Slashdot Mirror
Web of Trust Audio News Distribution
c0rtex writes "Wearlab (University of Bremen) has designed a cool web of trust voice message routing system with a decaying credibility metric. It supports xmms and winamp. Source available for Linux and win32.
"MPN makes it possible to deliver completely decentralized and independent news. Everyone has the possibility to be a reporter, no filtering publisher is required...""
Sounds like Slashdot.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
If the stream's not non-proprietary, I'm not interested.
I will continue to get my news from the fine reporters at Slashdot and Google News.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Quick! Call John Ashcroft! These pirates want to take copyrighted "news stories" and distribute them freely! This will take away the incentive for news to occur. News occurs only because news has an incentive to occur. Take away that incentive and it won't occur anymore. See what you've done? You can't just take news and distribute it without lots of damage. I say it's time for an FBI raid.
... but someone seems to have their caps-lock key stuck.
A whole page of CAPS? My eyes started to hurt after the 3rd paragraph.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
...now we can have /.-style moderation of the news...
Al-Qaeda Destroys White House, Pentagon (-1, Troll)
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
In addition, I'd rather read my news. It lets me go at my own pace, skip over the summary to the details, translate it, easily quote from it for rebuttal, etc.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Annonymous Coward --
We are legion, come, join us!
Sound cool, but what keeps people from spreading false news around? Any enterprising young H.G. Wells want to pull a 'War of the Worlds' all over again?
Nan
God is real unless declared integer.
One of the key concepts of developing technology that depends on decentralization is simplicity.
Setting this up will not be simple. You have to chose who you trust and how much of what they trust you trust. In order to do that, you have to get some idea what a whole bunch of people like. Getting this up and working correctly will be a headache.
Now, a directed news system based on previous picks and voting a la amazon might not be a bad idea...
I MEAN, COME ON, POSTING TECHNICAL SPECS IN ALL CAPS? AND THAT BACKGROUND CHOICE?
/. - people .
Also, the problem with "decentralized news" is the same problem with posts to
Do you really want your news be mostly "First Post", penis bird, goatse.cx, Beowulf clusters of grits, and NPN&P?
Until you have a means of creating a real trust metric, so that I can insure those I get my news from are marginally competent, the distribution method is meaningless.
And please, don't suggest M1 and M2 for news....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Now I get to hear those "In Soviet Russia" jokes over my web radio.
Sigpilot : I'm in the pipe, 5 by 5.
The technology claims to be able to provide "news that you can trust in", but it should be noted that trust != truth.
As in traditional trust systems (Karma, anyone?), someone being trusted does not necessarily mean that their information is valid.
-JT
I can't remember when the last time I listened or watched a news program. I find that I can suck up all the news I need from less than a dozen sites (including /., of course) during the course of a day and all my reading and clicking is still less than the 11-15 minutes of someone droning on between advertisements backed up by video clips and sound bites.
"Hey! Who grabbed my ass?"
If it means your computer broadcasts other peoples voices on your computer, imagine what damage would be caused by someone reading breaking news stories for a day or two (getting trust), and then screaming out stories like "I spanked your mom! GOATSE!" all day.
Much like slashdot, actually.
Putting together a good news story with audio is much harder than writing. Why not start with a "credibility system" for text?
For better or worse (almost certainly worse), spammers will target this sort of medium with a fury. It's a medium for open *audio* transmissions... it's like telemarketing, sans feedback.
Hopefully there will be an additional decision metric that allows users to selectively change their rankings for messages that they've listened to. If I like something, I want to give it a +1 regardless of which ID it came from! Then again, spammers want the capability to do the same thing.
*sigh*
I think that crackdowns on P2P-ers will be dramatically smaller than what will happen to those that use this. Once people start using this to "publish" information that [insert evil government of choice here] doesn't want widely publicized, expect all hades to break loose.
Add the "traditional" news outlets (who aren't nearly as flexible and fast moving as they'd like to believe) into the fray and you have tons of people in whose best interest it is that this never take off.
