Slashdot Mirror

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

I'm assuming the article is talking about http://getoutfoxed.com/

NoScript has to be on the top of my list (right after Adblock and Greasemonkey)...Disabling JS globaly and only allowing it where it is necessary keeps out almost all ads...pages load faster, and you don't have to worry about information leaks...

Some others I use...BetterSearch, LinkPreview, Outfoxed, BugMeNot, del.icio.us and Farky...

There is already a social bookmarking/site rating system for Firefox. It is called Outfoxed . Definitely worth a try.

We could even have a plugin in firefox that would warn or block a site that was known to have used spam.

What, you mean Outfoxed?

Comments are possible, and encouraged. E.g. these screenshots

Also, I've addressed the "trust is not binary" question in this FAQ.

Comments are possible, and encouraged. E.g. these screenshots

Also, I've addressed the "trust is not binary" question in this FAQ.

Uninstall instructions
Sorry you're having strange behavior. I've never heard of it not showing up in the extensions list. Please make a bug report and tell me what other extensions you're running. Thanks.

-stan

Uninstall instructions
Sorry you're having strange behavior. I've never heard of it not showing up in the extensions list. Please make a bug report and tell me what other extensions you're running. Thanks.

-stan

From the site:

"It's true, there are a lot of sell-outs and idiots out there. But remember, their bad trust decision affects not only you, but everyone else connected to them. (Possibly thousands of others.) All that is needed is for one of these other people to have a little sense and give a bad report to (distrust) the idiot, and then the problem is cleared. (See Keeping your network clean.)"

Within a web of trust, Googlebombing just doesn't work. If you are the would-be bomber, you have to convince a lot of people to add you as an informer. And then you have to hope that the people you have conned are informers to many other people. You must further hope that none of these other people will notice the bogus links and report you as untrustworthy. That's just too many levels of failure for googlebombing to be effective. (This also applies for straight-up hacking: Even though most of the trust pages will be presumably stored on low-security web servers, you'd have to hack a ton of pages to have any effect. And as soon as anyone notices, it's all for nothing.)

The other way of googlebombing would be to create tons of dummy users who are all trusted by one "real user". Once the real user is trusted, then all the dummies get in and screw up the trust levels. However, this only works if you have some sort of Bayesian or other distributed trust calculation system (see below) that takes account of the shear number of people who are giving their opinion. Outfoxed doesn't care about the number of votes, but only about the vote of the person who is closest.

Within Outfoxed, every informer in a user's informer network has "authority" over any report or informer which is further from the user. (In the most simple case, distance is synonymous with the number of hops. See path length.) In this way, network maintenance is delegated to others, and many users can benifet from the action of one.

Within a web of trust, Googlebombing just doesn't work. If you are the would-be bomber, you have to convince a lot of people to add you as an informer. And then you have to hope that the people you have conned are informers to many other people. You must further hope that none of these other people will notice the bogus links and report you as untrustworthy. That's just too many levels of failure for googlebombing to be effective. (This also applies for straight-up hacking: Even though most of the trust pages will be presumably stored on low-security web servers, you'd have to hack a ton of pages to have any effect. And as soon as anyone notices, it's all for nothing.)

The other way of googlebombing would be to create tons of dummy users who are all trusted by one "real user". Once the real user is trusted, then all the dummies get in and screw up the trust levels. However, this only works if you have some sort of Bayesian or other distributed trust calculation system (see below) that takes account of the shear number of people who are giving their opinion. Outfoxed doesn't care about the number of votes, but only about the vote of the person who is closest.

Within Outfoxed, every informer in a user's informer network has "authority" over any report or informer which is further from the user. (In the most simple case, distance is synonymous with the number of hops. See path length.) In this way, network maintenance is delegated to others, and many users can benifet from the action of one.

