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Firefox Extension for Applied Social Networking

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the grinding-out-the-documentation-of-relationships dept.

wanderingstan writes "Outfoxed is my masters thesis project about trust. (Nutshell overview) The extension uses a social network for personalized searching, phishing/spyware protection, file/process validation and more. It's related to del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and those Kevin Bacon things, but goes a lot further. Mathematically, it's based on the network behavior of small world networks (pdf). Built with Javascript, Python, SQL, and XSLT. 366 testers so far, but we need the network to grow!"

9 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Papers on similar work by techmuse · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've previously published two papers on a very similar idea - using distributed social trust networks to make trust judgements, which is essentially what Outfoxed is. You can find the papers at:

    The Solar Trust Model
    Michael Clifford, Charles Lavine, Matt Bishop
    http://www.acsac.org/1998/abstracts/fri-a-1030-cli fford.pdf

    Networking in The Solar Trust Model: Determining Optimal Trust Paths in a Decentralized Trust Network
    http://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/9.pdf

  2. Only Windows... by ozamosi · · Score: 0, Informative

    If you - like me - is running something which isn't Windows, you don't even have to try to try it out. It is Windows only at the moment.

    It do say that the extention have been compiled for linux, but isn't finnished. If I was him, I'd have my linux version Done when i submitted to /.

    1. Re:Only Windows... by wanderingstan · · Score: 2, Informative

      Mac and Linux versions are only a few days away.

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

  3. Re:Using social networks for personalization by lucabrasi999 · · Score: 3, Informative
    But those spyware companies aren't in your circle of trust so it doesn't matter what they think about their websites.

    True. I would never expect a spyware company to lie their way into a trusted network. :)

  4. Re:Using social networks for personalization by wanderingstan · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

  5. Re:Two things ... by Bitsy+Boffin · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
  6. More bandwidth on the way by wanderingstan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Looks like my ISP was overconfident in saying they could handle a slashdotting. I'm moving to a dedicated server, and they say it'll be ready within a half hour. We'll see...

  7. Re:Maybe this is a FASQ, but by wanderingstan · · Score: 2, Informative
    See the Objections page, item 2:
    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.
    This is also covered in "keeping your network clean":
    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.
    Incidentally, I also wrote about this as a weakness of Zniff.
  8. Re:I wish there was a Firefox extension for... by Tuross · · Score: 2, Informative

    Perhaps you've never heard of GreaseMonkey.

    http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

    --
    Matt
    1. Read Slashdot
    2. ???
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