Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 10th, '04

[TankGirl]

Thanks again for your dedicated work, Jack.

Originally posted by JackSpratts

File-Sharing To Bypass Censorship
Tracey Logan
BBC

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."

....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/h...gy/3611227.stm

The idea of a global P2P-based news distribution network is very interesting indeed. Both the elimination of censorship and a more versatile global coverage are reasons enough to set up such a network, and there would probably be many more benefits in the long run.

The basic technical requirements would be similar to any P2P network with an open access and potential hostile peer activity. There is a need for reliable identification of news sources and editorial middlemen plus a need for secure (proxying) mechanism to protect the real world identities of the sources when so desired. There is also an obvious need for a trust rating mechanism for the sources so that each peer can filter out her own personally trusted selection of news from the mixed offerings. A similar rating mechanism would be needed to classify the news according to their interest to each receiver so that people could easily subscribe their own favorite catering of information.

As there would likely be an abundance of sources with unclear trust levels, self-organizing communities of writers and editors could play an important role in the network. Instead of trying to spot and pick trustworthy and interesting sources from among myriads of individual candidates you could rather pick from among a much smaller number of newscast communities with established reputations, focuses, biases and styles.

- tg