[cap-talk] "ambient authority" on wiki.erights.org

[Karp, Alan H]

Rob Meijer wrote:

> > Whether or not permissions are shared is orthogonal to whether or not they
> > are ambient.
> 
> Not 'shared', 'shared implicitly'. I hope we can at least agree that the
> essence of why ambient authority is a problem (regardless of the specifics
> of the definition) , lies in the fact that it is implicitly shared authority.
>
I have read and write permission to two files, A and B.  Nobody else has permission to read or write these files.  When I say copy(A,B), I am not designating which of my rights to use for each argument.  The rights are not shared, implicitly or otherwise, but they are ambient.  

________________________
Alan Karp
Principal Scientist
Virus Safe Computing Initiative
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
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