Trusted Digital Facility

Full Title or Meme

A Trusted Digital Facility is a fenced structure that is designed and built for a particular purpose and can be isolated for evaluation of the Security and Reliability of the structure as a whole.

Context

Unlike computing in The Cloud a Trusted Digital Facility is entirely self-contained and not distributed outside of itself.

Consider the Star-ship Enterprise that is isolated in space and equipped with its own Artificial Intelligence that can operate in isolation from other digital facilities. This is one of many Science-fiction stories that predicted the problems that might come with powerful computer systems. The following scenario is lifted from "A Deepness in the Sky", a science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge published in 1999.

There is only pne important thing thing you have to learn about he machines. We can't survive without them. Over thousands of years the Machine memories

have been filled with programs that can help. But like Bret says, many of those programs are lies. All of them are buggy, and only the top level ones are precisely appropriate for our needs. She paused, looked at Pham significantly. It takes a smart and highly trained human being to look at what is available, to choose and modify the right programs, then to interpret the results properly.

Pham was silent for a moment, thinking back to all the times the machines had not done what he really wanted. It wasn't always Pham's fault. The programs that tried to translate one indigenous language to another were crap. so you want me to learn to program something better. Surra grinned, and there was a barely suppressed chuckle from Bret. We will be satisfied if you become a good programmer and then learn to use the stuff that already exists. Pham had spent years learning to program, explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back in his father's castle. Where the creek had worn that away ten meters down. there were the crumpled hawks of machines. Flying machines, the peasants said. From the great days of the past. There where programs here that went back thousands of years. Unlike the wrecks of his world's past, these programs still worked. There were a million -mollion threads of intelligence. Many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the facility. Down at the base was a single program keeping time from the start of the first Linux system started by the ancestors.

We should rewrite it all said Pham. It's been done said Surra. But the systems are enormous and we don't know when we might need the old programs.