from the where-will-they-store-the-source-code? dept.
Chris Ball, about whom I know very little, gave a talk to the Data Terra Nemo conference on 23/24 May in Berlin. From the conference site, I gathered the following: "Data Terra Nemo is a technical conference for discussing the ideas behind systems and protocols without centralized ownership and how they impact the landscape of the Internet".
Chris gave a presentation regarding a decentralized git repository which he has dubbed 'GitTorrent'. His notes, which he describes as an 'aspirational transcript' of the talk, take the story up:
Why a decentralized GitHub?
First, the practical reasons: GitHub might become untrustworthy, get hacked — or get DDOS'd by China, as happened while I was working on this project! I know GitHub seems to be doing many things right at the moment, but there often comes a point at which companies that have raised $100M in Venture Capital funding start making decisions that their users would strongly prefer them not to.
There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves. Mako Hill has an essay called Free Software Needs Free Tools, which describes the problems with depending on proprietary software to produce free software, and I think he's right. To look at it another way: the experience of our collaboration around open source projects is currently being defined by the unmodifiable tools that GitHub has decided that we should use.
So that's the practical and philosophical, and I guess I'll call the third reason the "ironical". It is a massive irony to move from many servers running the CVS and Subversion protocols, to a single centralized server speaking the decentralized Git protocol. Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't need to exist anymore". We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the world's source code.
So, especially at this conference, I expect you'll agree with me that this level of centralization is unwise.
The talk continues in the first link at the start of this summary.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:16AM
(Choosing Washington because I live in the USA; of course it could probably be any large country).
Every so often one of the two parties seizes the intellectual initiative and captures the attention of the media and the press. The Democrats did it with Obamacare; then GOP responded with the Tea Party. Years later, the Democrats came back with Gay Marriage, etc. Like the saying "no publicity is bad publicity", it's not so much whether you're right or wrong as whether you're able to grab the podium and the national stage.
That's what GitHub did. Git was the darling VCS, so SVN was the "legacy" tool. Even though Git is really most appropriate for huge sprawling projects like the Linux kernel, and SVN does quite well for most other projects.
(Score: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:32AM
I'd agree with this except for the fact having using both SVN and git heavily over the course of years, SVN's branching and merging support is not much better than CVS in many ways. Git on the other hand makes it trivial to merge multiple independent branches togethers, figure out who did what, and help keep patches across multiple trees (we've got some patches going across slashcode and rehash right now). I've also use bzr (and to a much lesser extent, hg), and neither is as good at git at handling branches and stuff. bzr is basically decentralized SVN. hg is fast, but it seems a bit clumsy to merge from multiple heads.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:49AM
(sighs)
I guess I'll have to spend more time learning git then.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:08AM
all those long strings of hex digits, guids or some such.
Yes I understand there is some point to them but they also make git quite unpleasant for me to use. With subversion I can just look for things like "commit 42".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pe1rxq on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:40PM
man git-tag
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:38AM
You are mistaken. I chose Git for my personal projects because CVS, SVN, etc are too heavy for simple hobby use. They require a server, and while Linux can multitask just fine, so "server" doesn't necessarily mean hardware, that still means somebody needs to set up the bloody thing. Yes, there's probably a howto for that. I tried to read the one for CVS, probably fell asleep on the first page. SVN is even worse, it runs as an Apache module, so now not only do I need to hire an SVN administrator, I also need somebody who can configure Apache securely. My personal web server does not run Apache because Apache is too complex.
Setting up git for a hobby project is as simple as
cd projectdirectory
git init
Done.
No servers needed, no separate user accounts, no nothing. And if I should decide to publish the repository, I can use any web server (even IIS), no modules needed. Git push to such a repository is done via SSH (usually), with no additional setup.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:17AM
"GitHub" is the trademark of a private company; it's like saying that all the folks who barbecued over the recent holiday weekend were a decentralized McDonalds.
It's a decentralized git repository, or a decentralized revision control system. Even if it's an identical clone of GitHub's UI, it's not a decentralized GitHub, it's a decentralized clone of GitHub.
