That last sentence was hilarious. Weed seeds are in almost all soil. They arrive there on the wind. What constitutes a "weed" is that it's a plant that's not desired in a specific location. What is, and is not, a weed, is entirely contextual.

The reason for walling a garden is to create a microclimate that protects the garden from the wind. It's like a greenhouse. It's protection for species that would otherwise not survive in the area.

The way to get non-walled technology is government intervention. That's how the internet was invented. Then, as it was deployed and commercialized, it "won out" because it was open, while services like AOL, Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, Apple's eWorld, CompuServe, and MSN were closed, walled garden online services.

You can't write out that coherent of an argument and expect any free market ideologues to answer you.

Cognitive dissonance is painful!

> How do you keep the weeds out of your garden?

In real life, you pull the weeds or specifically target them with pesticide. A wall is too granular of a filter to keep weeds out.

In software, the most successful filters -- such as e-mail spam filters --- specifically target malfeasors. A "wall" type of solution to e-mail would instead only trust e-mails from specific domains or recast the problem as "Facebook messages", eliminating interoperability.

Walls don't exist to keep out weeds, they exist to keep out neighbors or poachers -- aka, competitors.

  > There is a reason walled gardens work.

Amazing, how often this is forgotten. And way to often the attitude on HN is similar to that in Orwell's farm: "four legs are good, two legs are bad". Walled garden? Bad. Open? Good. The truth however is that goodness or badness is not defined by this.

Like a Linux LiveCD when you sign into Chrome. You authenticate, but when you close the session everything is gone and its back to default.

But that's google's garden. What is stopping them from getting bored of reading penis enhancement spam and shuttering gmail or reader?

While nothing is stopping them, Google provides ways to dump the contents of your feeds and mailbox locally so you can add them to some other email / rss client if you want. That is a lot better than what some of the higher up posts are getting at, which is platform lock-in

I said "like this" not "exactly this". Just a demonstration of how it could work.

That's called wishful thinking.

Which is what the parent was engaging in. The next guy then asked how it would work. I gave an example of how it could work. I'm not sure what the disagreement is here.

Your example is what I called wishful thinking. You haven't explained how it could work without authenticating to somebody's walled garden.

The original idea of some magical screen you walk up to with all of these abilities and none of the limitations of walled gardens is also wishful thinking; however it doesn't go so far as to claim it's an example of how to accomplish this.

Your imagination can't extend my example to something more private? You can't envision an NFC-based OpenID authentication connecting to your private server containing the information you wish to bring up on the screen? You can't imagine a Diaspora-style open source kiosk? You can't imagine even bringing up Chrome in Incognito Mode and feeding it data from your personal KeePass?

I was using an example I figured everyone around here would be familiar enough with to extrapolate the possibilities. If it actually existed, we wouldn't be wishing for it to happen. The whole point is that it's *not" "magical", it's completely possible, yet it doesn't actually exist.

Sure, I can envision that. But that's not what the original idea was. It was a box which recognized you (presumably via some form of computer vision). How could such a device work without having a database to match against people's identities?

Your NFC idea is a lot more plausible than the original idea.

I had read the original post as being open to the authentication method of choice. What you describe is certainly one authentication method (inherence, aka what you are or do). Most common is knowledge, aka a password or unique URL. NFC would be ownership, or what you have. Two of these would allow you to keep your own database. I guess the confusion came from our different interpretations of what the original poster meant by "recognize". I linked recognition with authentication, of which there are three methods to be used, and picked the most likely in my mind. I'm knee deep in authentication principles most of the day.

Sorry if I came off as hostile, it was a miscommunication.

>Sorry if I came off as hostile, it was a miscommunication.

Story of the internet, really. I get down-voted a lot on Reddit because people confuse my directness for hostility. I've tried couching my arguments with a more passive voice but sometimes it becomes too much of a hassle.