Of course, all the above reasons are why I absolutely LOVE this idea!
Don't believe anything I say. I crash test crack pipes for a living.
I see two ways this could work, depending on how most people configure themselves.
1) The plurality opinion, among those who care enough to broadcast, dominates what is "credible." Aliens kidnap people. School prayer should be mandatory. The list goes on. The internet is already like this.
2) The service fragments into cliques. You only hear from people who agree with you. Within any given clique, whatever you already believe to be true - this is credible. Nothing else is. The internet is already like this.
The big advantage to this is that it will give anti-p2p lawyers brain hemmorhages. As soon as p2p is a delivery vehicle, even secondarily, for political speech, it is sacrosanct. Untouchable. Yippee.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
As far as I can tell, actual real-life uses for this are not really in the area of getting the daily news. Rather, it seems better suited to "man-on-the-street" type coverage where unfamiliar parties are thrown together. Perhaps some types of urban warfare??? It's not so hard to envision trust metrics changing based on the consortium-of-the-week in some third-world environment where transmissions need to be made in the clear but some sort of filter is necessary and identity verification is important.
-JT
I barely trust people who make a living on knowing what they are talking about.
Maybe I don't understand the underlying concept, but it sounds kinda like a big game of telephone.
Also what good is a source that cannot be identified outright? How will this get us unfiltered news when the you have to filter everything (in your head) for truth or logic?
If I miss the point please explain as this has piqued my interest.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
But who are we kidding, people?
We have seen how long it's taken Linux and its related applications to gain acceptance. When Microsoft executives aren't crying to the press about us "communists" as we've been labelled, we find Linux getting a bad name for itself by information technology research groups like Gardner and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Decentralized news seems nice, but that's until one thinks about financing such an endeavor.
I ask you now, in front of your friends and peers:
- Who will pay the on-air personalities?
- Who will pay the reporters?
- Who would write code updates for free?
- Who would prevent Digital Rights Management (DRM) from becoming the black plague of Decentralized News Services (DNS)?
There are so many great ideas out there, people. So many. And I wish they could all succeed, but the hard facts and Lady Luck don't seem to be on the side of those who ignore capitalistic principles.
This is America. It's not East Germany circa 1940. It's not China under Mao. It's America under George W. Bush, and "because it's cool and geeky" just doesn't cut it anymore.
Money talks, the economy sucks, and free-spirited software movements are on the out and out.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
H.G. Wells wrote the book, but it was Orson Welles that spread it on the radio. Theres no relation. Its just coincedence that thier last names are pronounced the same.
What signature defines me as a person?
I mean, think of it this way...
So we have the opportunity to pick up "news" that is placed in front of us by people who are unaccountable for the veracity of the facts they present, who are driven by their own agendas, who are shamelessly self-promoting, who in some cases are not experienced nor educated in the subjects on which they report, and who are unlikely to hesitate before reporting information that is confidential, damaging, endangering, or even (legally) secret.
On the other hand, we could get our news from "Web of Trust"...
(grin)
But people *reading* their news? I can barely stand listening to regular people talk (Here in MN).
God forbid someone from Minnesota reads the news.
"YAAAAAAA...tudayee its reahl col, yah. Daah Nord Chore got some wedder 'day. Yahh. Dat 'torm waz ah reahl bigun, donchaa know...YAAAAAAAAAAAAA it wahz..." *Shudder*
Perhaps we can just make it text-based.
I've been reading about decentralized news for quite awhile now and have been waiting for some real, concrete results/products to be released. As such, here are some of my Mozilla bookmarks from my Decentralized News folder. Please enjoy!
infoAnarchy || Comments || The Circle: a new decentralized searchlike Advogato. Nodes on the network swap gossip with their friends.
www.infoanarchy.org/comments/ 2002/1/15/82223/3481?pid=1 - 12k - Cached
Scripting News
... Call us cockroaches if you want, I'm sure IBM thought Apple, Microsoft and Intel ...
