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Wednesday, August 28, 2002 |
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Extremism is dead
Ray Ozzie's take on Steve Gillmor's Notes is Dead:
PUBLISHING IS DEAD. Gone, a relic of the past, dead as a doornail, breathless, buried. According to police reports, one-way publishing was killed off by a technology - Weblogs - that have reshaped journalism forever. According to observers, there was formerly but a single effective way to get messages out to an audience - through major mass-market publications that possessed exclusive control of the final form of those messages. "Add Weblogs to that mix", one highly-respected and influential journalist recently wrote, and an entire industry's "world view was shaken". Indeed.  [Ray Ozzie's weblog]
Touché!
Sam Ruby once said:
I continue to strive to find the middle ground between the Web Services and REST advocates, running the risk of alienating both camps. Meanwhile, the ever moderate Jon Udell seems always be able to find the middle ground between my middle ground and the position that I am trying to moderate. How does he do that?  [Sam Ruby]
I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point I became an extreme anti-extremist. Or maybe the way to say it is that I became hyper-empathic: I couldn't avoid seeing issues from every point of view.
At various times, Notes and Unix and Java -- and publishing! -- are declared to be dead. I have explored all sides of all of these debates, and continue to do so.
What mainly fascinates me about this moment in history is the role of the blog. We've turned a corner, I think, in terms of pluralism. Authentic voices on all sides of all debates are heard directly. The world is profoundly more transparent. Given the irreducible and growing complexity of everything, this is a necessary and wonderful thing. I feel lucky to be a part of it!
1:28:27 PM 
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ACLs don't scale, accountability does
On Monday I got to meet Jamie Lewis face-to-face for the first time, and we had a great talk about a lot of things. We're both looking forward to the upcoming Digital Identity Conference. Chatting about PingID and XNS, Jamie quipped that for longtime industry watchers like us, it becomes necessary to qualify acronyms with date ranges. So for example: XNS2000 versus XNS1975. 
On the subject of security, I aired my concern (shared by acquaintances at Baltimore Technologies) that ACLs don't scale. Even if we can layer a permissions matrix on top of web services, the combinatorial explosion of that matrix will create complexity that nobody can understand or manage. The example here is from Zope, but we've all done this -- and it's unthinkable to do it for thousands or millions of rows and columns.
Jamie agreed, and cited a speech by Dan Geer, who's CTO of @stake, in which Geer advanced the notion that ACLs don't scale, but surveillance and accountability do. Here's an excerpt from the full text of the speech Geer made to the Security Industries Middleware Council (SIMC):
If the access control matrix eventually scales out of reach, what then? I submit that where the geometric scaling of access control will kill it in the end, accountability stands ready. This is not to say that I like pervasive, universal accountability, per se, but the only reason a free society works is that you can pretty much do anything though if you screw up badly we will find you and make you pay. Accountability is like that, i.e., it is a log processing problem. When it comes to processing logs, Moore's Law is on your side. Observability is on your side as it puts off the deductive costs to later when you need to invest in making them, and you can probably use grid computing as a log processing tool since the web search engines have got that pretty well worked out. Because disk prices fall faster than CPU prices and because network prices fall faster still, log information storage and availability are just not problems.
I'll buy that. As Jamie points out, this mirrors how things work in the real world. No ID and access-control mechanism can prevent me from committing a crime. But an eyewitness or a surveillance camera can hold me accountable.
9:47:47 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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