Use trademarks carefully or the lawyers will eat your lunch.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:55AM
Nobody knows the difference between git and GitHub. Even the Torvalds himself who invented git is on GitHub.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux [github.com]
See? Only 9075 forks! If you fork Linux on GitHub you can pretend to be a kernel hacker too. Isn't GitHub wonderful.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:10AM
That doesn't make sense. Git already is a decentralized revision control system.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:19AM
but SEO, once regarded as a black art, is know quite well documented. Go look at who the top hits are for a selection of valuable queries.
Or consider why the Champs d'Elysees (sp?) was constructed in Paris.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:22AM
Git was a decentralized tool for losers until GitHub centralized it. These days you're not a real coder unless you're on GitHub, just like how you're not a real person unless you're on Facebook.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM
What am I then? A corporation? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:59AM
I would otherwise have no possible way to ever communicate with my close friends and family. I work very hard to convince them to email me but they don't know how to.
My cousin Chuck Crawford was the valedictorian of his high school. He has a master's degree from havard, now he teaches at a graduate school of architecture. Even so he doesn't know how to send nor receive email; oddly he can write fortran code.
I tried to look him up at his school's website. Other than the HTML homepage it was a bunch of PDFs. There was no faculty directory.
Chuck's apparently a real important guy in the architectural world but even so I can't find him online other than through facebook.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:21AM
I hate my friends and family. I don't have a Facebook account and I never check my email.
I do all my talking with people in person down at the general store like it's 1955.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:20AM
I would otherwise have no possible way to ever communicate with my close friends and family.
Well, between surrendering my privacy to a scumbag company like Facebook (and the numerous companies it hands your information over to) and not talking to close friends and family, I'd easily choose the latter.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:48PM
when your friends and family are dead and buried, you will regret not having asked them some questions.
For me it is very, very painful that I did not ask my father just a very few questions.
One such is why I have never been so much as permitted to meet my own brother.
Dad left us in 2003.
Mom surely knows but she won't discuss Brother Chuck other than to name him in her will for the specific purpose of cutting him completely out of it.
My sister claims we don't have a Brother Chuck, she asserts that I'm referring to Cousin Chuck. But we really do have a Brother Chuck; I've seen one single photograph of him, also my aunt - my mother's twin sister - knew Brother Chuck when he was a toddler.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by KGIII on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:21AM
I think that this would go a long ways towards stopping (or hindering) actions such as those done by Dice to the GIMP for Windows product. That kind of behavior is becoming all too common and an open, distributed, standardized (Is there a .torrent standard? I seem to recall reading something about a proposed standard for .magnet links, I have not followed up on learning more about either though.) so something like this should be beneficial.
When you place something online, at a third party site, you have lost control of it. As this would make the content distributed I have to wonder how well it will do syncing if you change a file. I really do not know... If you have a revision but not a new version then? I do not see how that would propagate. I think that, really, is my only concern except that someone may choose to poison their local file in hopes of sending it upstream but that seems unlikely and what things like the MD5 checksum prevent.
Actually, how about authentication? How will torrent know who is authorized to send a revision upstream? How will it prevent unauthorized access? It seems potentially rife for man-in-the-middle attacks depending on the authentication method.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @03:50AM
I don't know much about it so I don't want to steer you wrong by providing incomplete information.
I came across it while exploring a hidden wiki; I don't recall where it was.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:39AM
My understanding is that the onion networks are terrible for downloading medium to large files. I have personally witnessed this and my experience support the statements but I, too, am no expert with this technology. The additional is likely true in that attempting to torrent over an onion network is neigh impossible, slows others down as well s yourself, and is generally a bad idea because the traffic is run through multiple loads and latency is very high so packet checking and throttling are difficult. I am not sure how anonymous traffic would benefit/solve the first few issues that I mentioned.
I think that this is a great idea, in theory, but I think the implementation may be more difficult if they want to get it right the first time. The whole authentication for modification and distributing new content concerns me. I worry about security for the developers and the potential to circumvent this which puts the consumers at risk. If they get it wrong at the start they enter the defeatist circle that is without security they will gain fewer developers and without developers they will gain fewer users to distribute to. That would negate the entire purpose.
