Re: ERROR verb (was: Re: well-formedness error)

[Mark Baker <distobj@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2004 at 10:32:30PM -0400, Robert Sayre wrote:
> On 6/19/04 8:16 PM, "Mark Baker" <distobj@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > I'm not convinced that there's a whole lot of value to trusting
> > untrusted third parties to tell you that your data is bad.  It seems
> > that's something you should check for yourself.  But perhaps there's
> > some use case for this that I'm unfamiliar with.
> > 
> 
> I've taken this opportunity rant at no one in particular. Please don't
> consider it a rebuttal.
> 
> <rant>
> 
> Mark's objection makes a lot of sense to a developer. The problem is that a
> vanishingly small percentage of users are developers. The average user has
> trusted their tools since the beginning of the web. It's possible[1] to
> publish your site with totally standard tools like Apache, IIS, Frontpage,
> Dreamweaver, Radio, Movable Type, Blogger, etc, and have *no clue* that your
> software has done anything wrong (or let you do something wrong).

Good point, but that only seems a respones to my "check for yourself"
comment, rather than to my point, which was about trust.

Though it's well intentioned, I think this type of service is certain to
be abused.  That doesn't mean that we can't make a go of it, but I think
there's a lot more work to do to make that happen, and going only part
way is probably asking for trouble.  Here's some possible problems that
I can forsee;

- intentional bombardment; akin to mailbombing
- unintentional bombardment; a very popular feed sends out some bad
Atom, and gets nailed by 1000s of do-good aggregators
- lying; an attacker grabs your good Atom, tweaks it to be bad Atom,
then sends an error report to you
- if error reports are presented on a publically accessible web page,
prepare for "error spam"

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

  Seeking work on large scale application/data integration projects
  and/or the enabling infrastructure for same.