A New Member Here, and Byzantine.

Hi, I am Starling. Neobond wants me to start writing interesting articles and news topics for www.neowin.net I hope that you all enjoy my stuff.

Can you see computers trading files and providing disk storage and optimizing there performance, with no administration? Well it all sounds good till you know that all the computers are in a group and if one hacker gets into one of the computers then the other computers in the group can be easily infected. Well this all not to be an issue because a new OS technology, called "Byzantine" is going to be made to fault-tolerant protocols, users and there data. This is part of the Farside project at Microsoft Corp. This project is only one of several at Microsoft Research. Farside is a server less, distributed system that doesn't assume mutual trust among its client computers. Although there's no central server machine, the system as a whole looks to users like a single file server. High reliability and security are ensured because each file has one or more encrypted and digitally signed replicas elsewhere in the cluster.

News source: CNN