5 - 25k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached
were cute and dirty too, but distributed and decentralized news is rapidly
scriptingnews.userland.com/backIssues/2002/02/1
Research News: TVC Alert, 31 May 2002
... Before summarizing software available for reading RSS/XML news feeds (end of article), ...
l - 38k - Cached
the author opines about the value of decentralized news or information
www.virtualchase.com/tvcalert/may02/31may02.htm
Hoosier Review
... used to their privileges as brokers of information in a top-down world, threatened ...
by the rise of new, bizarre, egalitarian and decentralized news sources?
www.hoosierreview.com/musgrave10.html - 12k - Cached
Netizens Info
... Non-electronic Reference Sources. Bellovin, Steve M. and Mark Horton, USENET ...
t ml - 11k - Cached
- A Distributed Decentralized News System, an unpublished manuscript, 1985.
www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CMC/netizen_thoughts.h
MetaLog
... just recycled news from major outlets. But what the weblogs did do ...
was provide a decentralized news source. At a time when all of
www.larkfarm.com/metalog.asp - 18k - Dec. 9, 2002 -
Michael Barone
... years ago. That's how it's bound to be in a country with increasingly ...
a sp - 17k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached
decentralized news media and a fragmented electorate. The
www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/barone100300.
SubIntSoc.net: The Suboctagon Report - The Center Cannot Hold, ...
... Another example: personal video cameras. People on the streets with cameras formed ...
a decentralized news-gathering system that the TV networks couldn't match.
subintsoc.net/suboctagon_20011121.php - 39k - Dec. 9, 2002 - Cached
Wired Online: Brain Tennis
... Or will the many-to-many nature of the Net lead to self-correcting, decentralized ...
m l - 11k -
news media that nobody owns and everybody contributes to?
hotwired.lycos.com/braintennis/96/23/index2a.ht
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
How would people be able to filter out what's signal and what's just plain noise?
--
Vote for your hopes, not for your fears - Vote Third Party
In Soviet Russia, web radio listens to YOU!!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Could you please go back to k5 and annoy them? Thx.
This is America? Anyone have the demographics stats on slashdot visitors? Are you *really* sure that 'this is America'?
Kyle Hodgson Systems Geek
Alright.. Im stupid. I tried to install this thing, but it keeps complaining about not having an OGG.DLL. Where can I get it?
Scott.
From the site:
You want to hear news every 10 minutes? Fine.
You want to hear only one minute each hour? Also fine.
You want to hear the news as soon as possible? Why not.
You want news from another country? Who does not.
You want news from a specific person? Go ahead.
You want to know about a specific topic? Sure.
You want news you can trust in? That is our business.
Yeah, it's the last item that bugs me. Trust is still being vested in someone to create the trust model.
Someone has to be holding the keys and the keys here are the weights. For example, the rate of trust decay could be increased to marginalize the "small reporter." I'm not suggesting that these guys are some ill-intentioned neer-do-well's, I'm just suggesting that keys of power are merely being shifted, not eliminated.
Frankly, if I'm wrong, someone PLEASE speak up and tell me why. I've never wanted to be so wrong in my life. =)
My
Limekiller
In Soviet Russia, chunky girls get head from YUO!
Sounds interesting. Too bad it's voice: that makes it useless as far as I am concerned.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Everyone has the possibility to be a reporter, no filtering publisher is required...
Sounds like a great place for Jon Katz.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
That looks exactly like a Google search for "decentralized news"!
Ugh. Someone mod this guy DOWN. We all know how to search Google.
kthx.
I have read most of the posts here, and most of you don't realize that this was made with 'wearable' in mind. Meaning that you have a slow connection to the internet, and a quick connection to the intranet. Let me give you an example. You have a wearable device that has a 128kbps uplink (think cellmodem) and you have an IR port on your shoulder that can communicate with other people within the line of sight at 4mb/sec. With this system, your buddy who listens to the radio can record and re-distribute the stories to his buddies over the IR link. If you bump into them during the day, you could instantly be updated on the latest news.
