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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)
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.
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
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
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
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
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
You mean, go outside? Well, fuck me, I'll try anything once!
_khl
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!
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!
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.