Re: [xwiki-users] esoteric features

On 9/26/13, Guillaume Lerouge <guillaume(a)xwiki.com> wrote: Sharing + Security. What everyone else fails at pathetically and have pretty much given up on. Okay, let's say you have a wiki with 100 MB of storage. You decide to give access to it to 9 of your friends, giving 10 MB to each of them to do with as they please and keeping 10 MB to yourself. Each of them can make pages off of other pages in their own namespace, so effectively they've each got their own wiki now. You are their patron because you've given them resources and can revoke them at will, nuking them when they misbehave. However, each of them has immediately turned around and made themselves a patron. By publicizing the first secret "password" that gets to their account, which now hits a SECOND login script of their own devising. And each of them has created10 clients with 1 MB of storage which they're administering from what YOU see as basic private accounts. One of those 1 MB accounts is now THEIR account, and the others have been handed off to THEIR friends. So far, it's exactly like if you sell off land, people can subdivide it and sell it off in turn. Or if you give someone a key to a house, they can make copies as needed for their family members. YOU do not get to authorize each and every single person who uses a resource just because you "own" the resource. We do not live in fucking Nazi fascist totalitarian countries and *software security shouldn't be fucking Nazi fascist either*! You can guess what I think of software programmers for having created a Nazi state of affairs as "security" and considering it perfectly adequate. Eventually, as inevitably will happen, one of your clients will be lax in their own admin'ing. So one of the people with a 1 MB account has started posting pro-Nazi propaganda and recruiting neo-Nazis to post more. You don't like this shit so you try to contact the guy you gave that 10 MB space to in order to explain himself. He's on a vacation and can't be arsed to explain himself. So you decide to nuke his account, erasing everything in it. Which *is your right* and is certainly a whole lot easier than trying to wade through and surgically remove only the pro-Nazi shit, wasting your entire life cleaning up other people's shit. And that's okay, because every single last 1 MB client secured a fallback patron and their 1 MB of space quota gets activated, thus they can trivially undelete everything you nuked in one operation just under someone else's space. The main cost they pay is they all have to look for and find yet another fallback patron because their fallback patron just became their primary patron. Of course, the Nazi guy ALSO did this but this time around he falls under the purview of an admin who hasn't gone away and NOW he has to explain himself. This new admin of his notices that *ALL* the guy does is publish Nazi propaganda and so decides that on second thought he doesn't care about the explanation and so just nukes the 1 MB account. Now the Nazi guy is on a third patron, if he's secured one. Eventually he runs out of patrons, or HIS patrons run out of patrons. Meanwhile, everyone else is just slightly inconvenienced and their accounts rearranged, but that's it. The upshot of all this is that the Nazi guy is purged out of the system with nobody really going to any great amount of effort to do so, and no great "collaboration" to do so either. This is about a third of what I'm trying to achieve. The other things I'm trying to achieve is: implementing private and communal property that actually works. And implementing democracy. You know, the basic things that make it so that in real life, we don't have 1 owner = 1 country. Also known as tyranny, dictatorship or absolute monarchy. Which no matter what veneer of benevolence you slap on it is *exactly* what exists in collaborative software. In c2 wiki it started out aiming at totalitarian communism but that failed, so there was a knee-jerk aristocratic response which also failed. In wikipedia, "jimbo" is a big fan of fascistic feudalism, so much so he dismisses the peasants (the actual contributors) out of existence, considering them non-entities. He thinks the aristocrats are the ones who matter since every bit of property out there has been pissed on by an aristocrat, and repeatedly so, and pissing on it is obviously the most important contribution to agricultural lands. I realize that adult politics, economics, and sociology (above the level implemented by a typical 10 year old) are beyond the ken of programmers, that's why I've labeled these basic features of everyday adult life "esoteric". Note that these aren't insoluble problems or even very hard problems. I know exactly HOW to implement them, I just have too many even more important priorities.

Thanks. At least I know this message made it to the list.