I also wonder about the 'complexity.' You, the other members here, and I are all familiar with downloading torrents and getting an application installed to do so. We may even have a torrent client on our microwave even. The vast majority of internet traffic is consumers. These people do not know anything. They know nothing about FTP. They know nothing about alternative browsers. They know nothing about computer security. They know nothing about their operating system. In all the cases I just listed it is a near certainty that they know less than nothing about torrents or onion networks. This is a barrier to entry...
Maybe HTML 5.1 will find a way to bind sockets and providing a website will be doable? Maybe a simple Java client can grab the URL and do the work (overhead is less an issue now)? This is, unfortunately, going to create a user class of leechers, this is not what the torrent networks are for. Hell, that is the antithesis of torrents... How will one remove a defective or malware afflicted file? Will one be required to visit the developer's site or the official GitTorrent site? Can third parties index them? How about if they include links to virus infected or backdoored files that mimic the file name and structure?
I could go on... I think the idea is great but it is along the lines of cold fusion unless I am missing something. I could easily be missing something. I am not infallible, I do not even possess the ego to pretend I am error free.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:04AM
the main problem I've experienced is that some file share sites limit the rate at which any client IP may download new files. That makes sense if some freeloader is downloading directly - not with tor - but breaks down if a lot of clients are going through a proxy.
There aren't that many exit nodes, so quite commonly I either have to wait a long time or I'm not permitted to download at all. Sometimes I can work around it by using Tor's "New Identity" feature, which gives me a new exit node but it doesn't always work.
The most straightforward way to fix it would be to create lots more exit nodes but getting that to actually happen is problematic.
Once I am able to start a download, in my experience the transfer rate is reasonable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Monday June 01 2015, @05:47AM
I can only speak for myself and have not torrented over it as it was advised not to. The files I downloaded were very slow. Now that I think about it, it may have been because the onion network via Tor was rather new at the time and changes may well have been made and the popularity has certainly increased. I will install the pirate browser bundle and give it a new run.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:09AM
But perhaps those people are not the target use case? We know about western states wanting to break encryption standards to give them access to anything they want, we know that shutting down those who refuse to play ball with government requests is not something that some nations will think twice about. So the value of this system might be that those who are bright enough to be writing the next clever piece of code are more than capable of using both Git and torrents, and they will benefit because their source code cannot magically disappear or become worthless because of the possibility that the only source is contaminated. If a TLA wants to control the source code, they will have to be able to control each and every distributed git repository because, if they don't, they cannot be sure that they 'control' anything. They haven't managed to do that with other torrents, have they?
End users don't need to know about torrents - they can install packages or programs the same way that they have always done so. Whether those packages are secure or not will not change - but the end user who doesn't know enough to to use torrents probably doesn't care about security of the packages. As long as they can access emails, create and watch videos, and publish cat photographs they will be happy. But those who have decided that there might be a better way than having a society with no privacy whatsoever can have more faith that any code that they produce will exist in so many places it would be hard for a TLA to exert total control. This is not a perfect solution, but perhaps it is a step in the right direction?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Monday June 01 2015, @05:42AM
That may work to some extent (I would still worry about security and things like authentication as well as replication and versioning) but it appeared that the intent was for end-users... Hmm... I like the way you are headed with this line of thinking though. I will ponder it and see what I come up with. I wonder if a more traditional P2P may be the solution? I will ponder.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Sunday June 14 2015, @05:02PM
I'm only reading this now because I'm trying to catch up but BitTorrent (the name of the protocol using .torrent files) is better than “a standard”: it's a protocol and has a specification which is in the public domain (when I say that protocols are better than standards I'm kind of joking, don't worry if you didn't find it funny) :)
Here's an example [bittorrent.org] of the protocol specification that might be outdated (taken from the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]).
I don't know anything about GitTorrent (I only started reading the comments here first) so I can't answer anything about that, I'd like to know (a lot) more just like you.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:03AM
I think git is just fine. There is some point to github.
What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.
They don't ask for my sourceforge.
What particularly pisses me off is that I prefer not to use any manner of hosting service when I can avoid it, for code repositories specifically I always set up my own server.
