Re: Design principles and ethics

[Bas Wijnen]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 05:05:46PM -0600, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> > > How does the child have any guarantees about anything?  In other 
> > > words, how can it refuse to run?
> > 
> > It can't.  The thing is that if the child (which before 
> > instantiation is just a bunch of numbers) should have a say 
> > in this, then it must somehow be able to decide to "refuse" 
> > something.  I meant to indicate that this is impossible.
> 
> Yes, but perhaps I wish to refuse the allow the program to run in
> certain circumstances, and so I wish to write encode into the program
> the means for detecting these situations.

Then you make it a service, which can do all checks it wants.  It runs on your
storage though.  If someone else has the code, they can run it however they
want.  Note that they can also change it and remove the checks anyway.

> You have taken that ability from me.  You are constraining my actions, and
> removing my freedom.

So I am removing your freedom to limit other people's freedom.  How is that a
problem?  (Note that I haven't actually limited it at all, but below I did.)

> If I wrote a program that I wished to keep for myself, I might encode
> into it a way to make sure that only I am running it.

That is security through obscurity.  It doesn't work.  People who get the code
will change it such that it doesn't do that check.

> If someone then steals my private program, what is essentially my property,

Sorry, I don't believe in information as "property" which can be "stolen".
You still have it, don't you?

> they can benefit from it without my consent.

And without any harm to you.

> You are enabling theft without repercussion.

Nonsense.  This is not theft, and if you cared so much about keeping it
secret, you should have tried harder.

Thanks,
Bas

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