P2P News Syndication?

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Friday April 9, 2004 @11:54AM from the reinventing-usenet dept.

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."

10 of 266 comments (clear)

Remember the article troll? by i.r.id10t · 2004-04-09 11:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

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
1. Re:Remember the article troll? by Raindance · 2004-04-09 11:59 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  One might say that's not terribly different than what some news organizations already do.
Your one-stop source for news... by some2 · 2004-04-09 11:57 · Score: 5, Funny

Naked News. Now showing on your local P2P network. :)
Freenet by MoonBuggy · 2004-04-09 11:58 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:Freenet by mar1boro · 2004-04-09 12:13 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Anonymity is not the key though. I personally don't want my news reporters
  to be anonymous. I want them to be accountable. A reputation tied to public keys
  is what we need. I suppose an anonymous news reporter could eventually
  build up a reputation as credible. That would be tough.
  (The public key thing was discussed above, but seemed pertinent here.)
  
  --
  -- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
Re:One Word: by GAVollink · 2004-04-09 12:17 · Score: 5, Informative

Excuse the dumbness here, but
...can't web site's be blocked (by places like China, and work networks)? Distributed news through P2P is unstoppable. Even if you run P2P on some of these campuses, you'll never be noticed if you never share but a single news feed.
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.
Re:One Word: by a+whoabot · 2004-04-09 12:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

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."
Relevant Links by Anonymous Coward · 2004-04-09 12:32 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Freshness? by Doobeh · 2004-04-09 12:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

Wouldn't one of the greatest problems be that of signal to noise. If P2P is employed as a way to supress censorship, then we by that very mark, we are unaware of who published it (since we don't want the author being censored at a later date)

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?
Similar GPL project by +ve_flow · 2004-04-09 13:51 · Score: 5, Informative

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)