Abstract: Systems and methods for determining the identity of entities who meet trust requirements of a privilege grantor include an identity and trust management system including at least one computing device in communication with at least one entity, at least one privilege grantor, and at least one authoritative source. At least one rule is received from the at least one privilege grantor that must be satisfied for the at least one privilege grantor to trust an entity. A database is established of at least one entity with information about the at least one entity. The at least one authoritative source is queried to determine whether at least a portion of the information about the at least one entity is correct. A response is received from the at least one authoritative source as to whether or not the portion of information is correct. The database stores a result of the query without storing data underlying the result.

Abstract: Systems and methods for determining the identity of entities who meet trust requirements of a privilege grantor include an identity and trust management system including at least one computing device in communication with at least one entity, at least one privilege grantor, and at least one authoritative source. At least one rule is received from the at least one privilege grantor that must be satisfied for the at least one privilege grantor to trust an entity. A database is established of at least one entity with information about the at least one entity. The at least one authoritative source is queried to determine whether at least a portion of the information about the at least one entity is correct. A response is received from the at least one authoritative source as to whether or not the portion of information is correct. The database stores a result of the query without storing data underlying the result.

Abstract: PONS comprises a transform coder and decoder for discrete time electrical signals, in particular acoustic signals. The PONS coder utilizes an integer coefficient transform coder which is not frequency based, which requires almost exclusively fast integer arithmetic, and which spreads incoming signal energy nearly as evenly as possible among coefficients in the transform domain. The PONS coder also has the property that the magnitudes of transform domain coefficients vary by less than about an order of magnitude, so that the PONS coder dispenses completely with time-varying bit allocation. PONS uses only the quantization step to achieve significant compression. Energy spreading also permits reasonably accurate signal reconstruction when significant numbers of transform coefficients are lost or corrupted.