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SoylentNews is people

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, @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_