P2P News Syndication? 266
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."
Re:One Word: (Score:2, Funny)
Your one-stop source for news... (Score:5, Funny)
I will believe it will happen... (Score:2, Funny)
I expect an excessive amount of… (Score:2, Funny)
In case of slashdotting..... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:oh goody (Score:1, Funny)
"Durty, S1uts with farm animals !!!"
I share your pain. Everyone knows that clean sluts are better than dirty ones. And you just can't do that sort of thing with farm animals and not get dirty.
Yes, in that sense of the word, too.
Slashdot? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:News? Oh my!!! What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
Never happen (Score:3, Funny)
In case of /.ing (Score:2, Funny)
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."
Text of article (Score:2, Funny)
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?