
   What is Reptile?

     Reptile is a P2P (peer to peer) application designed to locate the
     best news on the Internet, increasing diversification while
     reducing censorship, disinformation and bias of the press.

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

     Reptile also supports disconnected functionality. Even if your
     network connection does become severed, you can still read news
     from your local cache.

     Reptile is designed around a hybrid architecture which supports the
     best advantages of client/server and P2P systems. For example you
     can run Reptile as a P2P system on your laptop. You could run
     Reptile as a client/server application from your home computer and
     access it over SSL from a web brower at an outside location.
     Reptile also supports rendezvous nodes 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).

   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 artices 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 you can subscribe to multiple news sources such as
     articles from large organizations such as AOL/Time Warner, CNN. You
     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 in 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 lower.

     [35]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.

   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 [36]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 [37]Ant, [38]Tomcat hosts our servlet environment,
          and [39]Xerces and [40]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
          [41]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.

   Status

     Thu Feb 14 2002 12:34 AM (burton@openprivacy.org): [42]Reptile 0.5.0
   has been released. A number of significant features have been added
   and this puts us a lot closer to 1.0.

     Fri Dec 21 2001 04:41 PM (burton@openprivacy.org): We are currently
   working hard on a 0.5.0 release. Hopefully this will be available
   soon. The Reptile team wishes everyone a Happy Solstice!

     Thu Sep 27 2001 04:48 PM (burton@relativity.yi.org): [43]Version
   0.0.3 of Reptile has been released. This is mostly a bugfix and
   stabilization release prior to JXTA/reputation integration. Release
   early, release often.

     Wed Aug 15 2001 01:00 PM (burton@relativity.yi.org): Version 0.0.2
   of Reptile has been released. This version incorporates a number of
   new features and bugfixes including improved OCS support, better
   weblog integration, and misc performance enhancements. Reputations,
   and the associated cryptographic support from Sierra, are not yet
   functional.

     Fri Jul 27 2001 05:37 PM (burton@relativity.yi.org): The OpenPrivacy
   project would like to announce the creation and initial release
   (0.0.1) of Reptile. Reptile is a peer-to-peer content syndication
   engine (think RSS/OCS) that has privacy protection facilities (for
   such things as your identity and subscriptions) built in. Reptile
   nodes can publish to each other (everything is driven by XML based
   subscriptions) and provide a decentralized authentication model based
   on cryptographic mechanisms supporting the concept of Reputation.
   Reptile is built using Java and XML, and is fully Open Source/Free
   Software.

     Wed Jul 11 2001 04:05 AM (burton@relativity.yi.org): [44]Screenshots
   are now up. The best/quickest way to see what Reptile can do for you
   is to take a look at the screenshots.

     Sun Jul 08 2001 04:11 AM (burton@relativity.yi.org): Reptile nightly
   builds [45]are now available.

     Tue Jun 26 2001 03:37 AM (burton@relativity.yi.org): Reptile is
   currently in development mode and we encourage other developers go get
   involved.
     _________________________________________________________________

                  Copyright  2001-2003, OpenPrivacy.org 

References

   1. http://www.openprivacy.org/
   2. http://reptile.openprivacy.org/
   3. http://reptile.localhost/index.html
   4. http://reptile.localhost/screenshots.html
   5. http://reptile.localhost/future.html
   6. http://reptile.localhost/install.html
   7. http://reptile.localhost/actions.html
   8. http://reptile.localhost/content-controls.html
   9. http://reptile.localhost/database.html
  10. http://reptile.localhost/libraries.html
  11. http://reptile.localhost/parameters.html
  12. http://reptile.localhost/settings.html
  13. http://reptile.localhost/tasks.html
  14. http://reptile.localhost/tomcat.html
  15. http://reptile.localhost/xml.html
  16. http://reptile.localhost/xslt.html
  17. http://reptile.localhost/notes.html
  18. http://reptile.localhost/ocs-rss.html
  19. http://reptile.localhost/search.html
  20. http://reptile.localhost/search-providers.html
  21. http://reptile.localhost/jxta.html
  22. http://reptile.localhost/proposals/p2p-protocol-handlers.html
  23. http://reptile.localhost/proposals/nextgen-subscriptions.html
  24. http://reptile.localhost/proposals/rendezvous-nodes.html
  25. http://reptile.localhost/download.html
  26. http://www.openprivacy.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/reptile/
  27. http://bugzilla.openprivacy.org/
  28. http://reptile.localhost/jase/svg
  29. http://reptile.localhost/jase/png
  30. http://reptile.localhost/jase/html/org.openprivacy.reptile.html
  31. http://reptile.localhost/javadoc/index.html
  32. http://www.openprivacy.org/lists/
  33. http://reptile.localhost/screenshots.html
  34. http://reptile.localhost/screenshots.html
  35. http://sierra.openprivacy.org/
  36. http://www.openprivacy.org/licenses/
  37. http://jakarta.apache.org/ant
  38. http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat
  39. http://xml.apache.org/
  40. http://xml.apache.org/
  41. http://sierra.openprivacy.org/
  42. http://download.openprivacy.org/reptile/reptile-0.5.0.tar.gz
  43. http://download.openprivacy.org/reptile/reptile-0.0.3-stable.tar.gz
  44. http://reptile.localhost/screenshots
  45. http://www.openprivacy.org/nightlies
