White Bicycle Technology

White Bicycle Technologies are those that assume best practice and safe intent, and underestimate (or ignore) the risk of abuse. They only work in a perfect world, or as long as their environment approaches this perfection.

Examples include the competitive ("co-operative") multitasking model used in early MacOS and Windows 3.x, auto-running scripts in HTML email "message text", auto-running macros in MS Office "documents", etc.

The term comes from free public white bicycles, as available in some European cities; something that would be unlikely to work in high-crime areas where these would be stolen, stripped for parts, sold over the border etc.

• I would imagine that, once you get past the scarcity problem, the theft would pretty much stop. The trick is persistence. It's easy to get discouraged and abandon the project when theft begins to erode its viability. You have to get smarter than the thieves. And then there's the "no ownership" problem; it's well known that stuff that is "not owned" or "owned by everyone" deteriorates. So some public body or volunteer body would have to maintain it. Hmmm. Now we're into donations or taxes. More Hmmm. So you either make it a government thing (thanks for playing) or some philanthropist would have to out-fund the deterioration effect. Hmmm. Well, if you've got a culture of "need" anywhere in the neighborhood, this is going to get expensive. This doesn't work in the most obvious form. Gonna have to think about it some more.

This has also been tried (and eventually failed) in Portland's Yellow Bike Project, as documented on this very web server: http://www.c2.com/ybp/

Note that this does work in some restricted areas. In the Dutch National Park De Hoge Veluwe, where entrance and exit is controlled by gates, fences and other security measures, this actually seems to work. Sort of like sandboxing IRL, I think.