[cap-talk] more terminology discussion, authority, permission, influence

[Jed Donnelley]

At 05:02 AM 1/20/2008, John McCabe-Dansted wrote:
>...
>"Authority" seems to be very close to the common English meanings of 
>Influence, Power and Ability.
>   See e.g. 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence

I like that.  However, the end of the Wikipedia definition of "Influence":

"Influence is a term that refers to the ability to indirectly 
control, shape or affect the actions, beliefs and attitudes of other 
people or things through your behavior, words or presence and or being drunk."

'...or being drunk." strikes me as typical Wikipedia.

>However I'd like to clarify one possible exception. We may casually 
>say that X can "influence" Y via a covert channel, but Y might not 
>be in the transitive closure of permissions.

I don't think MarkM likes this "transitive closure" wording.  I can 
see his point.  Arguing along the lines of my recent message to 
AlanK, couldn't we simply say that X has some explicitly granted 
"permissions"?  If X can influence Y only through a covert channel, 
then might we say that X still has some "authority" to influence Y, 
but no explicit "permission" to do so (still struggling with "authority")?

For me this way of using the term "authority" seems to limit it to a 
rather obscure type of influence, namely that not granted by any 
explicit permissions.  However, if that is what is intended, I can 
certainly accept it.

>Or would we say that X and Y have permissions to the shared resource 
>used to implement the covert channel?

That sounds right to me.

>However, we might still have  the case:  X -> Resource <- Y

By this do you mean that X and Y both have permission to access Resource?

>But not: X -> Resource -> Y

The above is getting too brief for me.  In the above I assume 
"Resource" is a passive object.  Writing "Resource -> Y" seems to 
suggest that "Resource" is actively influencing Y.

>Or are permissions reflexive?

I don't think so.  If Alice grants Bob permission to write even 
integers, it's not necessarily the case the Bob grants Alice the 
permission to write even integers.

I think perhaps I should stop writing on these terminology issues 
until somebody more "authoritative" can comment.  For me they are 
just words that I'm trying to understand in context to facilitate our 
discussions.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html 
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