There may not be wisdom in crowds, but there’s certainly data. The wisdom exists at every stage from picking the right crowd to start with, down to the various levels of processing, filtering and reprocessing used to sieve through the raw data. And once you have just the relevant data, the wisdom lies in best utilizing that data to shape an end product (or service) that adds value to people’s lives.
Here’s a good example of what can result from the above process:
Herdict– verdicts from the herd
It uses the same building blocks as spyware, but with the opposite ethos. It runs unobtrusively on the PCs of participating users, reporting back information about the vital signs and running code of each participating user’s PC to help other users figure out the level of risk posed by new code.
As users are deciding whether to run some new software, the toolkit’s connections to other machines can tell them how many other machines in the herd are running the code, what proportion of machines of self-described experts are running it, whether those experts vouch for it, and how long the code has been in the wild. It can also signal the amount of unattended network traffic, popup ads, or crashes the code appears to generate.
This sort of data can become part of a simple dashboard that lets the users of PCs make quick judgments about the nature and quality of the code they are about to run in light of their own risk preferences, just as the drivers of cars use their dashboards to internalize the basics of a car’s speed and health and their radios to get traffic updates on AM radio.
The idea is not to replicate the work of security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who seek to bail new viruses out of our PCs faster than they pour in. Rather, it is to provide a common technical and institutional framework for users to devote some bandwidth and processing power for the common good.
P.S. Herdict is currently available for PC users only. And to make up for that bit of bad news here’s a little something extra: The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It .
Long live Collaborative Anarchy!
Ron Thomas - NY
Tags: data
