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P2P News Syndication?
Buggernut writes "According to an article at BBC, news may be the next major item to be passed around through P2P networks, thereby escaping the grasp of the censors' attempts to control the spread of forbidden information."
Weblog.
Remember the poster(s) not too long ago who would post the "complete article text in case of /.'ing" and then subtly replace/add words in the actual text? How'd you like to get your news that way, and not even know it?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Naked News. Now showing on your local P2P network. :)
and how does one know this "forbidden information" is from a credible source rather than just placed in there by someone who made it up?
It's one thing to rip off musicians and publishers, but when this has some chance of actually being used for samizdat, you'll see it demonized and outlawed as a tool of terrorism.
The problem is lack of attention. Censorship is a problem too, but there certainly are sources out there, albeit obscure ones, that cover all sorts of stuff that "mainstream" sources don't touch.
The problem is lack of attention and publicity. Mainstream sources cover mainstream things because that's what the mainstream wants: it's what sells. While stories are sometimes neglected due to their being taboo, I'd say the main obstacle is lack of interest. The stories may be taboo at CNN, but they're probably being covered elsewhere. It's just the elsewhere (Indymedia, foreign sources, what-have-you) is unpopular: people aren't interested.
A P2P news network might ironically solve that problem, though, as it would likely get a fair amount of press in and of itself.
Isn't this already happening in the world wide web? (which by the way is the first p2p system)
...when I read about it on P2P.
Isn't this the exact purpose of Freenet? It's simply more anonymous than your average P2P application to prevent people from being forced into self-censorship.
File-sharing to bypass censorship
By Tracey Logan
BBC Go Digital presenter
The net could be humming with news, rather pop, swappers
By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.
This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Cambridge University's Professor Ross Anderson.
In his vision, people around the world would post stories via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.
They would cover issues currently ignored by the major news services, said Prof Anderson.
"Currently, only news that's reckoned to be of interest to Americans and Western Europeans will be syndicated because that's where the money is," he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.
"But if something happens in Peru that's of interest to viewers in China and Japan, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.
"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."
'Impossible to censor'
To enable this, Prof Anderson proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, the internet news service.
If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down
Ross Anderson, Cambridge University
But what of fears that the infrastructure that allows such ad hoc news networks to grow might also be abused by criminals and terrorists?
Prof Anderson believes those fears are overstated. He argued that web watchdogs like the Internet Watch Foundation, which monitors internet-based child abuse, would provide the necessary policing functions.
This would require a high level of international agreement to be effective.
"The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible," said Prof Anderson.
"If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck".
Political obstacles
Commenting on Prof Anderson's ideas, technology analyst Bill Thompson welcomed the idea of new publishing tools that will weaken the grip on news of major news organisations.
Such P2P systems, he said, would give everybody a voice and allow personal testimonies to come out.
But the technology that makes those publishing tools accessible to everyone and sufficiently user-friendly will take longer to develop than Prof Anderson thinks, added Mr Thompson.
Prof Anderson's vision underestimates the political obstacles in the way of such developments, he said, and the question of censorship had not been clearly thought through.
"Once you build the technology to break censorship, you've broken censorship - even of the things you want censored," said Mr Thompson.
"Saying you can then control some parts of it, like images of child abuse, is being wilfully optimistic. And that's something that peer to peer advocates have to face."
...Stephen King obituaries in this brave new world of news.
Desert Storm 1. The CNN guys using IRC to get info past the Iraqis.
Corrupt
Incomplete
Poor Quality
or possibly even think I am getting news, I open it up and get:
"Durty, S1uts with farm animals !!!"
yay.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
The site is going a bit slow, so heres the Torrent
liqbase
P2P news syndication would be the perfect venue for public keys and signatures.
Find a journalist you trust? An entire news organization maybe?
You could check the validity of source every time.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
This type of news dissemination will always stay underground for the reason the parent points out: credibility. Anonymity != ( credibility || newsworthy)
The whole reason why news works is because people trust newspapers. I know it's stupid, but there are people out there that trust FOX!
