Thanks, Whoaa. I was always carrying the iPad plus a pad of paper to every meeting three years ago when I started this fiasco :) There were other drawing & notes apps out there, but this is the one I wanted.
IMO, A big danger of implementing centralized authentication across multiple sites is that will make social engineering schemes aimed at stealing a user's credentials more plausible and effective.
I know that systems such as OpenID and others perform authentication directly between the user and thetrusted provider (google, facebook, twitter, etc), and that the site ends up with a one-time token that confirms the user's identity. The site requesting authentication never gets the actual password to the openID account, which makes this approach viable in a technical security sense.
But here's the thing: general users are getting used to entering their centralized credentials to perform actions on untrusted sites. Technical users understand the design. We can confirm that, yes, TwitScoop does indeed direct us to twitter.com/oauth/... (no HTTPS, but that's another story).
Regular users posting a comment on a blog, though, don't see any difference between giving their credentials to a trusted Google login site and entering their credentials into some form on a blog.
If, for example, logging in with Facebook credentials becomes common, it would be trivial to create a rogue blog which collects login information. Fill it with a few incendiary posts, possibly create an official-looking Facebook login page that doesn't display its URL, and it would be possible to capture quite a few sets of credentials.
But a find on root takes a lot of time in some cases, during which the attacker could be compromised. And the scripts might not use it for that reason. The script could use it as a backup only if the standard one doesn't exist, but still, it is a bump in the road, and might be worth it to cause the script to use find and delay it.
I'm not a user of THC, but it doesn't help the debate when opponents spread huge amounts of misinformation and propaganda on the opposing side of the topic either, often citing debunked toxicity studies, and claiming false links to mental illness, none of which have been shown to be causative. Many of the dangers claimed are observations made from animal necroscopies after LD50 doses or doses non-representative of recreational or medical usage. Not joking, the LD50 of cannabis leaf for humans is roughly 3/4 of a ton, or something like 17lbs of pure THC.
I'm just curious, your opposition seems largely centered on people being high and not the medical effects, are you a prohibitionist too? What about self-induced altered states of mind, hypnosis, etc? Neurochemically active foods (chocolate->dopamine link)? What's the reasoning?
Storing something like a username in client-side data and then trusting its accuracy is effectively delegating your authentication outside you circle of control. Saying that encryption will make this magically secure is like saying encryption makes for effective DRM - eventually it will be compromised and you will have a systemic problem.
Storing, say, a username and a password hash in your encrypted cookie is at least as secure as direct authentication at each page load; even if they break your encryption they still have to know the admin's password.
Start with the assumption that the locks you use for security will fail, and ask "how will this break?" If we take the encryption out of the picture, do we trust the client to log in as root (or similar) with just a username and no password? The lock in question (as I understand it) is failing for an unrelated (information disclosure) reason. The design decision to lean so hard on the lock is what makes this such an issue.
"..Dozens of people collaborated spontaneously, motivated by loyalty, friendship, or the love of craftsmanship. We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work."
