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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!"

3 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. 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. :)

  3. 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.