I actually do have a github account, but I don't use it a whole lot so I never enter any answer into that form field.
I expect that leads recruiters to conclude that I don't really know how to program computers, despite my having learned to code in 1976, my focus in school being computational physics and having twenty-seven years experience as a software engineer, including a Senior Engineer position at Apple where I debugged problems that no one else had the first clue how to solve.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:46AM
GitHub is the trendy place for young posers to pad their portfolios with trendiness. They go to GitHub and fork a whole bunch of trendy projects, never contribute anything ever, and put the GitHub account on the résumé with the expectation that idiot recruiters will see a whole bunch of trendy projects and conclude that anybody who is somehow involved with so many trendy projects must be trendy enough to deserve employment.
The average GitHub project will have a handful of contributors but hundreds and hundreds of useless résumé padding forks by totally worthless morons.
Nobody really cares if you know how to program. The trouble is you're not young, old man.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:08AM
That's why I don't dye my grey hair.
That's why I don't tell anyone what my github account is, despite that I really do have one. I use it only to make actual contributions to projects that are themselves hosted on github.
A close friend who sincerely meant well advised me to stop linking my essays on mental illness from every page on my entire website. I pointed out to her that it is more important to me that those essays be widely read, than that I ever get a job.
Even so, it sucks to be poor.
Wikipedia has a good article about Diogenes of Sinope. He's an important philosopher but even so his lifestyle was what most today would regard as "homeless". Diogenes used to carry a lamp with him even during the day, in hopes of finding an honest man.
I read that just a few days ago, I'm considering doing the exact same thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM
Diogenes told Alexander to get lost and was lucky enough to live afterwards. Archimedes told a Roman soldier to get lost and died. Socrates who was too lazy to write anything down was instead such a talkative man that the Athenians had him killed just to make him shut up. So my question to you, modern man, is how lucky do you feel?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:56AM
sounded like a fun game.
Two different people - a psychiatrist and a close friend - each pointed out to me that I was "a survivor". In fact I do have the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge.
I've been tazed four times, each time by Clark County Washington Sheriff's deputies. The fourth time I yanked the wires out of the tazer.
I'm not dead certain but attribute my tolerance for pain to my fondness for spicy food. Capsaicin is well-documented to relieve pain. In my experience it does not relieve pain but makes the pain bearable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:09AM
I'm a pain in the ass, for sure, but I'm not a big enough pain in the ass to be murdered by anyone, not even the cops, and they love to murder people!
Look over here, at me! I love attention!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:35AM
Can we have a link to your mental illness articles, then?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:04PM
linked at the top of every page of my site. I have lots more but I need to adjust their markup as I'm moving them from a now-abandoned URL.
Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com]
My Deepest Fear [warplife.com]
Despite not having been symptomatic in any way, simply pointing out the existence of my deepest fear got me held involuntarily three times - twice in handcuffs, by the police.
Oopsy doodle my deepest fear redirects for some reason now lost to history. I'll fix that later this afternoon.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RobotMonster on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:33AM
Meh. Last three times I tried to get something from github via the git command line, the server would barf somewhere from 1MB to 4MB into the transfer, and then you'd have to start the whole thing all over again.
I don't know if that was caused by Git's protocol or GitHub's server, but either way it's pretty unimpressive for a "newish" system powered by a major host.
I eventually gave up.. Z-Modem supported resuming transfers way back in the dark ages.
I generally work on closed-source commercial projects anyway; if anybody's letting GitHub or SourceForge manage closed-source projects for them, they're going to get everything that's coming to them...
Btw, if you want to see some truly horrible C, check the original Z-Modem implementation...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:23AM
What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.
"What's my github? Oh, that's easy. Just take the "name@" of my email address and replace it with "git.". So, "git.mydomain.com"
The next inevitable question among such morons is, "Oh cool, how do you get your own domain on github?" The answer is, "Apache mod rewrite redirection magic", but the real answer is I host my own public git server on a subdomain (each project's git repo is also a submodule of the main repo), and have thus never needed github. It's fucking easy. Just:
touch git-export-daemon-ok
mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
git update-server-info
And my bare repository is available to clone over standard HTTP, use a local repo cloned with SSH to push changes to the remote. Sure, I don't get all the bells and whistles that github has, but that's what the rest of my website is for. Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:24AM
Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
Non sequitur. Just because someone doesn't have knowledge about something specific doesn't mean they're not very good at something else.
