August 5, 2003
Peer-to-peer news readers can best fight censorship
RSS has been the missing part a whole decentralized Web. One can easily re-distribute his or her website's content through this useful concept and beat local governments' censorship.
I've done the same with the help of a popular website, named Gooya. I've installed an RSS parser on Gooya's server. The parser connects to my RSS feed on my own server, grabs it and automatically makes an HTML of it. Therefore, as long as Gooya is not blocked by the government, people can see that HTML, regardless of weather they can access my weblog or not.
However, I have an idea which could be the ideal way to fight with web censorship, at least for news websites and weblogs that mostly consist of text.
Imagine a peer-to-peer news reader that not only syndicates RSS files, but also downloads them and share them with other users. So you'll never be blocked to access any piece of information as long as you have access to this peer-to-peer software. It could even be implemented in the browser or added as a plug-in for an existing newsreader.
Aside from legal challenges that this concept could cause, it could be the most efficient way to fight political censorship.
I'm not a programmer, but I guess there some people out there who might be interested to think and act further.
Posted by hoder at August 5, 2003 10:58 PMComments
Verry interesting. I have no idea what you are talking about, but if it is designed to circumvent unfair gavernment controls, I'm all for it.
Keep up the good work.
- By: American Guy on August 11, 2003
- By: American Guy on August 11, 2003
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We have a web site that is a web interface to a P2P network at P2PFiles.com and will be rolling out a normal P2P client soon. I love bashing brain-dead governments even more than RIAA. I have 2 suggestions.
1. An integrated RSS reader is not on our horizon. But could be if someone wants to write the code.
2. RSS files are just like other files that can be searched and exchanged on a P2P network. I could see setting up a web site to promote this usage and connect users.
If someone wants to work with us to develop these projects, let me know.
Thank you,
Marc Freedman
RazorPop
- By: Marc Freedman on August 9, 2003
- By: Marc Freedman on August 9, 2003
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Hi Hossein, I'm writing a proposal for a contest on open-source software for NGOs so this kind of idea is wonderful. Especially because I want to allow people with marginal Internet access to have such means to participate effectively in Internet society nevertheless. A sophisticated upload/download utility. We're working on this at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/minciu_sodas_EN/
- By: Andrius Kulikauskas on August 7, 2003
- By: Andrius Kulikauskas on August 7, 2003
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The "deny all except..." is very very unlikely to happen. Based on official government plans, number of Internet users in Iran will be around 15 million in less than 3 years (at the moment it's less than 3 million I guess). It is impossible to enforce the "deny all except..." policy for such a big market. That's why mirroring will be successfull.
- By: Ali on August 7, 2003
- By: Ali on August 7, 2003
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Exactly, Paul. Of course, if a government switches to (or, in some cases, already maintains) a "deny all except..." stance, then we're talking about an entirely different level of censorship problems to deal with.
Actually, politically speaking, any technology or whatever that prompts a government to move to take away a freedom already enjoyed by its people will in the end only undercut that government's long-term ability to hold out against its every growing unpopularity. Some governments I can think of would therefore be very hesitant to switch over to the more aggressive stance even if a decentralized p2p news-sharing network were to spring up.
All this reminds me of the effect of p2p (not that anyone called it back then) faxing of news under the collapsing Soviet Union in the 1980's. The fax machine was an important tool of communication against the totalitarian censors then; specifically because it was decentralized, informal, and self-replicating, so to speak, it was very hard to beat.
Hoder, my time has been heavily taken up today, but I still hope to look over the FreeWeb code (as well as some other code examples / approaches). In the meantime, don't anyone hold off on jumping in on this. (For instance, Amir, you.)
- By: Mac on August 7, 2003
- By: Mac on August 7, 2003
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As a bonus, you effectively get free mirroring of your website!
Ali, the piece you're missing is that if your ISP blocks foo.com, you go instead to bar.com which is running a server-based aggregator that reads the feed from foo.com, then re-serves the content to you, bypassing your ISP's block on foo.com. They could then block bar.com, but if any number of people start running their own back-alley aggregator-servers, they can't hope to block them all.
This may, however, prompt censors to move to a "Deny All" stance where all sites except those on their approved whitelist are by default blocked. In that case, this system probably won't be able to route around the censor, as it's unlikely that a site running an aggregator-server would be approved.
- By: Paul Victor Novarese on August 6, 2003
- By: Paul Victor Novarese on August 6, 2003
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If the RSS generator is on your own server, then it may not work even with a specially-designed news-reader. If all data coming from hoder.com is being blocked by an ISP, then news feed will not be an exception. Or maybe I didn't understand your idea fully.
- By: Ali on August 6, 2003
- By: Ali on August 6, 2003
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Yeah. FREENET might not have RSS support built in. But there exist an extention to FREENET, FreeWeb.
http://freeweb.sourceforge.net/
FreeWeb is not being maintaned now but it's an open source project, you can either contact the authur(s) to take over the project or download the source code and start your own open source project.
- By: Ramin on August 6, 2003
- By: Ramin on August 6, 2003
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Freenet doesn't use RSS. It's main function is to help being anonymous on the Net.
- By: Kaveh on August 6, 2003
- By: Kaveh on August 6, 2003
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Such a thing already exists -- see
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=faq#what.
- By: Alex Schröder on August 6, 2003
- By: Alex Schröder on August 6, 2003
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I'm Ready to participate in a workgroup to write the RSS Reader . i've some experience about writing P2P programs. its the best way to destroy Site Blocking policy .
- By: amir on August 6, 2003
- By: amir on August 6, 2003
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This is a brilliant notion. I can't see any problems with it as yet. I'll give it a think over the next day and see what I can come up with...
- By: Mac on August 5, 2003
- By: Mac on August 5, 2003
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