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Justin Frankel On AOL, Subverting The Status Quo
linuxbaby writes "Rolling Stone has an excellent feature on Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp, Gnutella, Shoutcast, Waste, and other projects. The article calls him 'the world's most dangerous geek', and after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence." The article ends by asking: "In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?"
It would be enough for me for the Internet to become a place where I can search and find any goddamn thing I'm looking for, whether it be the latest software update from Microsoft or an old album by Boy George or NAMBLA chatrooms.
Perhaps I've said too much...
I have been pwned because my
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That note the article ends on . . . what makes anybody think the internet is either of those extremes? The thing about the internet is it makes distribution of information and goods relatively easy for anybody with a computer. That includes pirates and corporations. The interesting thing about the internet is that it seems to level the playing field for both (although corporations still have one distinct advantage; advertising).
I am surprised Rolling Stone would cover this. Rolling Stone has evolved into a tool for corporate control.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
The corporation 1) Can afford better lawyers 2) Can afford better lobbyists 3) Can afford better advertising
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Well, I must certainly say that Mr. Frankel has contributed a worthy amount of applications and ideas to the collective community.
I guess I'm just finding it rather humorous, and maybe a sign of fads/things to come where a programmer is in rolling stone.
In the end, the software is more important than the creator. See Gnutella/Frankel, Napster/Fanning, or Mosaic/Andreesen. I applaud RS for trying to put a human face to the music revolution, but let's face it, that piece came across as more of a bad history lesson. What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi?
The Internet subverts and/or disperses power. This frightens corporations, governments, and megamedia because it allows individual people to be who they want to be and it gives them a voice to express that. Worse, it lets them filter the corps and gubmit critters out. Radio and TV? Best you can do is flip the ads. I got almost all of 'em blocked on my browser no matter where I go.
On the Internet, name brand means nothing. Anything you can think of to force your trashy product down my throat, I can think of a way to step around or destroy it. Any way you can think of to try and control my behavior, I can think of a way to step around or destroy it.
Megamedia like CNN, MSNBC, etc. don't want you to get information from the Internet. On the Internet, information can be dissemented from trusted sources directly to the people who need or want to hear it. I remember talking to a guy in Kuwait during the war who was telling us about how things were. Media doesn't like that. They want to tell you how things are as they see it.
Corporates are screwed on the Internet. They can exert some level of control over the Web with advertising and laws, but, frankly, when it comes right down to it, what fucks them most is that people are free to get the information they want and control its flow from start to finish. If I want to proxy out corporate garbage, so be it. If I want to disseminate something you don't want me to disseminate, too bad (Diebold, anyone).
Subversion at its finest. I welcome it with open arms. It's about time people were given the opportunity to really think and act for themselves.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Waste definitely is cool. While the public mesh isn't really safe, security-wise, it does allow you the ability to have a mesh of users that is for the most part completely secure. I've used it to get some friends together on our own little mesh, and while we didn't really have anything sensitive to share, it was nice to have that freedom of knowing nobody could packet sniff the traffic and see what we were saying and doing in plaintext.
ok, so you're right. The man wasn't first in many things. BUT he's definately good at taking something that's a "first attempt" and raising it to a great implementation. I've been using Winamp for almost EIGHT years. Name a third party program (i.e.: not companies like MS) that's remained free for eight years, is still around and has the penetration that Winamp has. There are many other player softwares around, but none as good as Winamp. Gnutella... well, it's still around. Is Napster? (It's original form) hell even Kazaa's going to shit.. the point is the man has done a lot of good things for us.
Hell, my freshman year in high school, just as MP3s were starting their climb to popularity a large question was "What player do we use for em?" and the ONLY answer you would EVER get is "Winamp." Hell, I know some people who thought MP3s were exclusive to Winamp, because no one would even TALK about an alternative to Winamp. Still till this day it works fantasticly, and with Winamp 5 it's even a better VIDEO player than WMP, which I had used for my video needs. It's now the only media player I have on my computer short of PowerDVD.