I agree that people should be able to do this, though.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:53PM
the forms, sometimes recruiter solicitation emails that ask, are always quite specific that they want my github username.
they don't ask for my bitbucket, my sourceforge or what have you.
I've been hosting my own repositories since 1988 but because I choose not to use a cloud service to have someone else host my repository, I am regarded as unemployable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:24AM
Well, you could create a GitHub account, and put a single repository there which contains a single file that lists the web addresses of all your privately hosted publicly accessible repositories. :-)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 01 2015, @08:59PM
Filter error: Comment too short
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:39AM
Gitlab is a self hosted repository alternative to guthub. It's nice, quite user friendly, and it works.
You can easily install it alongside an owncloud server, for example on a raspberry pi with some storage.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:49AM
But WHY?
Git already manages repositories, and can use any web server. What GitHub / GitLab adds to that is the "cloud" management via http interface. And if you already have local access, why would you need that?
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:56PM
Issues, for one.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday June 02 2015, @12:48PM
And as an alternative to Own Cloud, Gitlab is also available on https://sandstorm.io/ [sandstorm.io] and https://bitnami.com/stacks [bitnami.com]
(And Bitnami also has Gitorious [bitnami.com].)
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:04PM
And ArkOS, I think, but I don' tknow the maturity of any of these.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @08:56AM
Those who recently have been commenting on the role of the editor would do well to compare this summary with the original submission. It perhaps illustrates best the task sometimes facing the editor.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @01:52PM
That reminded me of the credit in the Will Smith "I, Robot" flick: "Suggested by the works of Isaac Asimov".
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:13PM
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by McD on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:46PM
I was involved in that discussion. What happened in this article is so much "editing" as "authoring," and that's not so much a "story submission" as a "story suggestion."
Full marks to Janrinok for following up and turning it into a discussion-worthy writeup! I would consider that above and beyond the call of duty for the position of "editor."
But that said, this is actually the exact sort of thing I was talking about [soylentnews.org]. Granted, the submitter is anonymous, and submitted little more than a bare link, but it's not obvious to me looking at this that the speaker is Janrinok, and not the submitter.
Clearer attribution of who's doing the speaking is my concern.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:13PM
Thank you for your kind words. However, it is not that exceptional - we have been doing this sort of thing since day 1. We have to get stories onto the front page. Receiving a simple URL and perhaps a couple of sentences from IRC or even in a submission is not all that unusual, although we would obviously prefer to have a little more to work with. I can't quote an absolute figure, but part of our work involves rewriting submissions. Not everyone can provide something ready for the front page but there are, of course, notable exceptions. Our procedures are well documented in the wiki. There are changes being introduced to the story format to make this more clear, and they will appear as soon as we can get the software ready.
We can't throw it back for a rewrite - ACs are un-contactable (and current policy prevents us from using email for any other submitter). If you wish to attribute it to Anonymous Coward, I have no objections. He doesn't get any karma. All I did was try to put it into context and then intro the blockquote which is, by definition, a quote from the article. I don't need the attribution, but if you look at the summary you can see that I edited it.
Just out of interest, does a newspaper editor only make spelling corrections? One definition that I found [preservearticles.com] says:
... and that is what I tried to do.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by McD on Monday June 01 2015, @09:56PM
No, I'm pretty sure newspaper editors exercise much greater latitude over stories from their journalists.
Bit of apples and oranges, though. A newspaper journalist has much more opportunity for give and take with the editor, has an ongoing relationship with the editor, and is paid for her efforts.
We're not a newspaper, though, we're... an internet community, let's call it. Our currency is reputation - either literally, via karma mechanisms and so forth, or figuratively, as in "I recognize that poster/submitter/editor, and tend to agree/disagree with what they have to say."
