[feature-proposal] Forgot password improvements

[Ewout ter Haar]

Hi Rodrigo,

I was upset, but not because of diverging opinions. Much to the
contrary, I considered this thread as an example how a diverse group
of people with different strengths and perspectives collectively can
come up with a better solution to a (admittedly simple) problem than
the one we had devised.

My problem and the reason for my disappointment  is what happened
next. The affirmation of an opinion disguised as a technical issue.
Using terms as "brute force", "privacy destroying", "Nope" (you
wouldn't understand, leave the technical matters to us, computer
scientists), "No, it won't". Everybody so sure of themselves...

And then, when pressed to make explicit their thread model, it turns
out that it involves the generation of fake users, with a very small
probability of there even existing a vulnerable user!

This is the kind of debate I object to. I call this technical
intimidation. To dismiss this as bikeshedding is condoning the
behavior. And it is a pity, because privacy issues a so much
worthwhile discussing.

As for the "we don't speak for Colivre" issue, I have now empirical
evidence that opinions of Colivre colleagues weigh much more than
those of others. And that is natural, you trust your colleagues and
people you now more than others. But when three (3) people with
@colivre.coop.br emails in succession pile up, all agreeing with each
other, and when then development stops, well, it seems natural to
assume that it was a Colivre opinion. When bugs happen in production
code, I am not going to complain about Rodrigo or Terceiro, I am going
to complain about Colivre. That seems fair and reasonable.

To sum up, I encouraged you to take the issue to the open list because
I believe that discussion between diverse people leads to better
systems. But I feel we still have long way to go before "soft" issues
like usability can be discussed without the technical people imposing
their opinions by shouting everyone else down.

Ewout


http://social.stoa.usp.br/ewout
F. 30916696


On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 4:42 PM, Rodrigo Souto <rodrigo at colivre.coop.br> wrote:
> Hey Ewout, I see that you are really upset about the divergence here on
> the list about this issue but I hope you see, as I do, that there is no
> reason to be.
>
> Although in your mind it's completely clear that the "two-emails-thing"
> and the "information-leakage-stuff" are really small related to the
> usability issues associated, it might not be clear on other people's
> mind (specially when those minds are computer scientists' minds).
>
> See, I still think that the select field is much better than all of
> these options, since I don't think selecting which field you want to use
> is really a hard task at all, specially considering all the other
> problems we are finding to remove it. But I saw that my opinion was
> overwhelmed by everyone else so I just respected that and tried to find
> and help with other solutions (as a matter of fact I was already
> developing the solution we had agreed until Aurium disagreed). That's
> what collective decision is all about, back and forth until a final
> point.
>
> The other point I have to make is this continuous "Colivre's against us all
> thing". When we discuss on the list, we don't unite on the background to
> come up with "Colivre's unified point of view (coincidentally being
> always against the opinions of the community)". These are just Rodrigo,
> Caio, Aurélio, Terceiro and whoever; speaking out their minds. Of course
> in some too large cases (like that one you-know-which) we must define
> Colivre's (as a organization) point of view but on 99% of the cases is
> just us, individual people with their own opinions.
>
> I really like all the communication we can have today that allows all of
> this discussion. I thought this feature, as an example, wasn't even
> needed to be discussed since I thought it was just so simple, but Ewout
> himself convinced me to put it up for discussion and I got surprised
> with all the divergent opinions everyone had about it. And this is
> great, although tiring some times. But if we want to continue developing
> in such environment, we must get used to have people disagreeing with
> us and talk in the most clear and reasonable way (avoiding sarcasms and all
> these aggressive stuff that just mess up the discussion).
>
> (I hope I'm not sounding condescending, I just don't see why we should
> go attacking each other instead of respecting each ones ideas and try to
> argument and get to an agreement).
> --
> Rodrigo Souto <rodrigo at colivre.coop.br> :: 55 71 8131-7714
> Colivre - Cooperativa de Tecnologias Livres
> http://www.colivre.coop.br/
>
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