How do you (and/or Plura) deal with the problem of running code on other people's machines? How do you know that the data being sent back is valid, or that a competitor can't start a node and reverse-engineer your code? This may be less of an issue than I imagine, but I'm sure it's something you've thought about so I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Great question. We've actually done a lot of work on this to ensure that there isn't a problem with running the code on various people's machines.
First, Plura actually runs the processPage() function in the restricted java sandbox so there is no way to actually see any data on the user's computer or do anything bad to their computer. Also, the code goes through a short verification process before it is deployed.
For the results, we do have a reasonably sophisticated validation process as well. For someone to change results from one node, they would have to do quite a bit of work.
How do you (and/or Plura) deal with the problem of running code on other people's machines? How do you know that the data being sent back is valid, or that a competitor can't start a node and reverse-engineer your code? This may be less of an issue than I imagine, but I'm sure it's something you've thought about so I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.