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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."
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.
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.
The only reason why Music sharing has slowed down is that it's static (the same 100,000 songs are shared over and over again, and are easy to write programs to search for). News is different every couple of days. So as long as people find a way to look for news, then there's little chance it will be able to be blocked and stopped.
Speaking of news feed, USENET is also difficult to trace and block as well. It's been around for much longer than P2P, and has not yet been campaigned against on a large scale. It's problem is awareness and a total lack of decent (neat) client programs for USENET.
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.
Over time news sources build credibility. For example, I don't trust CNN to give me the whole truth about the Iraqi war, so I also goto AlJazeera. I tend to trust more for that kind of news since they're local and since the US has bombed them a few times for not helping the US's media and reporting what they're told. I don't see our US officials bombing CNN now do I? I wouldn't trust Aljazeera for technical advice since theirs is horrible (they said mydoom took up over half of the internet traffic).
Not only that, but large reports and scienfitic reports, video's, and recordings are extraordinarily difficult to counterfeit. Many documents reach over 1000 pages if not more and many recordings are hundreds of hours long. Much of what's reported by thememoryhole.com , for example, can be trusted. Other things, like documents of Bush's or Kerry's service records are difficult to determine since they're much shorter and much more easily fudged with.
Not only that, but anyone with $100 US can pick up a cheap digital camcorder. You can photoshop images, but it's far more difficult to photoshop a video of some Iraqi kid videotaping a bunch of americans blowing the crap out of their parents or police searching through a house with a search warrent to consficate your computer and then consficating all the electronic equipment in the house. Go onto a P2P app and type in "UFO", there are lots of home video's I doubt are faked (although some are, and it takes a keen eye to see it). Cameras and portable flash memory is getting cheaper, so much so that soon cameras the size of a minimaglite will be available with 12 hours of recording for a couple hundred bucks.
And as some of the DRM technologies get incorperated into P2P apps (such as measures to ensure someone throwing something up is throwing that thing up has a name and an address and is the same person who can be trusted before) people can build trust relationships on websites and accounts.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
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.
There's even a news-over-freenet application. See JTCFrost.
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)
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.