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What is Reptile?

Reptile is a P2P (peer to peer) application designed to locate and filter the best news on the Internet. Reptile provides a distributed and decentralized mechanism to search, cache, subscribe, and publish news and other content. Reptile also provides an infrastructure for increasing information diversification and reducing censorship and bias.

Reptile is decentralized. No single point of failure should deny a user from quality news. To this end, we also to 'bind' across multiple network architectures. Reptile runs over the conventional "web" (HTTP) but also runs over more modern and distributed P2P architectures (JXTA).

Reptile is designed around a hybrid infrastructure which supports the advantages of both client/server and P2P systems. For example, one could run Reptile as a P2P system on a laptop. One could also run Reptile as a client/server application from a home computer and access it over SSL from a web browser from an outside location. Reptile also supports rendezvous nodes (supernodes) which bridge this functionality with the rest of the world. For example a major website can run a search request via a stable Reptile node running on a known host (AKA openprivacy.org).

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Architecture

Distributed searching

Reptile provides a distributed searching infrastructure. Reptile nodes can use each other as search providers. They can also search Reptile "supernodes" (nodes which are available for long periods of time and have large databases) for greater availability. Since this is based on a service infrastructure. Third parties can develop and work with Reptile services.


Distributed caching

Reptile nodes can exchange cached information which each other. This is provided so that if a major website fails, Reptile nodes can still obtain the information. This allows provides a much greater level of scalability.


Distributed subscription and publication

Reptile users can publish information and other Reptile users (and websites) can find this news and subscribe to it. This also works in the both directions as Reptile users can subscribe and publish to each other's channels.


Multiple network support

Reptile binds around multiple network infrastructures. The convention web as well as P2P systems are supported. This allows us to support the best of both systems and allows for a fair playground for anything with an electronic heartbeat.


Reputation optimization

Reptile users can use reputation (provided by the Sierra framework) to help filter out low quality (or irrelevant) information. Users can create trust

Our reputation system is still under development. The main goals are to build a system which is highly scalable, allows each user to define others whom they trust/distrust, preserve privacy and allow the rating of any resource.



Advantages for the user

Reptile provides a way to subscribe to news sources (channels) syndicated from popular websites (CNN, slashdot, etc) and other Reptile users (your friends and other popular authors).

Reptile also provides high availability of information for the user. All articles and channels are cached locally and Reptile also uses other peers as cache nodes. If a website goes down you can either fetch content from your local cache or the cache of a remote peer.

The Reptile search infrastructure provides a mechanism which allows you to access all this information in a very powerful manner. For example you could find all articles on all known peers with the word 'Linux' and sort these by date found.

Reptile also integrates the concept of reputation which we believe will dramatically increase the power of the Internet. Users will be able to create trust relationships with fellow peers and measure the quality of resources in a distributed environment. Reptile integrates the Sierra Reputation Framework which provides a simple and powerful mechanism for measuring the quality of information.

Reptile also has a flexible network plugin infrastructure that will allow us to operate on multiple P2P networks including JXTA, Freenet, GNUtella, etc.

Reptile also provides an easy and flexible publication system for authors. Users can publish their own articles and exchange these with other Reptile users directly or have them automatically uploaded to a rendezvous peer in order to be further syndicated to other news services.


Breaking through censorship and disinformation

One of the main reasons why Reptile was created was to provide a communications 'network' where censorship, disinformation, and bias of the press are kept to a minimum.

With Reptile, one can subscribe to multiple news sources including articles from large organizations such as AOL/Time Warner, CNN, etc. One can also subscribe to the author of a weblog living in some 3rd world country whose opinions just happen to be very well informed.

This is why Reptile is a P2P system. Anyone can be both a consumer and a producer within the network.

The main reason this works is that we use reputation (still under development) to rank the quality of articles. If someone like CNN produces an excellent and unbiased article, its reputation will rise. If they produce a biased and unfair article, its reputation will decrease.


Reptile is seeking developers!

The Reptile project is seeking experienced developers. If you like Open Source, understand Java and XML, and are excited about distributed (P2P) systems, please consider helping us out.

Reptile is still under heavy development. We encourage others to get involved and give us feedback.


Details

Open Source
Reptile is dual licensed (GPL/BSD) under the OpenPrivacy Licensing Terms to provide the greatest degree of usefulness and flexibility in its use.
Java and XML driven
Reptile is a 100% Java and XML based environment. Builds are driven by Ant, Tomcat hosts our servlet environment, and Xerces and Xalan provide the XML infrastructure.
Syndicated content
Reptile is backed by a syndicated content engine which enables it to continually check for updated subscriptions and publish content back into the system. As the communications are abstracted, Reptile can support any P2P network including Freenet, JXTA, Jabber, GNUtella, etc. Adding a new network is as easy as writing a plugin.
Personalization and Reputation Management
Channels, articles and indeed all objects within the Reptile framework can be enhanced with reputation as provided by Sierra. Reputations provide a facility to enable feedback for the creation, delivery and presentation aspects of each object, as well as enabling threshold alerts and other advanced features.
Channel Creation (Anyone can publish)
Reptile users can publish their own RSS channels. Further, as part of channel subscription and article selection, the user may choose to publish all or part of their filtered feeds, creating a new 'virtual RSS channel'.
Channel Listing
Reptile can talk to RSS channel feeds (and OCS feed such as xmltree, 10.am, or moreover) and list them according to their reputation.



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