[DAS] Re: DAS security

[Ewan Birney]

On Tuesday, September 23, 2003, at 12:08  pm, James Stalker wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 11:42:18AM +0100, Neil Walker wrote:
>> Tony Cox wrote:
>>
>>> Since it has always been an open source/data project we have not 
>>> engineered a
>>> system for hiding some data form a subset of users.
>>
>> I had this same discussion with the Mart team last week with regard a
>> distributed Mart.  I think the issue with Ensembl being Open Source is
>> that you can't hack the client code to hide your data from a paricular
>> class of user, as someone can always download an unhacked version from
>> CVS.
>
> Well, for the website, the issue is more that you don't provide the
> client, so can't do a thing about it, opensource or not.  It is also
> generally true that you can never trust the client in a client-server
> app.
>

Right. The open-source-ness of the client doesn't change the fact that 
a client
communicates with a port.

data slicing with tight user-authentication for slices is not a major 
driver for the
Ensembl code base - As Jim says, people who have non-disruptive, 
sensible
ways of handling different users are welcome to contribute...


(if someone really wants to do this we can consider having you work on 
campus
for a while - this why you can have a high-bandwidth conversation with 
developers
directly rather than bouncing email around).