Someone needs to introduce the webmaster of that site to the wonderful concept of TURNING OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK KEY. SO THE WHOLE PAGE DOESN'T LOOK LIKE THIS.
slashdot!=valid HTML
(To -1, preferably.)
He fucking searched Google for "decentralized news" and posted the top 10 links. Look, I can search Google too!
Nice boldfaced lie up there, too. "Mozilla bookmarks." Ugh.
Mod this down.
GigsVT's Latest 24 of 3201 Comments
Carpe:
You can put me in as number 4 on your list of prolific posters. Of course, instead of running that spider, if you would have asked one of the staff nicely, I'm sure they would have run "SELECT * FROM users WHERE commentsposted > 3000 SORT BY commentsposted DESC LIMIT 10"... It would have saved everyone a lot of time and bandwidth. Now that you have pissed them off, it's not likely they will be too receptive.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
You mean, go outside? Well, fuck me, I'll try anything once!
_khl
Finally we can get rid of those unncessary reporters. Next step: distributed dentistry! If I trust some 80% to extract a tooth, you as my friend should trust them at least 60% right? Maybe I'll invent a dental referral server.
It kind of sounds like Gooey. Remember that, now quaint, old concept. Two people surfing the same web site can have informed discussions and communictions regarding the content of the site--except that it simply became another forum for banal chatter like some much of the rest of the Web (Slashdot NATURALLY excluded). I suspect this will become more of the same--if it even makes it that far.
to something that can explain what is funny about that phrase
the freaking results of a Google search?! Ugh. Damn. And it's not like several other people haven't already pointed this out.
I hope I get this one in M2.
I'd settle for hot grits I can whack off into at this point.
Natalie Portman, here i cum!
I have to say that I echo the concerns that others have expressed over the reliability and veracity of news reports filed through an informal network of uncertified sources.
News that you can't rely on to be timely *and* accurate is worse than no news at all.
The big problem is that the immediacy (and high levels of competition) of news on the Net puts enormous pressure on publishers to be "first" with a breaking story and I've already witnessed numerous instances where this has resulted in even the "big names" getting their facts wrong.
There are three factors that a news organization needs to be successful:
1. Timeliness
2. Accuracy
3. Credibility
Without the first two, you don't get the third -- but without the third, the first two are squandered.
This could have a number of uses other than for news. A lot of people send each other jokes by email. These emails are forwarded around over and over until all the extra characters make them unreadable. What if you just publish it and all your friends who are interested could "pull" it from you. This could be a very useful concept for keeping in touch with people and building communities. Moreover, it gives control to the reciever who decides whether you have something interesting to say or are just annoying. They can filter out what you have to say. Slashdot does a similar thing with a different mechnism. Each one of us surfs the web and posts news/links that we think the Slashdot community in interested in. However, it is a centralized mechanism (the center being the website) This tool could just make it more peer-to-peer, distributed and personal. Why not use p2p networks to exchange information too? I could see capabilities like this added to instant messenging. Granted the whole voice thing would have little use for most of us.
This will let even more people say that you can't believe anything on the Internet.
Now I've even got computer professors telling me that line, and I don't think it's something that can be perpetuated to much. There is credible information.
What is needed is something better, this does nothing to improve on the confidence of users. If we had a system that used already published material, donated to the public domain with all brandings intact (FDL-like?), then anything I serve will automatically carry more weight.
There isn't much wrong with news that is published today - the problem is that mainstream news goes through those editors that control what gets reported. A system needs to be designed which spreads less reported news, and archives news.
Actually it hits on a good idea, decentralization is the key to free news, and maybe users can add their own comments but that doesn't belong in the system. If the system uses "copyrighted" or should I say "published" news then their branding would hold that trust, your own "made up" news would hold your branding so then I would know who to trust. Public key signing comes to mind when thinking of how to keep that "branding" authentic.
