Violation of basic computational rights?

I'm not sure the filename approach is really all that far out there.

Microsoft uses it for Office 2016 deployments.  Their new installer process 
does something similar to what we are trying to do when installing office.

An example of the filename they use is:
Setup.X64.en-US_O365HomePremRetail_0174f7b5-908c-4338-be4c-ffffffffffff_TX_PR_.exe

Their web page that kicks off the download process simply states we are going 
to download a file to your computer.  When your browser gives you an option to 
save it or run it, choose run.

----- Rom

-----Original Message-----
From: Tristan Olive [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tristan 
Olive
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2015 1:00 PM
To: Rom Walton <[email protected]>
Cc: Hugh Wormington <[email protected]>; Rytis Slatkevičius 
<[email protected]>; BOINC Developers Mailing List 
<[email protected]>; Matthew Blumberg <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [boinc_dev] Proposal: Simple Attach (Cookieless Installs)

I agree that an IP cannot be expected to be a reliable, unique identifier, even 
short term. However, I also think the long filename is unreliable, as it 
requires that a user not do basic file management on his own system. It feels 
like a "violation of basic computational rights" to expect this. Also, is the 
maximum path length on Windows still an issue? We can't be sure where the 
download directory is located, as that is also browser dependent and user 
configurable, so the total path length is unpredictable.

To go along with what Hugh is suggesting, see the attached (rudimentary) chart 
showing the flow of how this could work. Note that the nonce really is only 
used to establish a handshake of sorts between the client and server; once that 
has been done, the server gives the client a separate, verifiably-unique auth 
key to be used in <opaque> for client authentication going forward.

If the browser launch fails, can we add a link or button or menu item somewhere 
in the client as a manual retry? Then we could send the user a notice after 
some time saying, "we see you have not completed installation, please follow 
these directions to continue."

--
Tristan Olive

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