In that sense, if an editor substantially changes what was submitted, in a sense it's messing with the "currency" in which the submitter is "paid."
That said... I had no idea that the quality of submissions was so low - in terms of how much additional work was needed to post them, not in terms of subject matter. Makes me appreciate the "editors" even more - but I still think a bright line is needed to identify the speaker. Heck, it's the editor's reputation/currency at stake too!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday June 02 2015, @08:10AM
With regards to the quality of received submissions, we don't do so badly. We do receive submissions that are entirely unsuitable and, after a quick discussion between editors, they get rejected fairly quickly. We try to ensure that we don't reject without an alternative viewpoint although sometimes it is obvious that the submission does not warrant any further consideration.
There are a handful of submitters whose work is of a sufficiently high standard for it to be an almost automatic process to get it to the front page - not quite automatic, but almost. They have looked at how we format stories, have identified which html codes we use and where, and understand what we are looking for in terms of subject matter and linked source material. Some actually go the extra step to provide additional information, clearly marked as such, which we can use or not. Perhaps not surprisingly, such submissions often feature on the front page. When our backs are against the wall, having something that we can process quickly and easily tends to be an obvious choice for a busy editor.
Then there is the middle ground. These are submissions based on a topic of interest to our community, but need links tracing to the original material, or that require some reformatting (or even rewriting in some part to comply with the guidelines), or other typical editing tasks to make it suitable for the front page. This, I would guess, amounts for the largest part of our work.
But sometimes we receive a URL and perhaps a few words. This is quite understandable - if you are posting from a smart device it is not always easy to write a complete summary using just your thumbs! A URL passed to us from IRC about a news item that requires relatively prompt action would also fit into this category. As long as the balance remains as it is today, or better, we can keep on top of the task. All submissions are welcome, regardless of which category they fall in to, although we simply cannot process too many of the 'single URL and one sentence' variety and still keep the front page full.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 1) by d33tah on Sunday May 31 2015, @10:23AM
I like this idea and would love to make it layered - if GitTorrent was powered by a P2P library with DHT and blockchain support, I could think of many projects I could integrate this into. That would we awesome!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @02:50PM
I like the idea of a more decentralized Internet (freenet et al as well), but...
I work for a college where we spend lots of money trying to block even encrypted bittorrent, because we get so many damn letters from copyright holders. This nuclear option is about all we can do to keep the copyright mafia off our backs.
I know we are not alone in this. It would be pretty crappy to not be able to check out code from a university network.
Using a back-end for the communications that is more associated with human rights and free speech would make this less likely to receive collateral damage from the copyright trolls.
(Score: 2) by Techwolf on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:32PM
The fix is simple, block all inbound connections. Many free wi-fi places do this just for this very reason. Another trick is NAT with UPnP port forwarding turned off.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @08:30PM
Unfortunately, not that easy.
http://superuser.com/questions/104462/how-does-bittorrent-work-with-only-outbound-connections [superuser.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:47PM
Rather that putting your central repository (OH WAIT GIT IS SUPPOSED TO BE DECENTRALIZED, UNLIKED SVN et Cie.) in GitHub's butt, use the standard feature of `git' that is adding a remote copy path on a backup drive, network share, company server directory, etc, *rather than* https://github.com/sldfkjasldkfjalsd [github.com] -- it's that simple. In case of the "problem" this gitorrent (torrents are always trendy) solves, why can't rsync or git already handle it?
Also : Or does everyone else use github as some sort of "social" network ?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday June 02 2015, @12:30AM
Here we see yet another example of 1) good, almost omniscient design and 2) attempts to reinvent the wheel.
Git IS decentralized. Many of my repositories are kept in multiple places: GitHub, Bitbucket, my private VPS, my laptop, my USB stick, my backup HDD. There is no danger of my code being held hostage.
The "problem" is that GitHub has gobbled up all the mindshare (public awareness of brand name, size of userbase, integration with other closed-source services, and so on). This is not a problem that can be solved by making a "decentralized GitHub"; it can only be fixed by educating users to not chain themselves to a single point of failure and to exercise healthy restraint when outsourcing to proprietary entities.
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