But I think an even bigger system is in order. (Right now in fact I was going to look for web-space to lay out my full plans for this system) I think with the amount of information that is out there through PBS, Discovery (and their many networks), et. al. we should/could put together a gnutella-like system to share information in video form.
Taking the strain off of the producers of these videos bandwidth could swing favor to get some published over a P2P system. A system which can bring up videos (streaming... peercast?) on Ancient Egypt or NASA would be a great educational tool and would liken to cable in the classroom.
There is a lot more details that I have worked out, but I'm not going to bother right now.
Basically P2P systems can be more than music and pr0n (not that I complain). We should use these systems because I see an Internet in the future which says double you, double you, who?!
Get your Unix fortune now!
APPARENTLY THE AUDIO QUALITY DECAYS ALONG WITH ITS CREDIBILITY, WHICH IS WHY IT'S NECESSARY TO SHOUT OUT EVERYTHING...
--
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Therefore, I have to pad my mildly chucklable reply with somewhat less funny text... honk honk!
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Start an *internet* one.
Simple: Use P2P and magnet links to distribute content. Have a bunch of online friends, say, 20, produce content. Then post a magnet link with the video. You can have weekly news, comments, animation, movies, whatever you want.
It's possible, today, to start your own video distribution system. You can call it "video-blog" too, or "vilog".
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Actually the project is happening in Bremen, former Western Germany, which in 1940 was part of "das Reich" - and solidly unified with what would later become Eastern Germany, Austria, Poland and Soviet Russia. (Where history learns YOU!)
Use the Preview Button! Or whatever. I meant to say, that it "would later become Eastern Germany, Austria and part of Poland and Soviet Russia.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Imagine eBay had no feedback except a 1-10 numerical score for each seller/buyer. A fraud artist makes sure to make a number of 100% honest purchases/sales, delivered/paid for promptly. Then (s)he simultaneously bilks a bunch of people who haven't had a chance to see anything but the initial glowing feedback. A lot of damage has been done in a short period of time, the fraud artist starts again with a new user ID. As long as user ID's are not "tied" to the user, this system could work for "news credibility" or any similar system.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Did anyone try to install this?
I had a hell of a time, and you have to configure most of it by hand (re: pull out your editor and hit the conf files). I'm not usually against this sort of thing, being a System Admin, but geeeeesh.
Granted I went the lame way out with Winders, but geeeeesh.
Anyone have any luck?
--Fac Iustum Nec Time-- --Veritas Prevalibit--
Slashdot does it ALL THE TIME. Spreading false and misleading news. And when it happens 90% of everyone here swallows it hook line and sinker. Never bothering to check the actual article or any other sources that may contain possibly contradictory information. Slashdot has posted completely false stories and frequently picks out inflamitory and mostly incorrect stories to feed our insatiable lust for gossip.
Slashdot is itself one of the best examples of why this will fail as a "news" source. Slashdot is a self-feeding FUD machine where people come to hear what they want to hear and to oppress any thought that they do not want to consider. Slashdot is a popular gossip site but is an utter failure as a "news" site.
So if what you want is a giant audio gossip system, It'll go gang-busters. But reliable news? Not possible. You'll get prefiltered news for a particular segment of people. Anyone with an unpopular opinion will be "untrusted" out of the system just like they are "moderated" out of the system here. Popular news for the popular masses is no news at all.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
With the advent of corporate sponsored news sources, pretty soon the only news on TV will be news fed from corporations feeding their corporate interest (i.e. 20 minutes of commericals, 10 minutes of news...oh wait that already happens) I think this will allow people to get away from the overpriced priced schema of television networks and create networks that do not require any money to be spent for "airwaves". Ok so you still need bandwidth, and you have to pay the people doign the stories, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than TV, and maybe radio too, dunno abuot radio prices. But, this means we don't have to rely on one source for information, and this is important with the media seeming to just sit on their asses and not give good information to the american people because it's not profitable. Basically, this would eventually lead to non-profit driven news sources, or so it is hoped.
