Slashdot Mirror

We need to have a project that aims to unite all the privacy projects out there to make something good come out of it, using the power of the crowd with free software in a privacy respecting matter but in a much more powerful way that can actually serve people...

Here are some projects or ideas that deserves to be noticed:

An openID with privacy features:
http://openprivacy.org/

P2P social networks / research:
http://www.movim.eu/
http://www.peerson.net/

P2P search:
http://yacy.net/

P2P SIP:
http://www.blyon.com/blog/index.php/2009/06/22/p2p-sip-uri-dialing/

Encryption:
http://code.google.com/p/cryptsetup/

P2P encrypted networks:
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://freenetproject.org/

Augmented reality / group mapping:
http://www.openillusionist.org.uk/documentation/doku.php?id=site:home
http://www.biomapping.net/

Mesh:
http://robin-mesh.wik.is/

I envision a setup where our cell phones or little home servers (open ones, like the n900 or better) can connect to each other via mesh, have open social infrastrcture running on them routed over an I2P layer so nobody knows who is talking to who and you have total control as to who/when/what is seen by your peers.

These setup have cameras that can use such network to create massive collaborative networks to document a situation or location. Be it a manifestation where you relay real time camera from all angles with sound level maps and other sensors to augmented reality group interaction and other crazy ideas.

This is more broad that what is discussed here as it touches all OSI layers and ask for a shift toward a p2p infrastructure at all level respecting and working for the user and independance from middle man as much as we can.
Of course a distributed DNS might have to be worked on too. I think these research are fundamental to the survival of freedom online as we knew it ...

Has anyone got any precise insight on the difference between OpenPrivacy and OpenID goals? :)

Has anyone got any precise insight on the difference between OpenPrivacy and OpenID goals? :)

The people at OpenPrivacy have been working on tackling the problem of anonymous news syndication for years. The result of this effort is Reptile, which has both an anonymous RSS syndication system as well as a web-of-trust reputation framework. NewsMonster is a similar application written by some of the same people that has a reputation system but lacks support for anonymous publication.

Also, there's JTCFrost, a freenet client that supports NNTP-style news publication.

The people at OpenPrivacy have been working on tackling the problem of anonymous news syndication for years. The result of this effort is Reptile, which has both an anonymous RSS syndication system as well as a web-of-trust reputation framework. NewsMonster is a similar application written by some of the same people that has a reputation system but lacks support for anonymous publication.

Also, there's JTCFrost, a freenet client that supports NNTP-style news publication.

For example, slashdot would have a hard time going pay, but, say if all andover's websites went to a subscrption, costing $2/month for unlimited access for everhting

I think this is a good thing. It would require us to have a REAL revenue stream without having to rely on VC. People have to get used to the fact that someone needs to pay for the bills.

With Reptile we are going to integrate payment systems (paypal, merchant, etc) so that you can subscribe to content based on reputation..

This way you can subscibe to your favorite sites like slashdot or kuro5hin and and at the same time get access to a very high rated Salon article.

Of course a lot of this is still under development but we would love to get your help!

OK.. I am a Java fan... (recently this has been changing though.)

I have mixed feelings with JDK 1.4.

The JPDA (debugging) support in 1.4 is vastly improved. You can now redefine classes in a running virtual machine. This is really cool and I have written an Ant 'Redefine task to take advantage of this.

The assert facility is OK.... i don't like the fact that they added an Assert keyword but I don't get to make the decisions.

There is also some controversy.

The JSPA agreement that one has to sign to participate in the JCP is WAY too restrictive for Open Source developers. The Apache Software Foundation has a good document where they drawn the line in the sand on their participation.

The Log4J people are upset because there is now a 'stanard' Java package for logging. IMO the 'standard' package is inferior to Log4J in many situations.

The regexp package is not all it is cracked up to be either. I would recommend Jakarta ORO or Jakarta Regexp.

As far as that... it runs GREAT on Linux. Probably the most SOLID VM I have ever run.

They did break some stuff with legacy code. If you ever named a class 'URI' your code will now fail to compile because they put this class in the java.net package which everyone imports anyway.

As far as C# vs .Java. I am really impressed with the CLR/CLI stuff. Right now, as it stands, Java is a proprietary language. Unless we see SUN Open Source Java (or push it through a standards committee), we *may* see a JDK 1.5... but no one will use it.

