This week, the e-Science Institute launched a new research theme which should be of great relevance to industry as well as scientists - in fact, it may even help ordinary consumers to protect our own privacy online. The theme is about "Trust and Security in Virtual Communities". Andrew Martin , the theme leader, explained its aim in a webcast talk . The problem that Andrew is exploring is how we can trust a grid infrastructure to protect our sensitive data. In addition, how can we trust the results that we get back from running a job on "the computing cloud"? To give one concrete example, Andrew was involved in the climateprediction.net project, which encouraged people to contributed their PC's spare cycles to run climate modelling simulations. This raised several security issues. From the users' point of view, could they trust that the climateprediction.net program would not hijack their PC? Conversely, could the scientists trust that the data sets r...
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