liwords VS warrant

Check out https://woogles.io (disclaimer I am a cofounder). AGPLV3 platform with world class bots, puzzles, a free analyzer, clubs/tournaments, and more to come. You can see the source code at https://github.com/woogles-io/liwords. We recently hit 5M games played and have hosted a few major tournaments.

A small team of us work on a project https://github.com/domino14/liwords - this is an online crossword-board-game playing website. We have around 6000 MAU, are fully free and open-source, and need a lot of coding help!

We built woogles.io (a crossword board game playing site with almost 10K MAU) in Go. See https://github.com/domino14/liwords

https://github.com/domino14/liwords - warning it’s not that well-developed but it’s ok

A small team and I made https://woogles.io - we were inspired by lichess to make a site to play crossword board games during the pandemic (like Scrabble, Words with Friends, etc).

We did raise money on Kickstarter - 25K but are purely donations-driven and open source (AGPL3) Most months we just get enough to cover the cost of running the servers. We have around 6000 monthly active users, have hosted several big worldwide championships, have puzzles, and just earlier today released a board editor / broadcast mode for annotating real life games in real time. We also have a top notch bot AI and WASM-based analyzer.

Our stack is Go, Typescript + React, with NATS/PGSQL on the backend.

woogles.io

The people behind those websites and apps have no clue this software exists. The exception is woogles.io because it is associated with the Macondo AI. /u/14domino is the brain behind both of those things

https://woogles.io raised $25K on Kickstarter and built a more beautiful site. Come join us (we’re still taking donations :)

- Playing online: there is woogles.io which I personally would recommend; it's made by players for players and is free to use. Among the features are: play against humans, play against strong bots, tournaments, feedback on your moves after the game, availability of different languages and game variants. Other options are: playscrab.com (also made by players for players); isc.ro (the Internet Scrabble Club); the app Scrabble Go and, if you don't mind playing with slightly altered game rules, Wordfeud, which comes along with a large online league (not technically affiliated with the app itself).

Warrant — Hosted enterprise-grade authorization and access control service for your apps. The free tier includes 1 million monthly API requests and 1,000 authz rules.

The specific challenge with authz in the app layer is that different apps can have different access models with varying complexity, especially the more granular you get (e.g. implementing fine grained access to specific objects/resources - like Google Docs).

Personally, I think a rebac (relationship/graph based) approach works best for apps because permissions in applications are mostly relational and/or hierarchical (levels of groups). There are authz systems out there such as Warrant https://warrant.dev/ (I'm a founder) in which you can define a custom access model as a schema and enforce it in your app.

Let's use warrant.dev as an example. The system provides a set of REST APIs for you to define object types and access policies (called warrants). The general process is first to create object types using HTTP POST:

https://warrant.dev/ (Provider) Relatively new authZ provider, they have a dashboard where you can manage your rules in a central location and then use them from multiple languages via their SDKs, even on the client to perform UI checks. Rules can also be managed programmatically via SDK.

I would describe this debate more as Policy-as-Data (Zanzibar) vs Policy-as-Code (OPA et al).

In Zanzibar, all of the information required to make an authorization decision (namespaces, relationship tuples, etc.) is stored in Zanzibar, and the decision engine resolves access checks based on this data. This data can be scaled horizontally (and consistently) as needed for an application’s needs. This makes Zanzibar a centralized, unified solution for all of an application’s authorization needs. I’ve found this approach more purpose built / well suited for application authorization.

With OPA and other policy engines, the data required for performing access checks lives somewhere else (maybe the application’s database) and must be separately queried and included as part of the authorization check because OPA et al. are stateless decision engines. This makes it such that you need to piece together data from different sources in order to get your final decision, which IMO is something most developers don’t want to deal with.

On the flip side, Zanzibar’s “namespaces” are a very simple policy layer not well suited to querying against data outside of Zanzibar’s scope (e.g. geolocation, time, etc). For scenarios like this, a full fledged policy-as-code solution is great. However, it should be noted that some open source Zanzibar implementations like Warrant[1] and SpiceDB[2] (mentioned in the article) also offer a policy-as-code layer on top of Zanzibar’s graph-based/ReBAC approach to tackle these scenarios.

Disclaimer, I’m one of the founders of Warrant.

[1] https://github.com/warrant-dev/warrant

[2] https://github.com/authzed/spicedb

Hey HN, I recently shared my thoughts on why Google Zanzibar is a great solution for implementing authorization[1] and why we decided to build Warrant’s core authz service using key concepts from the Zanzibar paper. As I mentioned in the post, we recently open sourced the authz service powering our managed cloud service, Warrant Cloud[2], so I thought I’d share it with everyone here. Cheers!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36470943

[2] https://warrant.dev/

More than two years after choosing to build Warrant atop Zanzibar’s core principles, we’re extremely happy with our decision. Doing so gave us a solid technical foundation on which to tackle the various complex authorization challenges companies face today. As we continue to encounter new scenarios and use cases, we’ll keep iterating on Warrant to ensure it’s the most capable authorization service. To share what we learn and what we build with the developer community, we recently open-sourced the core authorization engine that powers our fully managed authorization platform, Warrant Cloud. If you’re interested in authorization (or Zanzibar), check it out and give it a star!