Imma say it. ACLs are a tool that centralizes command and control and, among other things, would create a cultural and economic avenue for eventual protocol capture by probably microsoft or some payment processor cloud+hardware monolith. There. I said it.
Jun 9, 2026 at 3:57 AM
ACLs don't
The ACL model is unable to make correct access decisions for interactions involving more than two principals, since required information is not retained across message sends. Though this deficiency has long been documented in the published literature, it is not widely understood. This logic error in the ACL model is exploited by both the clickjacking and Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks that affect many Web applications.
Authority as Possession: Permissioned Spaces Deserve Better Than ACLs
Why Capability Trees are the right governance primitive for permissioned spaces.
DASL: Governance of the DASL Project
The goal of the DASL Project is to develop content-addressing primitives and the technologies that build on them, with a view towards enabling unbundled software and protocol architectures that best align with and promote democratic systems.
Digital Driver’s Licenses Threaten to Create a “Great Internet Lockdown” | ACLU
Two trends threaten the creation of a bureaucratic wall between Americans and the information they have a right to access
Capability Trees: Sovereignty Is the Point
This piece argues that DASL introduces security risk when applied to delegations, and that by not using DASL, capability trees avoid that risk.
Autonomous Communicator (AC) Protocol — Germ Network
“Hi, I’m Mark, here’s how you can send a message to me.” Our Autonomous Communicator (AC) Protocol empowers people to autonomously define identities which they can exchange with others to form relationships for communicating over end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging channels.
Making MLS more decentralized
It’s no secret that we at Phoenix R&D are big fans of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, having helped it to come into existence. It’s a versatile group key agreement and messaging protocol that’s used to power both asynchronous and real-time applications. MLS is
Toward Copyleft Equality for All
I would not have imagined even two years ago that expansion of copyleft would become such an issue of interest in software freedom licensing. Historically and for good reason, addition of new forms of copyleft clauses has moved at a steady pace. The early 2000s brought network services clauses (such as that in the Affero GPL), which hinged primarily on requiring provision of source to network-remote users. Affero GPL implemented this via copyright-controlled permission of modification. These licenses began as experiments, and were not approved by some license certification authorities until many years later.
Just Enough Governance: Introducing Steward Governance for DASL
When we started working on DASL, it was little more than an experiment. We talked to as many people as we could who had been interested in content addressing but couldn't make it work for their needs. The result was radically focused on interoperability and adoption, on a mission
Centralization vs Decentralization - AVC
Decentralization is one of, if not the most, discussed features of the crypto tech stack. In a decentralized system, no single body controls the system. We have most certainly not reached the era fully decentralized systems, but that is what most of the world-class technologists working in the crypto sector are focused on getting us […]
Connect, protect, and build everywhere
Make employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost.
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech
So I finally finished reading this and while I agree with the recommendation, I’m a little wary of some of the context it’s rooted in ideologically and I’m wondering if others have thoughts on these things. Equality in the marketplace I think the main problem with the text is that it relies heavily on the idea of “marketplace of ideas,” leaning heavily on the idea that protocols are actually good for markets specifically because they make competition more perfect (because there’s better knowled...
Yes: Affirmative Consent as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding and Imagining Social Platforms | Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
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Decentralization is more than just a buzzword. Looking at the AT Protocol, it’s clear: the future belongs to systems that decouple identity and data from the provider. For sweep-it and my other tools, this means focusing on interoperability rather than closed silos. #atproto #decentralization
I hope @dholms.at or someone else at @bsky.app considers this before it's too late and ACLs are baked into the protocol.
Authority as Possession: Permissioned Spaces Deserve Better Than ACLs
leaflet.pub