P2P news doesn't really seem to have that same trust value. Personally I am happy with the Guardian newspaper in the UK to generally get things right. It is their job to go out and read stories from around the world and present the facts to me in a way that I feel is relatively objective. I know they like (think it's their job) to screw the british government so I take that into account.
I can't see how p2p would be any better. I would just get a massive influx of information that I don't have time to sift through. News syndicates not only do the sifting job for us, but they hopefully do it in a trustworthy fashion.
I think this would work if one takes into account some already-implimented p2p features- mainly the ability to rate a file/thing for completeness or quality.
If someone passes bogus news, they get a bad reputation. More importantly, if someone consistently passes 'good' news, they get a good reputation and lots of folks download their news.
Like another poster suggested, news releases could be GPG-signed so that
1. Known-good news sources could be identified, and
2. Mean folks couldn't change the news the known-good folks wrote.
RD
With P2P you just have no clue what you are getting. It might be true, might not be. If you've seen the story before then you could be sure that it was true, but that would defeat the purpose of news- reading stories you haven't read before.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
You mean there is more news than slashdot?
"If there's material that everyone agrees is wicked, like child pornography, then it's possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is wicked then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck."
Oh, would it were so, Professor Anderson.
There are quite a few of your human governments that don't have a problem with slavery and terrorism, let alone child pornography.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
My goodness. this would mean news being promulgated by illiterate, ignorant, uninformed, panderers after obvious political or social agendas instead of the current newspapers and electronic media which ..... hey now! wait a minute...
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
It existed long before the web and is a true distributed peer to peer system lacking centralised control.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Quote "This would require a high level of international agreement to be effective." We'll all be running around in ape suits chasing an (almost) naked Charlton Heston before this happens.
And while providing the average Joe with news that is much more gory than we see on a regular basis, it would also help to put an end to *altered* stories... the kind that've been mentioned on /. before where a story is written, then because of this complaint or that reason they edit the original. If the news is on P2P networks, we'll be able to always see the raw stories...
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
Wasn't this the purpose of Anonymous Remailers, Mail to News Gateways, and Usenet?
Then again, will the use of P2P to disseminate uncensored news be subject to the same vulnerabilities as the above -- e.g., spam, legal (and possible physical) attacks on "servers," etc.?
Or does the more highly distributed nature of P2P effectively immunize it from at least the legal attacks (while perhaps more effectively empowering spam...)? Or will it just serve to get more people harrassed, arrested and in some places, shot?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
There's already an Indymedia family p2p news-sharing site in existence. Indymedia sites are great for text articles and pictures, but pile audio interviews and videos on top of that and the bandwidth starts to pile up. Enter something like v2v, where the site shares the audio and video files on Bittorrent, Edonkey/Overnet, Gnutella and the like, this helps lessen the load on the servers, and I suppose helps prevents censorship as well.
Usenet I already serves this purpose, and with MIME it can be just as rich a medium as the web. Just look at the porn-spam groups!
Which does make me wonder how a medium even less controllable than Usenet would manage to avoid turning every group into spam. You'd need something like Google News to make sense of it... but, hold on, we already *have* Google News.
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.
Indeed it would be demonized, but that hasn't stopped sites like What Really Happened or Turning the Tide, even though they are quite popular.
Then again, they don't reach millions of people with video, which for some odd reason works more convincing on most people.
There's even a news-over-freenet application. See JTCFrost.
Now spread this out to a wide implementation, what news is 'worthy' and 'trusted' to read if this very untraceable route holds true? I might as well read mind-numbing, ultra-biased blogs, because that is all the system would amount to.
I go to the news outlets I currently do because I can to a high degree trust the articles, news without that trust is.. gossip.
P2P for articles, especially news doesn't hold true, how is the article propogated? Will I have to wait 2 days for a fresh article to make its way around the Internet to me? If I want news, I'm used to getting information when I want it, P2P fails on this point.
People think P2P is the cure to [insert internet downfall] because it works for MP3's. But MP3-P2P essentially runs off peoples greed, so there are mass copies of MP3's around, no-one cares if an Mp3 is four days, old, 3 years old, it makes not a difference, but hell, even MP3's are tainted, blanks, bad rips, misnamed, to assume this wouldn't follow on to any other P2P implementation is wishful thinking.
