[cap-talk] Failure isolation

[Stiegler, Marc D]

I don't think the problem is this hopeless. In the tribal village, once Bob tells the gabster Alice that he likes Carol, everyone in the village knows that Bob likes Carol. We have been dealing with information that is infinitely copyable for millennia. To integrate with human intuition, we just have to craft the user interfaces so that the humans can easily distinguish and properly manage what is like gabster information (like music and paragraphs in email), and what is like a rock (an eright managed with IOU protocol).

For some things this may not be as hard as it seems. A large company with which I am familiar recently did a giant spamming of its employees about not using atomatic email-address-expansion in Outlook, because it was too easy to accidentally send extremely sensitive financial information to the wrong person (Mark M Miller rather than Mark S Miller, because Mark M was the expansion of "mil..."). It would be fascinating to conduct an experiment with petnames to see if petnames, which people might make easily distinguishable for themselves, would reduce this problem enough so that it was no longer important.

--marcs

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cap-talk-bounces at mail.eros-os.org
> [mailto:cap-talk-bounces at mail.eros-os.org] On Behalf Of
> Jonathan S. Shapiro
> Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 8:42 AM
> To: General discussions concerning capability systems.
> Subject: Re: [cap-talk] Failure isolation
>
> On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 16:58 -0700, Raoul Duke wrote:
> > Basically, to what extent are humans destined to not work well with
> > POLAs? If humans are by nature not going to be perfect wrt
> security...
>
> This is a small part of a larger, harder question: to what
> extent are humans destined not to work well with electronic
> information?
>
> Today, all of our intuitions about property, protection, and
> so forth are driven by our intuitive mental models of
> tangible artifacts. If I give you a rock, you now have the
> rock and I no longer have it. These intuitions are very
> nearly useless in information systems, and they have been for
> decades. One might hope that the human model will eventually
> stretch to encompass information artifacts, but it seems
> likely to me that this may take quite a while, and I am not
> convinced that it will ever fully occur.
>
>
> shap
>
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