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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."
Hooray for trusted news sources.
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. :)
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.
...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.
Problem is that I no longer trust the "trustworthy" news sources. CNN tries to sound balanced but just ends up repeating whatever the US administration said today. FOX is so absorbed in jingoist dogma that they repeat whatever the administration said today and then gush about how wonderful it is. ABC/CBS/NBC/whatever don't cover enough actual news to be worth noticing.
Honestly, for all their faults I'm finding weblogs of various sorts more directly valuable than TV news (too politically charged and beholden to advertisters to be truly objective) AND print news (too late, and too beholden to advertisers to rock the boat).
...Stephen King obituaries in this brave new world of news.
Desert Storm 1. The CNN guys using IRC to get info past the Iraqis.
Equally, how does one know this "media sanctioned information" appearing on the T.V. screen is from a credible source rather than just placed in there by someone who made it up?
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
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.
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?
I think the sins of the news media today are mostly ones of omission, rather than active misinformation.
Most news reporters still like to think of themselves as objective seekers of the truth - but they also know what is "appropriate" or "practical" to talk about and what "crosses the line". This is the real ghost in the machine - the unspoken areas of omission. They're often pretty critical to understanding context.
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.
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.
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
It's okay to read mainstream American or otherwise Atlanticist news. But don't read just it. That's how you fall victim to the propaganda. Read some news from other countries. Try reading some from India or Germany. The stuff's not poison people. And just because it says things that contradict what you hear on CNN and the BBC doesn't mean you should stop reading it just to keep your cognitive dissonance low. It was former CBS president Richard Savant who said:
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
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.
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.
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?
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.
I don't consider any news source trustworthy. I simply have to gather the "facts" from as many news sources as possible and then formulate an opinion. I may watch Fox (although I try to avoid doing so at all costs, the people I live with love it and I hear it in passing), CNN, and BBC News; read the Guardian, Le Monde, NY Times and The Daily Mail or Telegraph (UK) in order to examine an issue.
Each newspaper has an agenda. American journalism aims to be objective which makes for dull reading. I love to read the Guardian because of its blatantly left-leaning nature, for example. The agenda is always there, even in so-called "objective" news sources, it is just not as blatant.
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...
Actually most things in the western world are censored, we just dont realise it. Look at Diebold coverage in the general media - its almost zero, when it should be making the front page of every paper and be the hot topic of every channel. Beef scares and wardrobe malfunctions get more coverage than a nations most basic principles and beliefs and you dont call that censorship? And dont get me started on tv censorship, in America you cant even say shit on tv. yes the western world might seem more open than other parts but we have just as much censorship - its just more advanced - instead of killing people for having some political leaflets, we have a nice advanced hierachy of various people paying eachother off for not mentioning things.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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 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.
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.
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
But it IS pretty easy to just clip off the beginning where the parents shot at the Americans. I'm just saying. This rush to trust "anyone else" is a foolish thing. To each their own I guess.
Memoryhole is weak. The vast majority of stuff on there is stuff that's not "covered up" or is just plain not accurate at all. He also likes to deceive by providing tons of documents that will draw one conclusion, but omit documents counter to that conclusion. There is some good stuff there, but frankly, the operator is a biased crank. I'd say 30% of it isn't remotely "suppressed" information at all, but just serves as a clearinghouse for public documents that support his opinions on current events.
Great! Now teenagers and old ladies can get sued by another content industry for sharing.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.