[cap-talk] Concening entry "ambient authority" in Wikipedia

[Charles Landau]

Mark Miller wrote:
> I would define an ambient authority system as one in which "If a
> requesting entity requests an action that it is permitted to perform,
> then the action is allowed." By contrast to a designated authority
> system, in which "If a requesting entity requests an action that is
> permitted by the subset of its permissions that it explicitly brings
> to bear on the action, then the action is allowed." This formulation
> also has the right paradoxical sense -- one can see why it was so easy
> to think that ambient authority was a sensible architecture.

I like that.