[josm-dev] Mandatory login for JOSM wiki

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> No, we don't want that really. Anonymous editing is a major part of the 
> JOSM concept till now and most important contributions are anonymous or 
> not logged in and I spent really a lot of time into improving the Trac 
> spamfilter to be a usable tool to find potential issues.
> 
> Beside this Sebastian and I monitor every change afterwards and check if 
> they are dangerous or spammy.

I'm not talking about help pages etc., i'm talking about JOSM 
configuration options that are now in Trac. If we want to allow 
anonymous edits to them, then I suggest that we should invent something 
where these things are signed by someone and JOSM only uses them after 
they have been signed.

I find it unacceptable that someone can inject any imagery source or 
preset or map style into *every* JOSM instance without even having to 
log in.

> Yes, there will be a time inbetween, when dangerous stuff can be 
> included, But this is a problem with OpenSource in general.

No. In the normal OSM SVN we at least have accountability - if someone 
uploads something malicious then we know who it was and we can block the 
account, or at least people know "stuff uploaded by X is not 
trustworthy". All I'm saying is that I want the same accountability on 
the JOSM trac *if* JOSM is built in a way to automatically download 
configuration information from there.

Correct me if I'm wrong but as I see it, currently it is very well 
possible that a JOSM user is shown presets, plugins, imagery layers or 
map styles where we don't even know who put them there. I don't think 
that's right.

> The biggest and in my eyes only important issue is the possibility to 
> have malicious plugins and we can't anyway do anything against this 
> without preventing plugins.

If someone downloads a .jar file from somewhere on the net and installs 
it - their problem. If someone clicks "update plugins" in his 
out-of-the-box JOSM installation and gets malicious code - our problem. 
I am not requesting that we find ways to perfectly prevent it, but I 
think accountability ("user XYZ changed the plugin list on <date>") is 
absolutely required. Otherwise this *will* be abused sooner or later, 
and massively reduce the trust users place in JOSM. We must think about 
these things before they happen. We have a responsiblity towards our 
users that we cannot simply do away with by saying "there lots of other 
ways how users can shoot themselves in the foot so why bother if JOSM 
adds some more".

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"