Re: P2P Architectures, SOPA/PIPA and freedom from censorship

[JavaFan]

I don't think there's much point in discussing this on a *Perl* forum, so I keep it brief. Why are companies like Google and Facebook so successful, and own so much data? They spotted a good idea, reimplemented in an agile way, and had the business model to finance it all.

I came across yacy.net, a P2P search engine, sadly for us written in Java. Although it's been around for a few years, it's still in it's infancy as far as performance and user experience,

See, that's the difference. Google and Facebook were way beyond "the infancy" stage after a few years.

It seems to me that what is a dynamic network of global peer-peer contributors (like us) is much harder to influence than a single huge company with all the political ties that it inevitably has.

Hmmm, and here I am, thinking that one of the problems of Google is, is that is hard to influence. Now you want something that's even harder to influence?

So I am asking my fellow monks, what experience does Perl and the Perl community have on P2P applications and what is there out there that we can draw on in our own development.

A few questions

1. Why is your idea tied to Perl? If your goal is "freedom of censorship" (whatever that may mean), why aren't you agnostic when it comes to language while searching for a solution? Why would anyone but a handful of your users care which language was used? Heck, I don't even care which languages Perlmonks depends on (very likely C as one of the languages, and either Perl and/or PHP as additional languages). For the user, it's all about the service provided, and (s)he doesn't care about the code.
2. Why do you think "P2P" is the answer? (And to what is it the answer?)
3. Now, suppose you know how to create your solution. (Perhaps CPAN is going to have all the answers). How are you going to finance it? What's your business model? Who's going to pay for the datacenters you'll need? Who's going to pay the people maintaining (and initially, developing) all this?

[pemungkah]

I think the idea Steve's putting out there is that P2P applications over secured channels are inherently hard to block (deep packet inspection can do this, but it's rather fragile). And that implementing them in Perl is a possible idea.

His idea is not meant to have a business model. it is meant to be computer-mediated, networked communication, not dependent on central servers, solely for the purpose of communicating, and for communicating in situations where the "norma" channels are suppressed. It is not meant to make any money, and its developers will, no doubt, either not care about being paid, or will feel that striking a blow for free communication is payment enough. It is meant to be a means of responding to the Bloggers and Twitters responding to pressure to censor themselves -- by censoring themselves and pretending that they aren't.

It's BitTorrent for radical ideas, with Tor on top. Anonynimization plus decentralized communication. I think Perl probably is a good choice.

[Steve_BZ]

Hi pemungkah

Thanks for your support.

It is meant to be a means of responding to the Bloggers and Twitters responding to pressure to censor themselves -- by censoring themselves and pretending that they aren't.

Well, I didn't mean that, but it's very true. I see people I know blogging every day, but only opinions they already know are popular. Where are the new and controversial ideas? As the British playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

As a very far-sighted man, he probably meant us here on PerlMonks.

And, as he should have added, Perl.

Regards.

[JavaFan]

As a very far-sighted man, he probably meant us here on PerlMonks.

Oh, please. The ability to type and to join a website doesn't make you special.