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...""

Comments

REALLY annoying spam

[nsample]

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*

Feel my antipopulist contempt

[sam_handelman]

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.