Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

160
Solutions
the toolkit is now available freely for download: “Herdict.” Herdict is a small
piece of software that assembles the vital signs described above, and places them
in a dashboard usable by mainstream PC owners. These efforts will test the hypothesis
that solutions to generative problems at the social layer might be applicable
to the technical layer—where help is desperately needed. Herdict is an
experiment to test the durability of experiments. 9 And it is not alone. For example,
Internet researchers Jean Camp and Allan Friedman have developed the
“good neighbors” system to allow people to volunteer their PCs to detect and
patch vulnerabilities among their designated friends’ PCs. 10
The value of aggregating data from individual sources is well known. Yochai
Benkler approvingly cites Google Pagerank algorithms over search engines
whose results are auctioned, because Google draws on the individual linking
decisions of millions of Web sites to calculate how to rank its search results. 11 If
more people are linking to a Web site criticizing Barbie dolls than to one selling
them, the critical site will, all else equal, appear higher in the rankings when a
user searches for “Barbie.” This concept is in its infancy at the application layer
on the PC. When software crashes on many PC platforms, a box appears asking
the user whether to send an error report to the operating system maker. If the
user assents, and enough other users reported a similar problem, sometimes a
solution to the problem is reported back from the vendor. But these implementations
are only halfway there from a generative standpoint. The big institutions
doing the gathering—Google because it has the machines to scrape the
entire Web; Microsoft and Apple because they can embed error reporting in
their OSes—make use of the data (if not the wisdom) of the crowds, but the
data is not further shared, and others are therefore unable to make their own interpretations
of it or build their own tools with it. It is analogous to Encarta
partially adopting the spirit of Wikipedia, soliciting suggestions from readers
for changes to its articles, but not giving any sense of where those suggestions
go, how they are used, or how many other suggestions have been received, what
they say, or why they say it.
A full adoption of the lessons of Wikipedia would be to give PC users the opportunity
to have some ownership, some shared stake, in the process of evaluating
code, especially because they have a stake in getting it right for their own
machines. Sharing useful data from their PCs is one step, but this may work
best when the data is going to an entity committed to the public interest of
solving PC security problems, and willing to share that data with others who
want to take a stab at solving them. The notion of a civic institution here does