What is Project Blackbox?

Response from Roger Meike, Senior Director of SunLabs:

That’s gotten a lot of press and it’s fun, we’ve taken an entire data center and put it in a shipping container. You can take it anywhere, when fully configured, it’s one of the top supercomputers in the world, and you can get it running in half an hour. As you look at what the researchers are getting excited about, you can tell a lot about what’s going on. We’re the eyes and ears of these corporations. We talk a lot about the participation age, where there’s lots of people being involved on the Internet and hosting things and selling things, buying things, is that you have to scale very quickly. So something like project Blackbox where you can get a new computer in the parking lot up and running in half an hour, that’s something. Another thing is storage, all this content how do you store it all? We’re looking at peer to peer storage. This system can address up to 19 yattabytes of information. So this beyond peta, zetta: yattabytes. It scales by just adding more drives and more machines participating in the system. It’s using peer-to-peer technology to make sure it's always backed up and you’ll never lose data. We’ve been doing some work with digital rights management and that’s a scary thing to talk about because it has the reputation for being something constraining when applied to media, but the technology behind that, and labs are driven by technology , and we look at it as a set of technologies. We’re always looking at what’s wrong with that. Right now it’s all driven by devices. It’s my computer that gets the license for the song, that doesn’t seem right. It should be licensed to me. The other thing that seems wrong is why is this the domain of big studios and all that? Couldn’t I use this tech to protect my medical records. Suddenly I care about that, I’d like to control some of my own personal data, I’d like to be able to post things and be pretty sure only my family is looking at it. So there’s a project we’ve been looking at called Open Media Commons for people who haven’t really thought about digital rights management. It’s at http://www.openmedia.org and I invite you all to take a look at that.