Overcoming Bias: Was Intrade being manipulated in the last month?

The link is good apropos, but the question that interests me is a bit more general. It seems to me that the apparent failure of Intrade to function as a predictor/knowledge aggregator before the US presidential elections was an important natural experiment. What do you think about the explanations and implications? I don't think it's too hard to discuss the knowledge aggregation issues without being bogged down in the specificities of US politics.

rot13.com is a service frequently used here to hide spoilers. I really hate it, though. If I had the time, I would build a simple, but much better alternative. Maybe somebody has more time to do that, so I'll share my rough specification:

• Dynamic. The encoding happens on the client automatically, whenever the content of the input textbox changes. No Submit key needed.
• Fully client-side. No server-side script, just a static page with Javascript.
• Decoded content can be reached through an encoded URL. Instead of the receiver pasting the ciphertext into the rot13.com textbox, the sender can provide an encoded URL, and the receiver simply clicks on the link. This is slightly less convenient for the sender, but is much more convenient for the (hopefully many) receivers.
• Many people can decrypt parts of rot13 ciphertexts without conscious effort. This defeats the purpose. The new service could provide some alternative encryption that is not a substitution cipher. It should still be a reciprocal cipher, that is a nice property of rot13.
• rot13 fails for non-ASCII characters. (rot13.com leaves them intact.) The alternative encryption should work for all Unicode strings.
• Strong, password-based encryption could also be added as an extra feature. I could send you a very long URL, and tell you a password on the phone, or only tell you the password at a later date.

The only important design problem I don't know how best to solve is making the encryption work for Unicode, with the following three constraints: making it a reciprocal cypher, outputting visually nice strings, and making it map ASCII to ASCII. One possible solution is to drop the constraint that it is a reciprocal cypher. For this service it is probably not crucial anyway: the ciphertext can be base64, with some escape prefix distinguishing it from plaintext.

After writing the above, I found this LW thread: Does anyone else find ROT13 spoilers as annoying as I do? There were several suggestions there, and two of the commenters, sketerpot and LightningRose even coded their own solutions to the spoiler problem. Each solution had some merit, and LightningRose's in particular was far superior to the rot13.com site I used to use, but basically, they only dealt with the third point of my proposal.

Is there anything like what I envision? Is anyone interested in building it? What changes or extra features would you like to see?

Scott Aaronson has published a preliminary version of his long essay titled 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity'. His announcement blog post has some interesting comments, and he welcomes suggestions there. I am not sure I like the organization of the paper. (I know most of the CS stuff discussed, so it is hard for me to decide how readable it is for people who don't.) But it is full of interesting ideas, and some of these are new even for those of us who follow Scott's writings.

I have just realized that sitemeter has the following data published about my visit, in a searchable and browsable format:

Domain Name		broadband.hu ? (Hungary)
IP Address		80.98.73.# (UPC Magyarorszag Kft.)
ISP		UPC Magyarorszag Kft.
Location		Continent  :  Europe Country  :  Hungary  (Facts) State/Region  :  Fejer City  :  Etyek Lat/Long  :  47.45, 18.75 (Map)
Language		English (U.S.) en-us
Operating System		Macintosh MacOSX
Browser		Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 GTB7.1
Javascript		version 1.5
Monitor		Resolution  :  1296 x 810 Color Depth  :  24 bits
Time of Visit		Feb 2 2011 12:34:19 pm
Last Page View		Feb 2 2011 12:34:40 pm
Visit Length		21 seconds
Page Views		2
Referring URL		http://lesswrong.com..._meetup_is_easy%252F
Search Engine		lesswrong.com
Search Words		hungary
Visit Entry Page		http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/
Visit Exit Page		http://lesswrong.com...a_lw_meetup_is_easy/
Out Click
Time Zone		UTC+1:00
Visitor's Time		Feb 2 2011 9:34:19 pm
Visit Number		3,497,452

I am not a privacy geek, but isn't this a bit too extensive? By the way, I am not from Etyek, Hungary, I am from Budapest, Hungary. Etyek is a very small village, so if sitemeter consistently identifies me as someone from Etyek, then it will be even easier to track my lesswrong browsing habits. It is very easy even without that.