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emergency internet broadcasting

Emergency means of disseminating knowledge
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Ever watch a movie, (say Contact) and wish "That's gotta get posted to the internet before it gets lost!" Imagine a service which allows anyone to post anything quickly out to the net so that it either is no longer a secret, is something folks should know about immediately (like say an earthquake) or otherwise get out to the net immediately.
triptych, Jun 13 2000

Freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
This solves the anyone-publish and won't-get-lost issues. It's not exactly broadcast, though -- still a pull medium. [eritain, Jun 13 2000]

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       The problem is that if it's a real emergency, the physical infrastructure for the net is probably down in the area. This is one of the few applications for which things like Iridium would've been useful; perhaps their satellites could be turned over to FEMA.   

       ObNovel: W. J. Williams, _The Rift_.
cosma, Jun 13 2000
  

       Another way to ensure your information never gets destroyed: Hide it in what appear to be email addresses and post it to USENET. Spamspewers will preserve it *forever*.
eritain, Jun 13 2000
  

       Another problem with this is that any information on the internet is either voluntarily looked for, or broadcasted to only a select group of subscribers (multicasting sports scores, for example). You couldn't simply post this to a webpage because if it was an emergency, people who need to know most likely won't be looking at it, and also there exists today no method of multicasting to *everyone* on the internet. You could try to set up a universal emergency multicasting service, but the problem is how to get everyone to suscribe. ("I won't suscribe unless everyone else is...") Also, how would you filter emergency broadcasts? If anyone can make an announcement, then there'd end up being a lot of spammers and if you filtered it, you'd have to have ppl working constantly to filter out all those spammers.   

       I think that right now the internet doesn't have the infrastructure to handle this type of service, although it does seem like a good idea.
jblake, Jun 19 2000
  

       And Contact was shite anyway... have they never heard of using a different ISP if the mail server is down???
cyberprog, Apr 21 2001
  
      
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