Dr. Dobb's Journal October, 2005
The nonprofit Unified EFI Forum has been formed to manage the evolution and promotion of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) specification (http://www.uefi.org/). The EFI spec defines an interface that hands off system control from the preboot environment to the operating system. In short, EFI is a modern replacement for the BIOS. (For more information on EFI, see "The Extensible Firmware Interface," by Craig Szydlowski; DDJ, September 2005). Founding members of the EFI Forum include AMD, American Megatrends, Dell, HP, Intel, IBM, Insyde Software, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies. The Forum will publish the EFI 1.10 specification by the end of 2005. It will also make available test suites for the UEFI spec based on contributions from member companies.
A Standard for the Eiffel programming language has been adopted by the General Assembly of ECMA International (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/ standards/ECMA-367.htm). ECMA's charter is to evaluate, develop, and ratify telecommunications and computing Standards. The Eiffel language, originally designed by Bertrand Meyer, is available through implementations by Meyer's Eiffel Software (http://www.eiffel.com/) and other providers. ECMA Standardization guarantees total, line-by-line compatibility between different implementations. The specification also has been submitted for ISO (International Standards Organization) approval as part of ECMA's "fast-track" ISO status.
The Enterprise Grid Alliance, an open consortium focused on developing and promoting enterprise grid solutions, has released its Enterprise Grid Security Requirements document, which identifies a set of requirements for grid security (http://www.gridalliance.org/en/workgroups/GridSecurity.asp). Developed by the EGA Grid Security Working Group, the document builds on the previously released EGA Reference Model by identifying the unique security requirements of commercial enterprise grid computing. It is intended as a guide for users, Standards organizations, and vendors.
IBM has launched an program that provides universities with free access to a range of emerging technologies developed in IBM's R&D labs (http://www.developer.ibm.com/university/scholars/). The goal of the "Academic License" program is to help train, educate, and accelerate development skills around open Standards-based technologies. University professors can use the technologies to build course curriculum. Professors will have access to more than 25 technologies, including games and simulations, to accelerate skills around IBM on-demand offerings including open Standards technologies, such as Java and Eclipse, tools to enable grid computing. MIT and Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be the first universities to participate in the program. The program is open to academic institutions participating in IBM's Academic Initiative.
OATH, the initiative for Open Authentication, has released Version 1.0 of its OATH Reference Architecture, which provides a framework for open authentication (http://www.openauthentication.org/reg.asp).
The document's client framework section addresses topics of authentication methods, innovation in authentication tokens for multifunction purposes or mobile devices, token interfaces for one-time password tokens, and authentication protocols.
The validation framework covers interfaces for protocol and validation handlers, and protocols used by applications to authenticate user credentials. OATH will develop a framework to let vendors develop Standards-based provisioning protocols and evaluate the need to standardize on one or more provisioning protocols to target specific credential types. OATH is a collaboration of device, platform and application companies, with the goal of fostering strong authentication across networks, devices, and applications.
Phil Zimmermann, developer of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) e-mail encryption software, is now working towards building similar security tools for Internet-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP). Codenamed "zFone," the prototype Zimmermann demonstrated at the Black Hat Briefings security conference scrambles information until it reaches its destination. To unscramble the data, recipients must be running a program that uses the same protocols. According to Zimmermann, zFone interoperates with any standard SIP phone.
Zimmermann's prototype is based on Shtoom, a VoIP client written in Python. For more information, see http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/zfone/index.html.
In a first-of-its-kind partnership between a public university and private Internet company, Yahoo Research Labs and the University of California at Berkeley, are launching a joint lab to explore Internet search technology, social media (photos, video, music, audio, and text obtained from personal, public, or community sources, then shared, referenced, or remixed in ways that help foster social relations), and mobile media. Most intellectual property developed at the lab will be shared jointly between UC Berkeley and Yahoo.
The founding director of Yahoo Research Labs-Berkeley is Marc Davis, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems.
IBM has stepped up its efforts to see an open-source, compatible, and independent implementation of the Java 2 Platform Standard Edition 5 (J2SE 5) by participating in (and eventually contributing code to) the Apache open-source Harmony project. Among other goals, the Harmony project was launched to create an open-source modular runtime (virtual machine and class library) architecture to allow independent implementations to share runtime components.