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At 05:02 AM 1/20/2008, John McCabe-Dansted wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">...<br>
"Authority" seems to be very close to the common English
meanings of Influence, Power and Ability.<br>
See e.g.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence</a></blockquote><br>
I like that. However, the end of the Wikipedia definition of
"Influence":<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
'...or being drunk." strikes me as typical Wikipedia.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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.</blockquote><br>
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")?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Or would we say that X and Y
have permissions to the shared resource used to implement the covert
channel? </blockquote><br>
That sounds right to me.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">However, we might still
have the case: X -> Resource <- Y </blockquote><br>
By this do you mean that X and Y both have permission to access
Resource?<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">But not: X -> Resource ->
Y</blockquote><br>
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.<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Or are permissions reflexive?
</blockquote><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
--Jed
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