Not to mention that only when an article gains a certain critical popularity mass would most people be able to find it on the system due to the inability to search every user without having a centralised database/hub (which could of course be.. you got it, censored!)
If we can't play God, who will?
Try Freenet. It's much better now than it ever has been.
It's nice to have an alternative method of news, but I don't think you could believe anything sent in such a network. There is "NEWS" that people can run cars on water and aliens walk among us.
"Consider the source" means a lot when your trying to decide if a news story is believable. P2P removes the credibility. News will bubble to the top based on how many people share it.
P2P news will end up a worthless collection of lies and urban legends. Most of my family is already is part of such a network via email and no matter how many times I tell them otherwise they still spread the made up news stories, "HUGS" and prayers. I search out and refute almost every piece of crap my way, but no one sends that out 20 times to everyone they now.
What news needs is peer review and feedback. P2P in it's current form doesn't offer anything like that. You would end up with worthless POP news that people bother to keep and share. News needs a reputation system.
At least now I can see something comes from Fox News and know it's likely distorted, on P2P there is no trust at all.
Web: Your Web broser (e.g. Mozilla) is a client, which sends requests to the Web server, which is a, well, server (nomen est omen).
USENET: Your newsreader, e.g. gnus is a client, the USERNET news server, is, again, what the name says: a server.
The fact that there is data replication between servers doesn't make them a P2P system. For a scenario to be P2P, both parties need to be able to submit requests to others AND answer requests with responses.
Maybe not the same exact thing, but in concept this was covered a few weeks back when talking about RSS distributed via Torrent.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind.
This is the view of the man who helped kickstart the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing, Napster co-founder Sean Parker.
In his vision, people around the world would post the most outrageous slander via anonymous P2P services like those used to swap songs.
They would further the trend toward sensationalism already seen in the major news services, said Mr Parker.
"Currently, only news with some factual basis will be syndicated because otherwise the news outlet, especially those in Britain, could face ruinous legal expenses," he told the BBC World Service programme, Go Digital.
"But if some crank with an axe to grind says that [Recording Industry Association of America Presdient] Cary Sherman is a cannibal who eats babies, it won't get anything like the priority for syndication.
"If you can break the grip of the news syndication services and allow the news collector to talk to the radio station or local newspaper then you can have much more efficient communications."
'Impossible to censor'
To enable this, Mr Parker proposes a new and improved version of Usenet, the internet news service.
But what of fears that the infrastructure that allows such ad hoc news networks to grow might also be abused by criminals and terrorists?
Mr Parker believes those fears are misguided. He argued that acts of politically motivated violence, such as those perpetrated by Al Qaeda and other muslim extremist groups, fulfill necessary functions in the maintanence of a free and democratic society.
Violence of this kind produces a high level of international fear, which is why it is so effective.
"The effect of peer-to-peer networks will be to make censorship difficult, if not impossible," said Mr Parker.
"If there were material that everyone agreed was wicked, then it would be possible to track it down and close it down. But if there's material that only one government says is okay then, I'm sorry, but that's their tough luck".
Political obstacles
Commenting on Mr Parker's ideas, movie actor Billy Bob Thornton welcomed the idea of new publishing tools that will weaken the grip on cinema of major world governments.
Such P2P systems, he said, would give everybody a voice and allow personal testimonies to come out.
But the technology that makes those publishing tools accessible to everyone and sufficiently user-friendly will take longer to develop than Mr Parker thinks, added Mr Thornton.
Mr Parker's vision underestimates the political obstacles in the way of such developments, he said, and the question of censorship had not been clearly thought through.
"Once you build the technology to break censorship, you've broken censorship - even of the things almost everyone wants censored," said Mr Thornton.
"Saying you can then control some parts of it, like images of child abuse, is being wilfully pressimistic. And that's something that peer to peer advocates have to emphasize."
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
thereby escaping the grasp of the censors' attempts to control the spread of forbidden information.
Like what?
Seriously. This is the 21st century. How long has it been since anybody in the Western, industrialized world actually considered any information "forbidden?"
