[opensource-dev] Client-side scripting in Snowglobe

[Robert Martin]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Morgaine
<morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Dahlia Trimble <dahliatrimble at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> To me, an environment such as SL or the web in general tend to attract a
>> few malicious developers, or more so, companies and individuals who are
>> interested in collecting personal data and usage patterns. I'd prefer some
>> level of control over what they can access without needing to understand the
>> source code of any scripted extensions (if indeed source was available).
>
> Dahlia, I agree with part of that, to the extent where it applies:
>
> The "malicious users" argument presupposes that scripts come from 3rd
> parties, some of whom are malicious.  When people write their own scripts,
> which is very common in this opensource-dev community, they are not
> malicious 3rd parties, and they do not generally want to be treated as such.
>
> Quite the opposite, they want all the power that scripting on their local
> platform can give them.  Therefore the "malicious users" argument applies
> only to a subset of scripts, the downloaded ones, and it is perfectly valid
> there.  However, it does not apply to one's own scripts, nor to any other
> power-users' scripts that one wishes to trust.
>
> This leads directly to a rather fundamental requirement:  the sandbox must
> be optional, applying only to the use case of unknown downloaded scripts,
> and not applying when the user wishes her scripts to be used as an interface
> to local facilities.
>
> It is considerations such as this that Lindens should be exploring together
> with the community here, because it impacts on the future of Snowglobe
> directly and in a colossal way.  We are all affected.  Designing this behind
> closed doors is not adequate, nor is it appropriate in an open source
> community viewer.
>
>
> Morgaine.
>
>
>
>
and this is where languages like perl/python have a strength since the
files are plain text
so if you think that a script is doing something funky you can just
look at the script and see. Mono/dotnet code is compiled and very
easily could hide just about anything.


-- 
Robert L Martin