It's difficult to rate-limit login attempts from a botnet. The attack pattern I see on my server is one IP making three login attempts, then another IP making three login attempts, and so on. I do rate limit (via temporary IP blocking) attempts from one IP, but it doesn't help much. Of course, they're all doing password-based login attempts and I disable password-based SSH logins for all Internet-connected machines...

Yup. Compiling for the Burroughs architecture was easier than many segment-based systems, because they allowed segment descriptors to be placed in main memory, with the CPU responsible for tracking the value type by updating a tag. We adapt this slightly so that we only require one tag bit per 256 bits of main memory (the paper describes the implementation of this in some detail, but I'm happy to answer questions) to be able to safely store capabilities in main memory. Our design also allows normal C data structures to work as expected. You can mix C code compiled for MIPS and C code compiled for CHERI in the same binary (though you only get coarse-grained protection in the MIPS code).

The Burroughs architecture had very little impact on the computer architecture community, but was enormously influential in the design of VMs for high-level languages. One of our goals is to pull out the aspects of such VMs that are required for memory protection and put them back in the hardware, so a buggy VM has a far more limited security impact. My student's work on JNI dramatically reduced the amount of C code in the trusted computing base for the JVM implementation that he used.

The flippant answer is all that your paranoia deserves. The work was undertaken by SRI and The University of Cambridge. The funding was provided by DARPA, but that's the extent of their involvement (other than creating a program with the goal of being able to redesign any aspect of computing with security in mind).

The code is no more or less meriting an independent audit than any other open source code. Less, actually, because we don't anticipate anyone actually using our open source reference implementation in production, we hope that CPU vendors will take the ISA extensions and apply them to their own chips, but we expect that (if they do) they'll do independent reimplementations. At the ISA levels, we have PVS / SAL proofs that we'll be publishing soon that the ISA does provide the desired security properties and you're welcome to audit those too.

By "vice versa", do you mean that the UN is against whatever the US is in favour of, or do you mean that the US is against whatever the UN is in favour of?

The purpose of the United Nations is:

This does seem to be contrary to the interests of the lobbying interests which run the US government, no?

Interestingly, the event described in the US national anthem would, under current law, be classified as a WMD attack.

We also have a crapload of land which is doing nothing except letting sunlight fall on it and letting wind pass unimpeded across it.

We don't have a lack of sources of energy in Australia. More to the point, we don't have a lack of produced energy, either; we are producing far more power than we use, but thanks to distorted incentives (and not the carbon tax!), we are paying more for it than ever before. Where are you when we need you, o invisible hand?

Australia is unlikely to use nuclear power in the forseeable future for the simple reason that there's no need to. We have precisely the number of nuclear power plants that we need for our own research purposes. As for all that radioactive material, we're better off exporting it to countries that don't have any other realistic options.

No. You can't back up the claim that "most [...] results from a person saying that someone looks nice". Most sexual harassment is nowhere near as simple as that. An isolated instance of someone saying that someone else looks nice is not enough to trigger a sexual harassment complaint in most cases.

Having said that, I'm sure you can see how the context, or constantly commenting on someone's appearance, could easily end up in creepy territory.

Without knowing anything about who these "propagandists" are, or what they exactly said, and in what context they said it, it's hard to say.

"Sexual harassment is required" is a policy.

I'd think you were joking if you hadn't run with it. Of course the law mandates that a policy meets certain minimal criteria.

Systemd definitely solves a problem that exists. Unfortunately, it solves it in the same way that a nuclear warhead solves the problem of rat infestation.

My Windows NT 4.0 disk had a PowerPC installer on it. I never found a CHRP machine to run it on though. I tried it on a PowerPC Mac once, but couldn't get it to boot. Windows 2000 only shipped for IA32.

The most obvious example is the byte-swapping load instructions. There are some other examples if you can find the papers by the VirtualPC authors, which explain them in detail. It's been quite a few years since I paid attention to anything PowerPC related.

You might want to go back and read some press releases from the AIM alliance at that time. Or even look at the ISA: there are a lot of things in there that only make sense if you want to emulate m68k or x86. They were positioning PowerPC as a migration path from m68k and i386 systems and being able to emulate both at a reasonable speed was part of this strategy.

Spoken like someone who has no idea about the market at the time. The PowerPC was introduced in 1992, announced in 1991. At the time, Intel's flagship x86 part was the 486 but they were trying to kill the x86 line. They'd released the i860 (RISC, not x86-compatible) in 1989 and tech magazines were saying it would kill x86. Windows NT was originally written for the i860 and only later ported to x86, so even Windows looked like it might not be tied to x86 in the long term.

1992 saw the launch of the Alpha and MIPS R4K, and 1993 saw the SPARCv9 ISA. It didn't look like a 32-bit architecture that was hacked onto a legacy 16-bit ISA had much of a long-term future. IBM and Motorola were two of the biggest players in CPU manufacturing and they teamed up to produce something that would provide a migration path for m68k and i386 software. The PowerPC architecture was based on IBM's POWER architecture but extended to make it easy to emulate m68k and i386 at reasonable speeds. Microsoft was signed up to port Windows NT and it looked like you'd be able to run Windows and MacOS (the two most popular desktop operating systems) and possibly some of the other less-popular ones (most of which were m68k-based) on the same hardware. IBM and Motorola were both going to produce chips, so there was guaranteed to be competition, which would bring down prices, and they were soliciting other companies to produce implementations of the architecture. Within a few years, PowerPC would be faster and cheaper than x86 and would run more software. At least, that was the theory. It sounded quite plausible, but history didn't quite work out like that.

Those numbers don't tell the whole story. iBooks doesn't exist to make a profit selling books, it exists to make the iPad seem like a plausible platform for reading books. Similarly, Amazon gets a significant benefit from locking people into the Kindle ecosystem. The $180M in cash that Apple gets is nice, but it's nothing compared to having a load of people who have bought books that will only work on an Apple device.

PowerPC was pushed by the AIM alliance: Apple, IBM, Motorola. The latter two developed and produced chips. Apple had some input. The goal was an ISA that made it easy to emulate both m68k and i386.