If you wanna talk about samizdat for the Islamic world or something like that, go right ahead. But peer-to-peer computer networks aren't it. Peer-to-peer requires either a small network of dedicated hosts (in which case it's peer-to-peer in name only), or a vast network of part-time hosts. Neither of these things exists in the repressive parts of the world.
It's a neat idea, but let's not overestimate our own importance, hmm?
I write in my journal
Here's a story titled Exploiting Peer to Peer Networking.
It's presented as a funny story, but it's a real world example of what could happen.
A choice of masters is not freedom
the P2P Sockets project paper has interesting
comments about this (it's a JXTA core project)
P2PSockets Intro
Cheers, Joel
I live in China, where everything from the BBC is blocked, so I can't even read the article...
grrr...
They haven't heard of /.
Every windows user is a sadomasochist.
Whoever had the most resources could flood, "this product shown to be great!" If you sorted out duplicate posts they would go around that and truely important news items would be blocked as well, there's no real way to work around it. People go to CNN, and Reuters and the like for their name, they're reliable (more or less).
I see the same kind of fake news, and strongly biased news come out of the "real" news organizations all the time. Wasn't there a new york times journalist that only printed fake news for years?
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Is the RIAA going to spread bogus or garbled news, like they do with music on kazaa? ;-)
P2P delivery of moderated news is one of the visions of this project:
http://www.freshmeat.net/projects/eucalyptt
Think of the moderated efficiency of communication provided by slashcode coupled with the decentralisation of a P2P network. With an open framework such that anyone may post on any topic without prior editor checking
The project is in early stages and is functional for a group of any size.
(hidden agenda disclosure: I am a developer on the project)
(at least not for the next two years)
Stack 60-odd of the wonderful Maxtor OneTouch external 250gig Harddrives (Maxtor propaganda page) and you'll get around 15 TB of extra pr0n and mp3-space. Each has a sweet 8meg cache to boot. So stop whining.
And yes, there's a level of quality that you can get from professionals, but don't think that "objectivity" means there isn't a lot of bias. I'm not talking about the US's "Liberal Media" that the right-wingers whine about - the actual media are radically biased towards the Establishment, and if you want to find some actual liberal media you need to listen to Pacifica Radio or read leftist web sites. National Public Radio is relatively liberal in its cultural content, except for an obvious bias in favor of music by Dead White Europeans, but if you look at its poilitical coverage, it's still basically believing that the government that funds it are a really good thing, even if there are occasional individuals it doesn't like.
Oh, and back to the reliability of P2P-distributed news, did you hear that thing about Bush's trouble with Duct Tape?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I can forsee several fundamental problems with spreading of news through P2P. First of all is the speed with which anything disseminates through P2P protocols. We're talking somewhere around a day or so for things to spread virally, not to mention the need to publish the presence of the latest news through the various announcement methods (trackers etc). Second, Google. P2P is not currently googlable. Third, the tendency is for us to accept whatever news is spread over the web without checking for details. If you know of anyone who still thinks that going on holiday to Bavaria/Thailand/Wherever is putting him in risk of getting his kidneys stolen and himself dumped in a tub of ice water somewhere, it's thanks to unverified mass mailing. Now imagine this being spread over P2P, leading either to a lot of people first falling for alot of false information, then distrusting whatever they hear (cry wolf syndrome) Finally, remember that P2P has enemies, namely the RIAA and MPAA (and their cronies worldwide). They'll believe, and rightly so, that anything that justifies the existence of P2P networks will weaken their ability to gestapo the net. Therefore I'd expect as much trouble from them as they can concieve up. Well, my 2 cents.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
A lot of people on here build up their karma by reposting the article text. I have a different approach inspired by Office Space:
Peter: No, you don't understand. So, everyday, Slashdot gets these anonymous posts with mod points that just go away. It's called aggregate. Samir and Michael and me wrote a program that drops those into an account we own.
Joanna: So you're stealing.
Peter: I don't think I'm explaining it right. You take a penny from a dish by the register right?
Joanna: From the crippled children?
Peter: No, not the jar, the dish. we just take a fraction of the mod points, and take them a couple of million times.
