The toman diaries

Its already possible!

lørdag, april 10, 2004

I read at bbc that..

"By the year 2010, file-sharers could be swapping news rather than music, eliminating censorship of any kind."

Why, its already possible, very very possible! By using a)A descriptive file-name, and/or b)metadata for the article you're publishing into the Gnutella and Gnutella2 networks, you can publish anything you want, anything. - And anyone can find what info they want, without cencorship. Today.

Of course, the Gnutella network doesn't provide you with the propagation things like RSS give you, gnutella is still limited by your own so-called 'horizon'. The gnutella horizon is your virtual near vacinity, your neighbours, of other users of gnutellla software.

The following table from leuf.com shows your horizon for any given TTL, a querys Time To Live (x), and the number of computers you are directly connected to (y), which is what determines your horizon size.

Note that this table doesn't take into concideration a relatively new addition to the gnutella protocol called ultra-peers, which have between 70 and several hundreds of connections called leafs. Ultra-peers themselves normally connect to 5-10 or more ultra-peers, while leafs connect to 2-4 ultra-peers making the horizon multitudes larger given the same TTL.

But this is your horizon; Those at your horizon also has such an horizon and those connected to them also has one, so one can actually say that all computers in the gnutella network are connected. Because everyone shares files on gnutella, we can actually say that all articles on the gnutella network are potentially on all computers in the network. If I want a book from computer number 20000, one of the users in my 10000 number horizon would have to fetch that file first, for me to at all know about it, and so on. If an article or a subject is interesting enough (wants to be shared), it will spread pretty rapidly throughout the network in enough copies that anyone can get it.

The only problem seems to be one of trust, of quality, like in any other editor-less world where everthing can be anything and everyone is likely to be a terrorist or even socialist with communist tendencies. But who is to say the current media talks more truth? --Making a decentralized news-source without cencorship is incompatible with editing. The most popular stories are probably also the most interesting and therefore often most truthful stories. I know I delete the bad stuff myself...