The news outlets claims to be able to provide "news", but it should be noted that "printed word" != truth.
As in any news systems, someone being said something does not necessarily mean that their information is valid.
-VD
P.S. Man, this is exactly what this system is about. You have to work it out. YOU've got to decide what is worth your attention, and what is not.
Christ, you are a lamer.
What is needed is something better, this does nothing to improve on the confidence of users. If we had a system that used already published material, donated to the public domain with all brandings intact (FDL-like?), then anything I serve will automatically carry more weight.
What gives PBS and Discovery credibility or authority? How do we crib that and make it available to the netizens. Empower us to make rather than just consume; PBS can play as one more peer. These folks at MPN have the right idea, explore ways to crack the credibility nut.
illegitimii non ingravare
Gigs: /. spider that I thought was rather insightful:
/. staff off or not...they're prolly not gonna do it on their own. Better start coding. ;)
Here's an email I got from someone that wrote me regarding the
Seeing the top posters is a feature I would have liked to have seen, but there's a good reason they don't do it. It's the same reason they now hide the Karma -- they don't want to turn it into a game of who has the most messages.
With that being said, I don't think it matters that I pissed
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
congrats on not having a tv. we're real impressed.
"the servers are only stupid data stores"
So... does that mean they store data and are stupid, or they store data that is stupid?
If it's the latter, I wanna have a look-see, cause I'm always up for a bit of stupid data viewing.
http://radio.oneworld.net/ is a fairly similar concept, and has been going for a while.
Has anyone actually got the Win32 version to work? I've finally got it to the point where fetchnews will download the news items, but whenever I try to select the plugin in Winamp, it crashes. I downloaded Winamp3 and can listen to each individual item by dragging it into the player, but V3 doesn't appear to support plugins the same so I don't know how to use the plugin there.
Also, the documentation for the win32 install is horrid. I'd be happy to help with that if I could ever get this thing to work!
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
Isn't my 80% level of confidence based largely on whether Mr A has been wrong in the past which might be related to his believing Mr C or people like him. Don't I double count if I add Mr C to the mix.
I mean I trust Mr B not to lie to me but I'm not sure about people he hears things from.
I think I'll stick to the regular channels. At least I'm sure that they're lying to me except for the bits that can be checked.
Try to confirm the shit actually makes before you post ads for it. Oh, wait, you don't actually know how to do that. Never mind.
Asshole.
I would say the last thing we need is indymedia-by-voice.
sulli
RTFJ.
Or turn the caps key of, god dam it!
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
1) The plurality opinion, among those who care enough to broadcast, dominates what is "credible." Aliens kidnap people. School prayer should be mandatory. The list goes on. The internet is already like this.
So you want to kill the internet too?
2) The service fragments into cliques. You only hear from people who agree with you. Within any given clique, whatever you already believe to be true - this is credible. Nothing else is. The internet is already like this.
What's new? People pass what they hear through a bullshit filter called education and experience. Your post put mine offscale, and the flaws were easily demonstrated. The internet brought me this silly post of yours extolling lawyers with brain hemmorages. The same page your message came in had useful content. I suppose I could tell my agent to block your account, but that might keep me from reading something you say one day that makes sense.
Choice and freedom to chose are good. Contemptuous ignorance is anoying.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Couldn't they regulate transmission with licenses that could be revoked in the same way ham radio operators work? That should keep the Beavis & Butthead operators from filling the net-waves with "huhuhuh. heheheeheheheh"
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
I don'
ink bablefish does kindergarten..
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
This way, a post could be widely popular, but you and your group would be less likely to see it above your threshold if your peers didn't generally like it.
That's a simplification. Naturally, look up "web of trust" on el goog for more information.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
The salary of the chief executive of the large corporation is not a market
award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal
gesture by the individual to himself.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "Annals of an Abiding Liberal"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...