Quick notes for meeting on December 23, 2009.

What information can Herdict for Network Health (hereafter Herdict) provide?

• Is this site down?

  If yes...

  • Is this site down only for my region, or for everyone?
  • How big is the outage (e.g. Boston or the United States)?

  If no...

  • Can I not view this site due to a firewall on my own network?
  • Can I not view this site due to a connection problem on my end (wifi connection too poor?)

Atul wrote in his blog about Herdict for PC Health, which tracks information about your PC's health then allows you to compare the performance of your PC to that of others on the network. My understanding is that Herdict for PC Health can give information such as:

• Can I not access this site due to malware/badware?
• Can I not access this site due to faulty software or hardware that I have?
• Can I not access this (or any?) site due to RAM/processor speed/hard disk space utilization etc?

I'm assuming we'll just look at Herdict for now, but would like to hear Harvard people's opinion on Herdict for PC Health.

What does Herdict require to gain information?

• Anonymized configuration data sent to "the herd" (Mozilla's servers?)

What does Herdict require to display information?

• Again, anonymized configuration data sent to "the herd" re location, hardware, etc - not stuff we can give out by default

Open questions

• Is there a way to provide information without requiring any user data sent?
• Is data sent a problem if it is anonymized? Will it freak out the user that we can detect location?
• Is there a reason Herdict isn't open source?

Sketches