http://aut.dyndns.org//webl10n/webl10n.html
Article by the author of Locale::Maketext::Lexicon. I was wondering about this, and this one article looks pretty comprehensive and practical.
Because I think the Mason Book’s explanation of sessions is pretty crufty, here are some descriptions that are, in my opinion, better explanations.
http://www.lerner.co.il/atf/atf_76 – Looks like plone! – doh. listings don’t work. explanation is still pretty good.
man Apache::Session
I’d heard rumors of superyuppies carrying around exclusive ‘black’ credit cards. At first, I thought these cards would carry a permanent 2% apr in the hope of capturing very expensive impulse purchase habits, but apparently, I was wrong.
http://money.msn.co.uk/Bank_Plan/Cards/SpecFeat/TakeTheCredit/Update1/default.asp The Amex Centurion epinions review The Amex Centurion Urban Legends Page (What’s the opposite of debunk?) The Beyond Black from Quintessentially.
I can see why heavy travelers can make use of free traveler’s upgrades, but honestly, is it a race to see who can have the credit card with the highest fees? Admittedly, it might be fun to pay for a Bentley on a piece of plastic… but to me, these are clearly not the realm of the self-made millionaire.
I’m kind of sick of hearing this from various sources, so I went to do some research into government-supplied budgetary data. I threw it into some Excel and ran some charts. Have a look for yourself. I plan on adding some more research there to investigate the various claims I hear from time to time.
One thing I did learn from this process is that budgeting and policy is pretty complex stuff. You might think that our leaders might have to back up their claims with better data than a simple dollar figure spent on National Defense. You might also think that a single number wouldn’t fully disclose changing natures of defense and military structure.
It happens to be that you don’t even need a single number to make a good sound bite. You can get away with a generalization, and as long as you repeat it long enough, those who hear it will believe.
One of the issues with providing search functionality to corporate knowledge is that access control is in full effect; you can’t simply do full indexing of everything available, because each user has a different set of data available to them. It also seems like everyone writes their own access control system as well (including yours truly), complicating matters. I’ll overview some of the interesting stuff going on and then go on to list some ideas for implementation in open source.
My Summary:
The critical issue is whether to integrate your access control system into your indexing process, or to modularize it into its own component and provide an interface to the search application. If you modularize, you end up doing a roundtrip check to the security module while iterating over result sets interminably. If you integrate, then you have to inflate your indexes considerably, which probably doesn’t scale too well. Not to mention that you now probably have an mini (or full) access control system in parallel to your main access control system, which you now must maintain and replicate successfully.
Either way, it seems like a tricky problem. Here are my thoughts about practical implementation:
Research References:
There are very few providers or researchers that i’ve found doing work in this area. It even seems like nobody’s coined a proper term for such functionality in search, so I list some terms you can google for at the bottom.
Netegrity / Inktomi – SiteMinder
Netegrity collaborating with Inktomi have apparently abstracted out RBAC into Netegrity’s SiteMinder software. It connects to LDAP on the user management side, and integrates with Inktomi’s Enterprise Search Security Module to basically do a last-step check on each search result returned. It’s the primitive solution, and has a host of performance issues involved with abstracting the permissions system out of the search component. This is apparently the only commercial solution to the problem that I could find. They even say they’re the only vendor inside their PDF! If it’s in the PDF, it must be true.
http://www.netegrity.com/partners/related/InktomiDatasheet.pdf
XenIntranet
There’s a reference in the changelogs for XenIntranet to adding access control to search. It looks like they use a custom ACL solution, and probably integrated it directly. See comments far below.
http://www.xenintranet.com/changelogs.php
Stanford Peers
This paper from Stanford people Mayank Bawa, Roberto Bayardo Jr., and Rakesh Agrawal describes a Privacy-Preserving Index. It also complains about the lack of Private information search technology, but the solution it posits seems to be more about preventing reverse engineering of data availability through special algorithms for building distributed indexes. The powerpoint below has animations describing the techniques.
*** Update – Mayank Bawa was kind enough to write me and point me to the original powerpoint slides for the presentation, so I changed the link below and removed my snarky comment about Stanford (full disclosure: I went to USC). Thanks, Mayank!
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~bawa/Pub/ppi.ppt
They do list a couple of interesting links.
The Stanford Peers P2P homepage. That’s interesting, that resource discovery over P2P networks may have a lot to do with access-controlled search. This page lists a lot of resources for reading on P2P network topics, but it’s a little stuffy in there.
IBM’s YouServ, a distributed personal webserver at use within IBM for web hosting / file sharing.
Chris Weider
This early paper (‘96!) from Chris Weider seems to touch briefly upon some of these issues in the second from last paragraph. It seems to be more concerned with exposing for-pay content to public users via normal search tools. Some solutions it describes are indexing proxies, which might index and expose for-pay content via search tools only. Think a9’s searching through book content for keywords.
http://www.isoc.org/isoc/whatis/conferences/inet/96/proceedings/a2/a2_1.htm
MIT Computation Structure Group
This bunch of people from MIT seem to be barking up the right tree. However, they like to use a bunch of big words. I think that when you’re dealing with a subject as complex as access control mapped onto search, you need to give your reader a bit of a break when it comes to academic huffing and puffing. Anywho, to summarize, they also complain about the performance implications of Netegrity-Inktomi-adopted approach of completely modularizing access control, and are working on integrating ACL’s into the Intenational Naming System.
http://www.csg.lcs.mit.edu/pubs/reports/search3.pdf, referenced in the MIT Computation Structure Group’s Search Project
If you want to do more research
Here are some of the terms I searched with that turned up goodies:
“permission-based search” “access-controlled search”
Possible outlets for implementation
Anyway, if you’re researching or doing development on anything like these things, I would love to hear from you. gluk AT padtie dot com.
http://www.asymptomatic.net/blogbreakdown.htm
This looks to be a very thorough and nicely-formatted comparison chart between various blogging software.
http://www.lostamerica.com/lostframe.html
A compelling long-exposure look at abandoned desert American lifestyles.
