
The growth in this sector has been discussed at previous conference with a focus on the OS, for example there is a big growth in people running one OS under a virtual machine on a host OS, Amazons EC2 effectively does the same at he server level, with EC2 you can run on one server and when required scale immediately up to 1000 servers as demand requires. I read
recently that there are more people running the new Microsoft OS Vista as a virtual machine under Mac OS X than there are running natively on PC hardware, it’s easy to see why as I
have done this myself, the ability to create a new instance and test out a new OS without affecting the main OS is very powerful, if it proves buggy and unusable, or you just don’t like it then you simply delete the instance and it’s gone, otherwise you have a complete OS install to go through again. This also allows complete flexibility of UI to suit your mood, unlike Apple’s bootcamp for example where you have to decide at boot time which UI you want to use, new products allow more than one OS at the same time which means you can flick
between.
What this raises now though is something much more powerful too, as things stand now it is possible to be running one OS with an Open internet connection and full administration rights,
and at the same time to run another OS under a virtual machine that can be connected to a corporate environment and under corporate IT rules. This separates the workflow and risk
between the two environments whilst allowing the user to only have one machine to run. This can also mean that a user can have separate identities under each OS and perform distinct
activities in each one while still having the ability to share data between OS/environments/identities, which still poses a security risk.
Whilst discussing Trusted Computing and the desire by Hollywood to secure the PC environment for their content rather than for the user, it was pointed out that one of the original goals of trusted computing was for example to provide a secure nvironment in which to do online banking, currently the banks will not accept liability for it as they can not trust a
users PC (spyware, Trojans, phishing etc) however all the focus has been on Hollywood wanting to protect their content.
This raises the possibility of the service provider being able to offer a totally secure virtualised instance on a users PC in which to do business, completely isolated from the rest of the users machine. So unlike now where in the host OS a user fires up a browser to log in to online banking which is full of risks, they run up a virtual machine which in turn runs on a virtualised server at the provider, within such an environment all services are run by the provider and therefore they can accept liability and be guarded against fraud as they are effectively extending their network onto a users machine.
A logical next step is to take advantage of an increasingly multicore CPU world, when you have 4,8,16,32 individual CPUs within on chip why not assign one to your bank, one to your
Telco, one to ‘unsafe’ browsing, one to gaming, one to a content provider etc etc?
One reason is attestation and authentication, physical access to a machine is still a great risk, and there will be a need for someone to provide a centralised identity function, such as liberty alliance or an open source alternative perhaps. There will also be a need to look at the authentication in such an environment, instead of logging on to one machine you will need to authenticate several systems (albeit in one physical system) biometrics could play a role but why not the SIM, is this a role that Orange could play in as both client based (SIM) and server based (identity management)
As a side note the panel covered the current efforts in this area including TCG, TPM, new CPU architecture, multi core, VTLT, CELL, AACS and the DLNA efforts to create a trusted
home network, on the panel was Bunny XX who originally hacked the Xbox security, he had a small argument with XX from HP about how it doesn’t matter how much trusted equipment you put in a PC, at some point it needs to be decrypted to be displayed and at that point it can be hijacked, XX claimed that they had some interesting developments coming soon that would mean this was not the case.
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AI