Within a web of trust, Googlebombing just doesn't work. If you are the would-be bomber, you have to convince a lot of people to add you as an informer. And then you have to hope that the people you have conned are informers to many other people. You must further hope that none of these other people will notice the bogus links and report you as untrustworthy. That's just too many levels of failure for googlebombing to be effective. (This also applies for straight-up hacking: Even though most of the trust pages will be presumably stored on low-security web servers, you'd have to hack a ton of pages to have any effect. And as soon as anyone notices, it's all for nothing.)

The other way of googlebombing would be to create tons of dummy users who are all trusted by one "real user". Once the real user is trusted, then all the dummies get in and screw up the trust levels. However, this only works if you have some sort of Bayesian or other distributed trust calculation system (see below) that takes account of the shear number of people who are giving their opinion. Outfoxed doesn't care about the number of votes, but only about the vote of the person who is closest.

Within Outfoxed, every informer in a user's informer network has "authority" over any report or informer which is further from the user. (In the most simple case, distance is synonymous with the number of hops. See path length.) In this way, network maintenance is delegated to others, and many users can benifet from the action of one.

Mac and Linux versions are only a few days away.

There was just some trouble getting pyana to link correctly in Python.

You're might trust sources in only specific areas. The shot at this, IMHO, is tagging (which I wrote about here)

Outfoxed uses tags to help resolve conflict within the database. If two equally-trusted informers give conflicting reports on a page, tags can be used to break the tie. When a user adds an informer, they can add tags indicating particular areas where this informer is trusted (or not trusted). For example, if your friend Bob is a good car mechanic but with very different political views from you, you might give him the tags "car repair auto -humor -funny". This means that his reports will take preference on pages tagged as auto, repair, or auto, and that his reports will be deprecated on pages tagged as humor or funny.

[Disclaimer: This feature isn't implemented yet, although all the tagging hooks are in place.]

But I don't think it's a ship-sinking issue for Outfoxed. It only tries to present you with the most relevant metadata for what you're doing, which you can look at or ignore.

And all things being equal, someone trusted by you is more likely than a stranger to share your values about what constitues good, bad, boring, funny, etc...

I cover this a little bit in calculating path length. As tdvaughan said, there's a built-in decay factor. And moreover, it should be said that Outfoxed is just a metadata aggregator: it will dutifully tell you if a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend thinks a plumber is good. But it's entirely up to you if you will trust the recomendation.

Download Extension here

Mirror

It says right there on the download page

Windows XP:
Download outfoxed_beta_0.2.90d.xpi
(Where are the Linux and Mac versions?)

And from that page seeing as the site is flakey...

2005-06-18 Note: Udo has compiled Mac and Linux versions. We need to wrap it up into an installation package though...so hopefully next week. Register to be notified by email when it's ready.

On the one hand, you trust your friends, so things your friends clicked on might be interesting for you to know about. On the other hand, friendships are not a good predictor for recommendations since your friends often have different interests from you.

One important difference is that Outfoxed doesn't assume that the people feeding you metadata are friends-- that's one reason why I chose the more neutral word informer, which can be a person, organization (example), or even auto-generated list (example).

It's true that you might trust informers in only specific areas. This is partially addressed by tagging. But the bottom line is that Outfoxed only tries to present you with the most relevant metadata for what you're doing, which you can look at or ignore. And all things being equal, a friend is more likely than a stranger to share your values about what constitues good, bad, boring, funny, etc...

But in any case, I'm looking forward to what the slashdot masses think of my project...and to how my ISP holds up.

The example in the "nutshell example" seems like a good enough idea, but I'm curious, what's to ensure that the results stay good as the connections increase? In this example, it very quickly gets to a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend status. It seems that for each hop you take away from the most trusted people in your social network, good advice gets exponentially harder to find.

For example, if you asked your brother--who just had his bathroom redone--for a recommendation on a good plumber, you might expect some good advice. But how much credence are you going to give the advice of your brother's co-worker's nephew's best friend?

http://getoutfoxed.com/

"There are over 8 billion web pages. Most of them suck.

Outfoxed uses your network of trusted friends and experts to help you find the good stuff and avoid the bad. (And a lot more, too.)"