The rapid expansion of web presence into many new kinds of social networks has by far outpaced our ability to manage (or even understand) the community, economic, demographic and moral forces that shape user experiences. Online ticket queues, communities of online gamers, online retail malls and checkout sites, Facebook or MySpace communities, web-based town hall discussions, and Second Life destinations are just a few examples of places that users have come to regard as neighborhoods. They are virtual neighborhoods. They begin as attractive destinations and attract both visitors and inhabitants. Some users spend money, and some put down roots in the community. But like many real neighborhoods, virtual neighborhoods all too often turn into frightening, crime-ridden, disease- (or malware-)infested eyesores. Most users are driven away, real commerce is replaced by questionable transactions and billions of dollars of value is destroyed in the process. In blighted inner city neighborhoods you can find a familiar array of bad actors: loan sharks, vagrants, drug dealers, vandals and scam artists. Online neighborhoods fall prey to virtual blight: (1) Bot Blight, where the bad actors use bots and other non-human agents to overwhelm systems that are designed for human beings, (2) Human Blight, where individuals ranging from hackers to sociopaths and organized groups deliberately degrade a virtual neighborhood, (3) Entropy Blight, where abandoned property accumulates dead-end traffic of various kinds. The simple first-generation tools that were deployed to protect online properties have failed -- the collapse of Geocities and the recent apparent defeat of Captcha, a technology to let only humans enter the neighborhood, are evidence of that failure. There is a growing realization of how easily bad actors can create the virtual version of urban blight and how ineffective existing approaches to identity, trust and security will be in battling it.

Richard A. DeMillo is an American computer scientist, educator and executive. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Computing and Professor of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In June 2008, he announced his intention to step down as the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech after serving in that role for six years. He joined Georgia Tech in 2002 from The Hewlett-Packard Company, where he had served as the company's first Chief Technology Officer. He also held executive positions with Telcordia Technologies (formerly known as Bell Communications Research) and the National Science Foundation. He is a well-known researcher and author of over 100 articles, books and patents in the areas of computer security, software engineering, and mathematics.
From 1981 to 1987 DeMillo was the Director of the Software Test and Evaluation Project for the US Department of Defense (DoD). He is widely credited with developing the DoD's policy for test and evaluation of software-intensive systems. In 1987, he moved to Purdue University where he was named Professor of Computer Science and Director of The Software Engineering Research Center. In 1989, he became Director of the National Science Foundation Computer and Computation Research Division and presided over the growth of high performance computing and computational science programs. He also held a visiting professorship at the University of Padua in Padua, Italy where he led the formation of a successful post-graduate program in software engineering.
In 1995 he became Vice President and General Manager of Information and Computer Science Research at Bellcore (which later became Telcordia Technologies), leading the invention of new technologies for e-commerce, networking and communications. In 1997, he collaborated with Richard Lipton and Daniel Boneh to create the "Differential Fault Analysis" method of cryptanalysis, leading to a strengthening of existing standards for internet security.
In 2000, DeMillo joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) as vice president and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). While working at HP, he led the company's introduction of a new processor architecture, a corporate trust and security strategy, and the company's entry into open source software. He was the public spokesman for HP's technology and one of the most visible figures in IT. In 2002, RSA Security appointed DeMillo to its Board of Directors, a position he held until 2007 when RSA was acquired by EMC. He remained at HP through the company's 2002 merger with Compaq computer and was named Vice President for Technology Strategy. He returned to Tech that August to serve as the new dean of the College of Computing.