Open Hardware

[Pete Chown]

Adrian Midgley wrote:

> So in 18 months, Pentium level ...
> Take 4 of those on a generic board with an OSS OS that does multi_CPU quite 
> well, and this is a reasonable piece of kit.

Also, you may be able to fit more than one Sparc clone onto a single 
FPGA.  The clone doesn't use that many gates.

A quad Pentium would still be well below the performance of present day 
machines.  It depends what you want I suppose.  If you program the FPGA 
yourself, you get more confidence that there are no backdoors.

> So what techniques can be applied to that to know that when it boots up it is 
> simulating a machine like I have now, and not a machine doing DRM or 
> reporting this and that?

Presumably, you ensure that simply by not building in any DRM/TCPA 
facilities.  If you are designing the processor yourself, you have the 
freedom to have it work the way you want.

> Hard drives a bit difficult perhaps, so maybe large silicon devices for 
> non-volatile RAM?  Or just generic hard drive circuit boards to plug the 
> mecahnics into?

Remember that hard drives have no access to the Internet, so they can't 
leak information.  If you can get them to work at all, you can be 
reasonably confident that they aren't doing anything behind your back. 
(I suppose they could look for particular things, and store them in some 
inaccessible part of the disk.  So if a disk block contains the words 
"bin Laden", the drive firmware makes a secret copy.  I feel this is a 
bit theoretical though.)

-- 
Pete