From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 17:51:27 +0800
To: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
Subject: Re: found nym-differentiation! Still need perpetual motion, FTL travel, cold fusion
In-Reply-To: <v02120d07adbb3f930991@[192.0.2.1]>
Message-ID: <199605130232.WAA10281@jekyll.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Lucky Green writes:
> At 19:02 5/11/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> >I doubt that will work even were it implemented. Every phone on the
> >planet and terminal would need to constantly do biometric analysis of
> >every user, and even then people could program their terminals to lie.
> 
> Telling your terminal to lie will be rather difficult once the CPU refuses
> to run an OS with out propper signatures.

Oh, sure. How, exactly, could you do that? I can't think of a way to
build a CPU to do such a thing. What would it do? I mean, if it
checked a signature before booting, you could just halt the clock,
reach in to RAM, and alter the contents of the OS after boot. Its
both meaningless and impossible for it to check signatures on
individual instructions.

Perry