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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...""
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.
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
If you think that's bad, what's going to happen when Stephen King really dies?
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 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.
Why do I need yet another way to get information?
You could have made that same argument before the advent of the Internet, you know. Want local news? Hang out at the barbershop. The coffee house. Talk to the kids on the street. Attend a city hall meeting.
I do agree that reading would be way better than just audio. There's simply no point to limiting the "stream" to audio-only. I can understand a bandwidth cap, but there should be a way to introduce a text stream, and maybe a video stream if exists the bandwitdh to push it without crowding out others.
It has become increasingly obvious that The Names You've Gradually Grown To Trust (like NYT) are less and less worthy of that trust -- marketing and the need for sensationalism drives their agenda and clouds their judgement. I get my news from The Economist and Funny Times and everything in between. The more sources, the better!
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.