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.
The difference would be that Spyware Program would be rated as dangerous by some source, and (speaking only for myself) I trust my friends a great deal more than I trust I trust Windows, IE, or Active X.
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.
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...
"Against stupidity even gods struggle in vain." -Schiller
Nice article on BBC (via) about how most users don't even know the words for threats on the internet.
Confusing "geek speak" used by experts and media included "phishing", "rogue dialler", "Trojan" and "spyware".
Eighty-four percent did not know that phishing describes faked e-mail scams. ...
A quarter said they knew what "spyware" was, although almost one in 10 of those thought it was a computer program that kept an eye on unfaithful partners.
This is why I something like Outfoxed is needed: Even if you had magic browsers which could tell users "This is a phishing website," most users wouldn't even know that this was a bad thing!
The bottom line is that telling people to "get smart" will not help a computer novice who doesn't know the difference between Gator and Macromedia.
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.
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...
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 feature of LEDs likely to propel them into homes is aesthetic, not practical. Arrays that mix red, green and blue LEDs can produce any color of the rainbow. Instead of a dimmer, you might have three sliding knobs that let you mix color.
"On a very hot day you might want blue light to cool it down a bit, or on a winter day you may want to simulate sunlight," said Steve Landau of Lumileds Lighting, an LED-making joint venture of Agilent Technologies Inc. and Philips Lighting.
Well in that case, why even mess with the hash? A program that randomly spits out 0's and 1's will eventually create every possible data file, including the LoTR avi.
Too bad. I was hoping to compresss my entire HD into a single 128 bit hash.:)
One-way hash functions are supposed to have two properties. One, they're one way. This means that it is easy to take a message and compute the hash value, but it's impossible to take a hash value and recreate the original message. (By "impossible" I mean "can't be done in any reasonable amount of time.")...
If you only have the hash, how can you recreate the original message (even with infinite time)? Is he saying that with only a 128bit hash of a LoTR avi, and an unreasonable amount of time, it would be possible to re-create the movie? I'm no encryption expert, but that don't sound right.
You're right that users choosing "Save as OpenDocument" won't be the driving force behind a shift. But I think the shift will happen. The pressure will come from integration with other systems, especially the internet varieties. Right now the MS Office suite covers most of what runs a business, but already strange new tools and data formats are becoming important even for small businesses: content/site management, integration with search tools, blogs, RSS, RDF, automatic translation systems, Wikis, collaberative document generation, and yet-to-be created tools.
Office can't handle these things. But the people who use and develop these new beasts will certainly find ways to integrate with a standard document format...and long before Microsoft gets around to it. Image being able to use one word-processing tool to create blog entries and update wiki pages, with content integrated to your sites CMS and published on RSS, with RDF automatically extracted, and FOAF used for distribution, and on and on... This can (and will) happen with an open document format......As long as it's standardized, and has a modicum of support. And this, I gather, is what OpenDocument is all about.
[That said, it'll still be an uphill battle. IMHO OpenOffice really sucks compared to MS Office, I just wish I had viable other options.]
Slashdot Mirror
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
The difference would be that Spyware Program would be rated as dangerous by some source, and (speaking only for myself) I trust my friends a great deal more than I trust I trust Windows, IE, or Active X.
Now have a dedicated server. Things seem to be running mostly smoothly...
This is also covered in "keeping your network clean":
Incidentally, I also wrote about this as a weakness of Zniff.
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)
[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...
-Schiller
Nice article on BBC (via) about how most users don't even know the words for threats on the internet.
This is why I something like Outfoxed is needed: Even if you had magic browsers which could tell users "This is a phishing website," most users wouldn't even know that this was a bad thing!
The bottom line is that telling people to "get smart" will not help a computer novice who doesn't know the difference between Gator and Macromedia.
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.
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...
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.
well, actually it was Jell-O...but no matter. :)
Well in that case, why even mess with the hash? A program that randomly spits out 0's and 1's will eventually create every possible data file, including the LoTR avi. Too bad. I was hoping to compresss my entire HD into a single 128 bit hash. :)
You're right that users choosing "Save as OpenDocument" won't be the driving force behind a shift. But I think the shift will happen. The pressure will come from integration with other systems, especially the internet varieties. Right now the MS Office suite covers most of what runs a business, but already strange new tools and data formats are becoming important even for small businesses: content/site management, integration with search tools, blogs, RSS, RDF, automatic translation systems, Wikis, collaberative document generation, and yet-to-be created tools.
Office can't handle these things. But the people who use and develop these new beasts will certainly find ways to integrate with a standard document format...and long before Microsoft gets around to it. Image being able to use one word-processing tool to create blog entries and update wiki pages, with content integrated to your sites CMS and published on RSS, with RDF automatically extracted, and FOAF used for distribution, and on and on... This can (and will) happen with an open document format... ...As long as it's standardized, and has a modicum of support. And this, I gather, is what OpenDocument is all about.
[That said, it'll still be an uphill battle. IMHO OpenOffice really sucks compared to MS Office, I just wish I had viable other options.]
-stan