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DanielLC comments on Is Google Paperclipping the Web? The Perils of Optimization by Proxy in Social Systems - Less Wrong
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Jim Whales (the guy who started Wikipedia) tried that. He couldn't get enough users to justify it.
I don't see much of an advantage to have it open source, and it allows people to actually see the algorithm when they're taking advantage of it. It might even be possible to change the algorithm to help them.
I would have thought the same of open source antivirus, but ClamAV is as good as any proprietary AV.
Neither of those is large enough scale for people to try to take advantage of the algorithm.
Come to think of it, in both cases, people could still use it for learning the algorithms in general. Knowing how Wikia Search worked would teach you a thing or two about search engine optimization, and knowing the specific vulnerabilities ClamAV protects against can tell you what you can take advantage of. It would be impossible to trace either of these effects back to the source, so we can't be sure it hasn't happened.
In this vein, you can do even better with binary updates for vulnerabilities (such as Windows Update). They can be automatically rewritten into exploits: "Automatic Patch-Based Exploit Generation" (LtU).