Also.. check out my Reptile project. It is Java based, only requires JDK 1.2 and incorporates some really cool Java/XML stuff. :)

There are a lot of people here that are criticizing UML.

It is important to remember that UML is not a panacea! It won't solve all of your problems. However, when combined with other proper design techniques it can be very valuable.

For example:

Check out my Reptile docs.

When combined with regular documentation, and linked to the Javadoc, these UML class diagrams REALLY help to clarify the system to newbies.

These were generated from source with Jase

The site was generated with Apache Velocity/Anakia and the Jase diagrams are generated with Ant every time I want to rebuild the site.

This allows us to produce a site that has up-to-date UML Class diagrams, javadoc, code snippets, etc and these are always up-to-date with the code that is in CVS.

cool... huh? :)

This is a good example of how UML can bring a lot to the picture.

Slashdot does not use RDF.

What you are thinking of is the slashdot RSS feed.

This is not true RDF. This is actually Rich Site Summary.

Early in the development of RSS there was a slight intermingling with RDF.

The only current remant is the shared RDF namespace that RSS 1.0 uses. Slashdot uses RSS 0.9 so I can understand the confusion.

True RDF is REALLY cool and I hope this patent gets knocked back to /dev/null where it belongs. RDF can be used to create very complex graphs which computer systems can understand.

We are working on a distributed Reputation system and RDF graphs will probably play a major role.

Also. If you are interested in doing some cool stuff with RSS I would recommend checking out Reptile

Kevin

Slashdot does not use RDF.

What you are thinking of is the slashdot RSS feed.

This is not true RDF. This is actually Rich Site Summary.

Early in the development of RSS there was a slight intermingling with RDF.

The only current remant is the shared RDF namespace that RSS 1.0 uses. Slashdot uses RSS 0.9 so I can understand the confusion.

True RDF is REALLY cool and I hope this patent gets knocked back to /dev/null where it belongs. RDF can be used to create very complex graphs which computer systems can understand.

We are working on a distributed Reputation system and RDF graphs will probably play a major role.

Also. If you are interested in doing some cool stuff with RSS I would recommend checking out Reptile

Kevin

I'm excited about several potentially significant projects that may have their first "stable" releases next year. Everyone knows about OpenOffice, Apache 2 and Mozilla (I'm surprised that neither article mentioned the last two). Here are a few others:

• Subversion version control rethought, could replace CVS as free software tool of choice
• E capability secure programming
• Reptile reputation-based content aggregator

This is slightly similar to my Reptile project which was covered a while back on slashdot

The major difference is that we are reusing existing P2P protocols and will provide bindings for JXTA, Freenet, Jabber, etc.

Content is syndicated in between nodes as XML (RSS, etc). An index is kept of all the content so you can run local searches. Actually we use Hypersonic SQL so you have a very FAST in-memory index of all this stuff.

Users publish information into the system by adding a item to their local weblog. Remote users can subscribe to this channel and will receive updates via the P2P layer.

We are also working on a reputation, and distributed public key authentication model. This is obviously very tough and we have been working at it for a while...

Hopefully we will have another release out soon.

Anyway.. check it out!

Reptile is a distributed publishing agent.

We need to make a system of decentralized authentication. So a user can put in "bob@bob.com" and the auth system will look up authentication information by looking up the authentication host for bob.com. This will create a system in which people can use familier email addresses for ID's. This is a very simplified explanation, but I think people understand the basic idea. I *thought* that Ximian would try to do the same thing, but apparently not!

I worked at a company whose goal was to create a system like this. For now, check out www.openprivacy.org or www.xns.org! We need to create a system that competes with Passport! It's crucially important!

Once an open system like this is created then people can realize the examples in the Hailstorm white paper (e.g. automated travel reservation, etc) using a completely open and standard system. People could still make money by building applications that use this platform. For exmaple:

Automatically schedule a movie with 5 friends on Friday and send an electronic ticket to your cell phone once everyone agrees on a time.

We're still a fair ways off, but our design - as it says on the home page - is "an Open Source, cryptographically secure, transparent to the user, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information." Sorta like an Open Source Hailstorm running on Freenet.

Though the code (written in Java, XML and SOAP) is available for anonymous CVS download, it doesn't really run yet without a lot of tweaking (so no bug reports, please). But we'd love to get feedback and ideas how to make this free framework more solid - and more amenable to the business folk who we'd love to see jump on it.

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