re: [Epiphany] 1.2 Plan (kiosk mode)

[adam cec wustl edu]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Christian Persch wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-09-15 at 18:46, Christopher James Lahey wrote:
> > And of course, as soon as I send that message I remember some of the
> > other features I want to see for kiosk mode.
> >
> > 6) Restrict set of viewable URLs.  The decision of whether a URL is
> > viewable should be some list of blacklists and whitelists with some sort
> > of globbing/regexp or directory functionality.  This should probably
> > prevent viewing of said URLs both from the URL bar and from hyperlinks.
>
> I disagree here. Restricting the UI so that the user can't hose the
> setup on the computer he's on it okay, but restricting _where_ he
> browses to it not: we should not enable or facilitate censorship.

And I strongly disagree with your disagreement.  There are different kinds
of kiosks.  Some of them are for general purpose browsing, and probably
shouldn't be limited, but some are provided for one very specific purpose.
For instance, several libraries I've been to have terminals set up that
provide catalog information from the library website.  They're not
provided for the purpose of doing normal web browsing (there are other
computers in a different lab for that), but so that patrons can quickly
look up the locations of books at convenient locations near the stacks.
Ideally, the UI should be locked down enough to prohibit entering an
arbitrary URL, and there shouldn't be any links out of the "safe space",
but realistically it's nice to be able to limit the computer to the
purpose it was put there for.
-- 
Adam Lopresto <adam@cec.wustl.edu>
Unix System Administrator
Center for Engineering Computing, Washington University