After reading Safer than ActiveX: a look at Google’s Native Client plugin from ArsTechnica I finally understand where Google is headed and how they plan on taking over the world.

From the article…

The Native Client framework consists of trusted and untrusted modules that run in their own individual processes and communicate through an RPC system. Third-party untrusted modules contain application-specific programming and leverage the Native Client container to interact with trusted modules that perform any activities which impact the underlying platform, including networking operations and file system access. The container will impose security constraints on the behavior of the third-party code and will also give users granular control over the permissions granted to third-party code.

[...]

Google supplies a customized GCC build toolchain that can be used to compile portable binaries that are compatible with the Native Client infrastructure. This makes it extremely easy to port existing code. As a test, Google ported an H.264 encoder that is about 11,000 lines of conventional C code. To get the encoder to compile and run in Native Client, they only had to add approximately 20 lines of code and modify the Makefile. The resulting binaries are completely portable and can run without requiring recompilation on any operating system supported by the Native Client.

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UPDATE 9/13: I’ve fixed the bug and will be releasing the fixed version sometime tomorrow.

There is a bug in Facelift that is causing all images to be generated with a white background. The temporary fix is to disable GIF/JPG support until I can release a fixed version. You only have to modify one line of code to fix and FLIR will behave as it did before with transparent PNG images.

You can read more about the problem and get the fix here.