Joanna: How's that not stealing?
Unknown host pong.
Certainly on a p2p network there could be clans of reporters that sign their work and gain a reputation for valid news.
This has already happened for things like DVD rips.
yes, yes, the technology is interesting and so forth, but to me p2p news doesn't look much like progress. look: 1. people get news from anyone who happens (or claims) to know slightly more than they do. news is decentralized, not to say anarchic. 2. paid messengers and town criers bring news to specific people or groups. news is partly centralized, and targeted. 3. the newspaper, radio, tv are invented and anyone can buy relatively cheap, reliable (as far as they know) information. news is centralized. 4. the internet comes along, people think centralized news is censored and decide to distribute news via p2p, which is. . . 1. people getting news from anyone who happens (or claims) to know slightly more than they do.
And so far as spamming a p2p service like freenet - well, there's that "demand" thing. So unless you are posting some high demand spam, it's doomed.
man that was a painful article to read. Never has so much been written by one man that means less to so many who can read [English].
This man couldn't be more uniteresting, less politcal, or less aware of _existing projects_ (*cough* freenet *cough*).
Crypto? RSS? Blogs? Why bother extrapolating from things that are highly effective right now when you can go a different way and get posted to slasdhot?
-1 Karma for the article becuase it comes from the BBC. Britons paid for this obviousness "drunk people more promiscuous, study finds" journalism.
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
I'm sure I don't have to tell people here that China blocks webpages (like the Voice of America, blogger, etc.). So even though in the big cities the Chinese have killer broadband, it's not as useful as it could be.
Anyway, when VOA, whose TV/radio signals are blocked/jammed on the mainland try to get the feeds out, they'll run broadcasts through other sites, and also make everything available via P2P networks.
Whether you agree with VOA/the U.S. Government is another matter, but they're doing stories on things like the AIDS/blood donations crisis, that China won't even talk about (just back from a party with those filmmakers and some VOA reporters).
Of course, most of what people in China download over p2p is Britney or whatever, but, still, the stuff is out there and there ain't nothing the gubmint can do about it.
i think the p2p part really isnt all that important. ... with signature of course. :/ 153
what would be needed to bring the whole news (and discussion) thing to a new level is a standard format (think xml file) in which stories/comments/moderations are posted for everyone to download
the method of transportation really isnt that much of an issue. ppl can shove it around anyway they want. this is more or less what i mean (friend of mine wrote it)
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/27/225230
Found a reference to a Sourceforge project called PeerNews... I'm assuming that the URL is peernews.sourceforge.net or something like that. That URL doesn't work, but the original post I found said that the project was just getting started, so maybe the project hasn't been approved or something. I plan on googling for more...
Shit, his name is actually Richard Salant. With an 'l', actually it could be Salent. Blah!
What news needs is peer review and feedback.
Yes! And that's where internet can be useful. It's one thing to say "I trust this source but not that," but how can I be sure my trusted sources weren't duped themselves? That's where sites like Slashdot come in. When a "news" item is posted here, anybody can comment on it, and this gives me a chance to guage the truth behind the article not only based on my own opinion but based on the opinions and references made by hundreds of others.
That's where traditional news media is weaker, TV, radio and newspapers are one-way communications and aren't accompanied by others' feedback. So I can never be sure if I'm getting the whole story or even the right story.
They should really censor those IPs who keep babbling about You Ess Ee En Ee Tee. We're trying to keep it under the radar folks, so shut up already!
Slashdot
http://tka-dvdr.co.uk
We should just start swearing up and down that controlling content, administering copyrights, and stoping forbidden information and file sharing will be easy once a secure and private p2p infrastructure is in place.
....then again, it practically already is in place.
Then once it's in place, give em the finger.
How long before people started posting spam stories? You think you're downloading a story about government corruption in Norway and end up with an ad for v!@gra or something.
all the geeks went to get videos of janet's wardrobe malfunction after hearing about it from their sports loving cohorts at work?
