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Twitter made a public stance in 2011 to remain a platform for free speech, having helped fuel movements such as the Arab Spring. This past week, however, Twitter is shown to have complied with Russian government demands to block a pro-Ukrainian Twitter feed from reaching Russian citizens, with Turkish government demands that it remove content that the Turkish government wants removed, and with a Pakistani bureaucrat's request that content he considers blasphemous and unethical be censored in Pakistan. Given Twitter's role in the democratic uprisings of the past few years, perhaps these capitulations just show that centralized control of information is inherently flawed. Any network under the control of a few individuals may be compromised by non-technical means. Examples like I2P-Messenger may be a necessity.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 27 2014, @08:56AM
If it wuld be sufficient that a distributed alternative exists, we would not have any issues by now: One of the earliest communication systems on the internet, Usenet, was distributed by nature. Yet people left it for more centralized systems.
Anyway, thinking of it, this very place is also a centralized system. Which makes me wonder: Would it be possible to make it more distributed (so that anyone could set up his own server, but still carry the same information, similar to Usenet) without changing the basic more of operation? I guess the most difficult part would be to prevent abuse of the power which comes through your own server; OTOH you still need someone to peer with, so bad servers might be removed "automatically" by nobody being willing to peer with them any more. OTOH, back in the days, when Google Groups was the main source of spam in the Usenet while largely ignoring abuse notifications (and in addition was doing indirect damage to it by conflating the Usenet access with their own, closed Groups system), people apparently weren't brave enough for an UDP against Google.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 27 2014, @11:59AM
my 2 cents
My point? Twitter or not, centralized or distributed, if the population wants it bad enough there's little** the officials can do to stop spreading the info
** short of cutting the entire country from the Internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 27 2014, @01:56PM
No one left usenet (I was there) because of some philosophical belief about centralization or decentralization, the problem was megatons of spam and trolls.
Your system description sounds vaguely like the old freenet project, which is still going after decades. For that matter usenet is still going.
You can have a centralized system where a moderator censors scans stores and sells all the "private" data but at least keeps the trolls/spammers out, or a decentralized system that is full of spammers and trolls that make /b/ look prim and proper.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday May 27 2014, @05:33PM
Not really. Back around maybe 2007 they released version 0.7, which is a completely separate, segregated, incompatible network. The previous network resisted for several years, but did eventually cease to exist. As someone who once did a bit of development on the old one, I tried to get it working again a couple times since, but it doesn't seem to be possible any longer.
So yeah, the administrative part still exists, but that's all. The rest has been scrapped and rebuilt at least once (I lost interest shortly before 0.5 went silent; never could get into the newer network)