Darius,
I wrote the castle analogy. Actually, people can get the equivalent of personal cannons today - they are called guns, and have enabled a number of revolutions. I think that it is no accident that the second amendment ensures the rights of the people to bear arms. I personally believe that we have outgrown the need for that particular technology, but there is an even greater need as we move forward, and that is the right to secure and safe communications.
Especially in these days of increasing interest of governments in peoples personal affairs, and on the other side the increasing capabilities of the black hats and their desire to do harm, the right to communicate safely is essential for the continued evolution of a free society.
One of the major goals we have is to directly address the concerns that you raise. We believe the solution to this will be a namespace architecture that simply disallows access to key parts of the OS, but of course we are still developing this. The end goal is that you can connect to any other environment without fear of viral-like pollution as well as ensure access by others to your spaces is also controlled by you.
Regards,
David (A. Smith)
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 2003 16:03:48 -0800 From: Darius Clarke darius@inglang.com To: Kim.Rose@viewpointsresearch.org Subject: A Question about Croquet's Philosophy... X-Originating-IP: 65.204.160.2
Hi Kim,
Last Friday I finally tested Croquet on my notebook. Such fun! Even my kids (5 yrs. & 3 yrs. old) kept asking me, "Go in another door Daddy!
However, I've been ruminating on this Alan Kay statement in the Croquet site & documentation:
The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would get to declare himself as King. This was great for the King. And not to bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end - technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides of the castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology does this.
I like the analogy, however, on further thought, lets extend the analogy to be a bit more similar to Open Source technology. What would have happened if a cannon that could blow wholes in castles could be had by anyone for the price of a loaf of bread? Would the villagers blow their own villages apart over petty disputes?
Likewise, in an online, collaborative environment, hostel minds (idle teens?) can cause much damage. In Croquet, parent a black sphere over the head of all the avatars. Too easy to diagnose from a 3rd person camera? Parent a very small black sphere over just the avatar camera. Too easy to find the sphere in the code? How about changing the worlds fog to black with a far distance value of 0 and transparency value of 0. (I tried that last one.) Now make it like a virus by changing all avatars in your current world so that when they go in a new world, they change all the fog values and that world's avatars there too.
This parallels the current geopolitical trouble that the real world faces with terrorists having weapons of mass destruction.
How does Viewpoint Research plan to address security for the Croquet villages once they start attacking castles? :)
Cheers, Darius
--
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org