This sounds like the way news should be to me, I know I'd rather hear news straight then with the media's crooked twist. I'll be interested to see how this plays out into the future, when I can stream uncensored news to my wrist watch. 2010 though... I hope it happens sooner.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
Yay! Twirlip's back. Now things can get frustrating again. :)
Someone will end up wanting to regulate it and we'd get fed biased stories. Give me /. anyday!
"That's their tough luck" is second only to "Dude, watch this!" as an intro to a disaster. "That's their tough luck" sounds good until their lawyers come into the picture, and then the situation suddenly changes.
I think anyone who provides or relays P2P news will have to be extremely careful of stepping into the twin potholes of copyright infringement and libel, as people who publish tell-all weblogs have already found out. In defamation suits you get treated just like a big publisher, except for not being owned by a media conglomerate with a multimillion dollar legal budget. Calling yourself part of "The Press" means nothing unless you have the resources to actually take your case into court.
It's not the despotic governments I'm afraid of, it's the toady governments (starts with a U, ends with SA) whose corporate sponsors demand a structure of rules that limits their own exposure to lawsuits. I don't know whether that means more RIAA-like waves of lawsuits against individuals or another crusade to harass ISPs for carrying P2P news feeds, or some other form of restriction, but you can bet there will be something.
so we use encryption... public/private keys? Popular news editors, indy sites, mainstream sites have a file that you add to your 'buddy list' or 'subscription list' that contains the public key(and whatever other metadata needed). From there, the publishing system encrypts the given article using the authors private key, and then submits it. You only ever see articles that is decrypted correctly with your subscription list.
Authors, Indy or mainstream could grow a large reputation to be trusted(or the inverse, completely ignored). You could even have 3rd party unencrypted articles submitted by people trying to get a start into the network. The possibilities are endless.
Um, are u mking fun of slashdot cause' if u r u are making a big mistake because we now what we talking about and news isnt always about grammer so why don't you stfu noob and go learn some english you 14yo fat kid U are obviously uninformed about inteligense cause it is not always about how u spel yer words!!!!
--- We need more Ron Paul!
It is completely natural.
Even the meaning made into news is not felt.
_
# CheapGbE!GbE!!TheKLF!KLF!!TheRMS!RMS!! And a meme sparks
The comp.* and sci.* hierarchies, from my experience, have been good. e.g. comp.text.xml, comp.protocols.kerberos, etc.
Many of the big players would like Usenet to go away as it is decentralized and distributed which makes it hard to censor and control. ISP what a bottleneck though which users must pass and view ads while doing so.
The BBC article brings up a good point, but perhaps it is more practical to look to Usenet again. It is the only decentralized, distributed service I have seen. Mozilla, Opera and other web browsers include news readers so there is no need to install extra software, though dedicated news readers do have advantages. (Ask your ISP for details on how to connect) I prefer when mailing lists have SMTP/NTTP gateways so that I can check the list with a threaded news reader.
Maybe it's time to look at a new version of the NNTP protocol, and/or to the message format to make up for shortcomings. RSS is trying to do something with the web, which is perhaps more suited to NNTP or its successor.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The number one problem with P2P software is that it breaks down the walls of "the priesthood of the computer operators", which dates back to the 1950's and has various forms that currently is embodied with the MIS staff at most larger business. The idea is that a central authority has control over computing resources, and that you should get "permission" to get anything or be able to access "computing resources". Much of this dates to the military involvement in the creation of the first computers, and the fact that the first computers were so expensive that security provision (as in actual human security teams with badges and billyclubs) were needed just to make sure it would be running the next day. Software development talent was so rare at the time, and the very idea of computers so new that it was treated like some sort of God-like device.
... usually yes. In this case sending news through a P2P network is mainly to help avoid the /. effect of millions of people crashing a server with the latest cool thing that geeks like. If a good P2P network for news protocol were establshed, it would require at most a few hundred "hits" per computer, and some way of sharing with other computers in the network what are the "new" news items, and how to exchange them without hogging bandwidth. Of course, that is the whole point of USENET, and earlier systems that did this very well like FIDONET.
