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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 05 2015, @08:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-wonder-if-they-run-rehash dept.

Stumbled upon this (disclaimer, I'm not affiliated and don't hold any special interest):

Aether is an app you install to your computer to connect to Aether network. This network is made of different boards (forums) where people post and discuss things. On the surface, it's fairly similar to Slashdot, Metafilter, Reddit, or any other community site on the Internet.

The different thing about Aether is that it doesn't have a server somewhere. The only thing the app does is that it finds and connects to other people using Aether. In other words, it's a distributed, peer-to-peer network.

This makes it impossible to censor, and renders its users anonymous. It's useful for people concerned about privacy, or pretty much anyone who doesn't want to be watched and catalogued for every word they write on the Internet (so, pretty much everybody).

It's also temporary. Whatever you post disappears after six months. It's designed to be an ephemeral space, and it's focused on now, rather than the past. Other people can still keep copies of what you wrote, but it won't last forever in the network itself. They also won't know who you are.

Community moderated, distributed and anonymous. Almost to good to be true, but... how do you know it is actually _gewg that's posting?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @08:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @08:49PM (#205369)

    I don't download and keep a lot of stuff locally.
    I am, however, a real packrat when it comes to bookmarks.
    Stuff that disappears and makes my bookmarks useless does bug me.

    When Google changed (and changed and changed and changed) its USENET archive, that was irritating.
    After their most recent(?) "improvement", I just gave up on them.

    it's focused on now

    Hipsters.

    -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:04PM (#205372)

    Re:you(sic) post disappears after six months

    Bad taste in pedandery, "whatever" would have fitted the Subject.

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:15PM

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:15PM (#205375) Homepage

      Bad taste in pedandery

      I believe you meant "pedantry."

      You're welcome.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:12PM (#205373)

    There are bookmarklets and services to automatically backup pages of interest to one of the many online services that do it and that way you can bookmark those and always have access.

    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:21PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 05 2015, @09:21PM (#205376) Journal
      Except that it's not necessary web:

      Aether doesn't depend on the web. This is possible because it's nothing but a communication protocol that describes how you find other people speaking Aether protocol, and how to speak to them. Aether (the app) is just a reference implementation of a client that talks Aether protocol. The protocol itself is open.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:04PM (#205389)

      Yeah, that will work for some purposes.
      ...though the cloud thing isn't necessarily perfect either.

      You may have noticed that I am fond of the Google Cache of pages.
      Those allow me to highlight portions of the page which I think are especially cogent.
      Posting a link to that marked-up Cache (along with a link to the original) is technique I like to use.

      Paradoxically, over time, that gives another point of failure if Google loses track of the page or changes their 12-character identifier for that page.
      (Sites switching over to https-only is a recent wrinkle in this paradigm.)
      OTOH, having a record of significant words in the text has allowed me to find the page again or another copy of the text when the original can't be found.

      Pages that e.g. are behind a database search page[1] or are forbidden by a robots.txt won't get cached, so those may be other gotchas.

      [1] Often, copies of pages are still at Archive.org, but a Google Cache of those doesn't exist.

      -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:22PM (#205391)

    People archive 4chan; they can archive this newfangled thing.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Monday July 06 2015, @01:28AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Monday July 06 2015, @01:28AM (#205443) Journal

    USENET posts disappeared after 2 weeks or whatever the local administrator thought was enough of retention time.

    Anyway, there's a lot of hipster designed and administered things out there both in hardware and software. Any sane person does best to avoid them at all times if possible.

    Seems we are now very near the point of re-inventing USENET in some form. This time eyes behind your shoulder will be surveying every post.

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 06 2015, @08:43AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday July 06 2015, @08:43AM (#205519) Homepage Journal

      This was something I was seriously investigating for SN. I ran an experiment if it would be possible to spool the database into INN (netnews server), and proved that the basic idea was sound, but there were enough edge cases to prove that using INN wasn't practical for two way communication. What I want to see for SN is it to be able to continue if we ever go down, and my intent now is to implement NNTP in perl, and allow downstream servers to pull from use via NNTP XFER. As such, it could even be spooled into USENET itself, with "from USENET" posts coming in as AC.

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 06 2015, @09:02AM

        by TheRaven (270) on Monday July 06 2015, @09:02AM (#205524) Journal
        I played with something similar about 10 years ago. Integrating with INN was a non-starter, but the NNTP protocol is pretty simple. A server that can speak to it, require authentication, and provide an NNTP interface to a web forum was quite easy to put together.
        --
        sudo mod me up
        • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 06 2015, @09:12AM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday July 06 2015, @09:12AM (#205526) Homepage Journal

          I got somewhat farther than you I guess; my plan was to set the soylentnews.* hiearchery to have the Moderated flag on it, and use a mail-gateway to manage posts. THe problem is there was no way to hook into INN's authetication code to make it validate against the SN database, and then automatically generate a mail header that validated a user to a post. The two systems were so far disconnected to each other that I couldn't figure out a decent way of doing it without a massive hack. Plus INN sucks to run.

          I've looked at implementing NNTP, the problem are the article control numbers; NNTP *really* wants to its own system of managing it, and that means mapping tables to keep everything sane. Maybe I'll hack up NNTP code for the 14.07/08 rehash release though. The pain part will be handling STARTTLS in perl. I'm already cringing thinking about it.

          --
          Still always moving
        • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Monday July 06 2015, @11:30AM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday July 06 2015, @11:30AM (#205566) Homepage Journal

          Actually, after thinking about this again, its going to have to use INN if we want to spool onto USENET and get posts, or else I need to re-implement a mail-to-post gateway from scratch. I'm reading some of my old code from when I last experimented with this to see what I can do ...

          --
          Still always moving
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @03:21PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @03:21PM (#205660)

            Maybe a better solution than an integrated NNTP gateway would be an HTTP API that allows access to all the features also available with the user interface (but nothing else). This would then allow to write interfaces to other systems like NNTP without messing with Rehash internals, possibly even by third parties who wouldn't want to dive into Rehash itself. This would also have the advantage that once that API is available, any such development and deployment can go on independent of Rehash development/deployment, so e.g. an update of the NNTP gateway would not affect the main site.

            Anyway, if you post to Usenet, make sure that the posts follow Usenet conventions (especially: no HTML; HTML is not appreciated on Usenet).

    • (Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Monday July 06 2015, @04:49PM

      by mr_mischief (4884) on Monday July 06 2015, @04:49PM (#205722)

      USENET and FIDO were the first two things I thought of when I saw the summary.

  • (Score: 2) by GoonDu on Monday July 06 2015, @03:24AM

    by GoonDu (2623) on Monday July 06 2015, @03:24AM (#205470)

    4chan is similar to that concept in terms of ephemerality, it took the userbase roughly 7 years (when storage becomes way much cheaper) to create an archive site that automatically archive all the posts from respective boards. I can see the same thing happening to this as well, a server simply needs to connect to the Aether network and download scrape the posts.