Trust Network Pocket Paperback (v2.0p)

Xochitl Green is a contemporary web programmer. She's faced with the issues of any techno-savvy person today, primary among them being the ethical implications of the arms race between content producing industries trying to protect their producers' rights and consumers who just want to get at that content and not be hassled with copy protection and other invasive technologies. Her friend Brian has an idea: take all of the online social interaction that we are building and turn it into a model of trust for our computers. Instead of thinking about firewalls and Internet privacy and protection at a software level, think of it at a social level. Xochitl takes the idea and writes the program, calling it "Alfred". Alfred turns out to be quite popular, and attracts both good and bad attention.