The opposite side of this is the decentralizing forces that have made things like TCP/IP and personal computers. To really understand this philosophy, you really need to go back to the hippy movement with it roots in San Francisco, and its role in the development of computers. With programmers so used to sharing girlfriends, dope, money, class notes, and beer, it is no wonder that they also felt that sharing data and computing resources was just a variation on theme, not really even an innovation. P2P networks and Grid computing are natural progressions of this philosophy.
What has been exciting is that the two cultures are colliding is some very substantive ways. P2P networks really aren't any different from normal TCP/IP networks... it is just that they have a different topology that bypasses the normal control mechanisms (I.E. Cisco routers and the MIS control freaks). Don't think that routers don't exist in P2P communication... they do. It just gets disguised a little bit more and is not where "the powers that be" are normally expecting them to be at. Instead of being in a nice air-conditioned secure facility behind bullet-proof glass and 7 levels of physical security, it is on a workstation for some high school computer lab set up by some 16 year old totally without permission of even the school district. That is the real rub of P2P communications.
Can P2P communication be linked to a specific IP address (and hence a specific user)?
If you don't know about FIDONET, that was a BBS newsfeed exchange service that exchanged news items between dial-up BBS services. There were many levels they worked on, and some interesting routing protocols, but it was a very effective and cheap, if not slow. You could exchange e-mail with people across the world for basically the cost of a local phone call back in the 1980's and early 1990's. If you were generous, you would send the $5 or $10 per month to the local BBS operator to keep it going, but often this was a voluntary donation even then, not something you were obliged to do to get the message sent. The only problem was because it was only dial-up connections at each exchange node (which happened only once or twice per day... to save money) it would sometime take a week or longer if your message had several hops to get to the final destination. Still, it was a great alternative when having internet access for mere mortals was impossible. As usual, most of the bugs in the system were worked out just in time for cheap commercial internet access to become available. There were some FIDONET/SMTP gateways made, but
Balance out your US news by reading opposition news. I suggest Al-Jazeera. Despite what Donald Rumsfeld may claim, their journalism is no more biased than one of Rupert Mudorch's outfits. The quality of news varies, from hastily written reactionary news to deep and knowledgable analysis of geopolitics (and neoconservatism in particular). The political cartoons are quite incisive and worth checking out as well.
I find that getting doses of propaganda from each side tends to nullify each other's effect, leaving me able to figure out the truth more accurately.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Great! Now teenagers and old ladies can get sued by another content industry for sharing.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Damn... Why does every idiot on
Yes, they are talking about P2P, but that doesn't mean a bunch of people distributing documents on kazaa named "NEWS", with no guarantee of the source. Most likely, the future of P2P news will be one where each piece of news is signed with someone's private key, and you simply seach with their public key to find everything they've submitted. That would allow anyone to start reporting news, and allow end-users to fetch only from the sources they want, and potentially assign a level of trust to each seperate source of news.
eg. Goatse-Troll=0 Fox-News=0 CmdrTaco=5 CNN=20, etc.
I get the feeling that 20 years ago, upon hearing the prediction that people would browse the internet with formatting and pictures, you would have said "Gopher can't do that, no way!"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
*sigh*
Please read past the first sentence before responding. I also said...
What news needs is peer review and feedback. P2P in it's current form doesn't offer anything like that...
Obviously something like that is needed. That's the point of my post.
Kind of a quick way to take the pulse of public opinion right?
Of course. If the public opinion you're interested in comes from the people who watch CNN and respond to the slanted question. Not to mention the way he slights any response that is even marginally left of his. I can't speak to his method for selecting the mail to read, but I do have my doubts about it being unbiased.
Talk like a pirate day
Hmm, strange. From your post (and from that 2 sentence quote), I would assume that your point is that P2P is inappropriate.
The 4 little words "in it's current form" are the only place you do anything but outright slam P2P as being incapable of doing this, and even that isn't a very clear indication that you DO think P2P is capable. But still, you are talking about "peer review and feedback", which I don't believe is important at all. There's really none of that with standard news channels, and
In fact, P2P applications are very close to being capable. You can search for a file based upon the SHA1 hash, so a website could just list the hashes of stories, and anybody could find it, and know they are getting exactly what they shoud be (and who it's from, through the method of hash distribution).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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