Outfoxed? You bet I was
Tue 21 Jun 2005
Posted by daniel under general
trust | outfoxed | firefox | phishing | security
geourl | mapquest | confluence | show map >>
Okay, so after all my huffing and puffing about begging Google to implement browser extensions for trust networks, suddenly (and seemlingly out of nowhere) comes Outfoxed, a Firefox browser extension that uses trust networks to prevent phishing, warn about malicious files, and generally spread trusted information throughout the web. It was created by Stan James as part of his masters thesis. I’m downloading it now, and will report back soon about its effectiveness. To friends of mine who are reading this and use Firefox, let me know if you download this extension and we’ll form our own trust network 
Update: So far, it has complained about being unable to connect to localhost:63047, and crashed my browser. But I’m using Deer Park Alpha 1, so don’t take my case as typical. Also, it is (probably by necessity) dependant upon a central server to share information with other browsers (Correction: It is not based on a central server, but rather on XML “feeds” which can reside on any server, just like RSS). However, if this server software is also open source (and I suspect that it is) then it will be possible to set up private trust “Islands”, which is actually a Good Thing ™ as far as the software design is concerned.
Also, the user interface supports ratings and tags - rock! I really hope that an active user and development community builds around this initiative. Great work, Stan
Update 2: Outfoxed re-orders your Google results based on trust ratings. Sweet mother of shit!
Update 3: Went back to the latest stable Firefox (1.0.4) and it works very well. Still get very occasional messages about being unable to contact the local database, but the experience is mostly surprisingly smooth.
5 Responses to “Outfoxed? You bet I was”
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June 21st, 2005 at 12:39 pm
re-orders your google results? Usefull? Or incredibly invasive? I’m assuming there’s a toggle for that feature
June 21st, 2005 at 12:43 pm
Yeah, it’s an option. There’s lots of cool stuff that it does that people might find, uh, “creepy” to start with
But it’s a Masters thesis, not a commercial product, so many of its features are prototypical versions of things that may _develop_ into useful and refined features down the track.
For a version 0.2x, it’s very cool.
June 21st, 2005 at 2:57 pm
oop, that was a downer comment. I actually think it’s cool and would use it. Why did I forget to mention that… Probably too much cheese cake
June 21st, 2005 at 9:29 pm
Thanks for the kudos and realistic assesment.
One small correction: Outfoxed does *not* require a central server. I provide one for beta testers becaue not everyone has FTP access to a server. See this page for info:
http://getoutfoxed.com/node/107
Basically, you can publish your Outfoxed reports anywhere you can put a web page. (It works just like RSS in this regard.)
-stan
June 21st, 2005 at 11:47 pm
Hey, thanks for reading my site Stan
And thanks for the correction. Since downloading it I’ve gone and read some more of the design docs. I like it. A lot. Once you’ve got some python code and a sqlite db running locally, the scope of functionality you can implement easily explodes…
As I said before, I can’t wait to see where this leads.