[cap-talk] origin of the power box

[Marc Stiegler]

It's been a long time since I read Ping's paper, but I do not remember 
this paper mentioning a powerbox. I just did a quick search for 
"powerbox", "ping", and "interaction design", and the top hit is mark 
seaborn, not ping's paper :-)

Ping may have described an object that would correctly be described as a 
powerbox, but I am quite confident that the first use of the term, and 
the first detailed characterization of the powerbox pattern, appear in 
the DarpaBrowser technical report, issued in June 2002:

http://www.combex.com/papers/darpa-report/html/index.html

So it is even more puzzling, what they did before then. Presumably they 
had powerboxes, they just didn't know it. This would make the history of 
the powerbox similar to the history of petnames: over and over again we 
can see very-nearly-complete petname systems (buddy lists for IM, the 
newest cell phones that ask to add a contact to the address list when 
you hang up from talking to a phone number the phone has not seen 
before, the pgp web of trust), reinvented each time by folks who do not 
realize that what they are invented has been done before, in a context 
just barely different enough to hide the relationship.

Also, powerboxes become important to characterize only when one gets 
fierce about highly dynamic grants and revocations. The desktop is a 
place where this dynamism is acute, and without a solution to the 
dynamism there is no pola on the desktop. Server-side systems, while 
they benefit from dynamic pola, can stumble along quite well without it. 
Most of the work on capabilities prior to ping's and our work was 
server-side, so the powerbox was neither as important nor as visible 
earlier.

--marcs



Neal H. Walfield wrote:
> What is the origin of the power box idea?  Mark Seaborn states on
> http://plash.beasts.org/ that 
> 
>   The powerbox concept appears to have first been proposed by Ka-Ping
>   Yee and Miriam Walker in Interaction Design for End User Security
>   (December 2000).
> 
> I find it amazing that this idea was suggested so recently.  How did
> earlier capability systems handle run-time access delegation?
> 
> Thanks,
> Neal
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