You could say simlar things about John Carmack. Sure, the guy wasn't the first with 3d engines, but he sure as hell is the best at em.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
Just how different is real life censorship from the internet. Sure, you have access to arbitrary garbage, most of the time. When was the last time you read slashdot at -1?
We censor ourselves, generally to those publications that agree with our own views. When was the last time you read research pages at Micro$oft? In the end, the only difference between the internet and traditional media is that the brands online are not as firmly established as in the 'real world'. Given enough time, this space will be just as commericalized (read censored) as every other media. Not because some big corporation has done it, but becuase every big website has become big by pandering to its audiences prejedices and misconceptions.
Don't agree with me? Take a close look at what websites you visit on a regular basis. Convince yourself you visit a new webiste with a view different from yours every day....
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Complete bull!
If you wrote a program and released it under the GPL, at any time you can turn around and say that you are going to release it under a more restrictive license.
The key here, is that the released version will still be available, and anybody can improve upon it. However, that is certainly NOT unique to the GPL... Release a program under the BSD license and you have the same effect, but even less chance that it can get shut-down (with the GPL, if a patent shows-up, you can't distribute the program any longer, the BSD license has no such restriction).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The problem is that everyone is using the SDK provided libraries, and few people program to the metal like they used to. The last generation of consoles really set the bar high for making a programmer's job easier.
As far as pushing the envelope, the PS2 is a very interesting machine with a CPU, FPU, VPU1, VPU2, and a big bus. There is alot of potential there for creative programmers. The PS2 is technically inferior to its rivals, but I bet it will blossom over time as the original NES and Sega Saturn did.
And as far as cutting teeth, the video game industry has evolved like the electronics industry. Nobody tries to fix their radio anymore because it is too complicated with all of the integrated circuits and solid state, specialized, components. I don't think there is any place for cutting teeth on the latest technology in this age.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
While we don't have a "killer" machine for learning programing, I've found my TI-86 to be a great starting point.
I don't know any programing languages (yet) but through messing around with my calculator, I've learned some of the basics. I don't know if that fills the void left by the Atari, but it's a step in the right direction.
On a side note, his "garage" sounds like the ultimate workshop. Add an arc welder, and it's heaven!
"See you, space cowboy." -Spike
Ya know, once upon a time that's what we said about you kids who could just go out and buy computers instead of having to hardwire bistable multivibrators from discrete componants scrounged from the town dump.
Well, you take a geek genius, get him the hell out of the public school system as early as possible and let him do his own thing, he'll manage to "cut his geek teeth" somehow. His nature will see to it.
Keep him in that school system, drug him and send him to counseling until he fits into all the neat little rows and columns of the standarized test, standardized people state of mind that is the highest the mediocre thought processes of those that dream such up can muster, well, it doesn't matter after that what you give him to cut his teeth on. His teeth have been filed down to dull little stumps.
The equipment isn't the key, the enviroment is.
If you wish to protect the next generation of geek geniuses ( and do please bear in mind that "geek" doesn't mean "computer nerd") then do what you can to get them out of school and into a library.
Add a little peace and quiet and they'll manage the rest on their own just fine.
KFG
I too had an Atari, actually a couple of them. Old tricked out 400, which I still have because of how it looks, and an 800XL which died :(
Poking around that machine taught wonders. Display lists and their interrupts, graphics modes and memory mapping for scrolling and such, the sound chip. Lots of fun hardware ready to play with.
The Atari did lots of interesting things, once you decided to hack around a bit. Joystick ports were bi-directional and latched if you wanted. Great for controlling things.
Most hardware has the really good bits hidden from the programmer. Today this is really true, given the API we almost all work through. (Not that this is a bad thing, it just is.) Back in the day, the Atari was unique in its design. The smarter you were, the more you could make the machine do --true for the game machine as well.
Many years later, people are still finding new ways to get those bits of hardware to do new and interesting things. No wonder people still hack the old machines. It is worth doing.
To me, this is what really appeals about OSS. The hardware hacks are not as common or necessary --to me at least. Hacking your OS to work a specific way is as good as using display list interrupts, creative display memory mapping and complementary colors displayed on alternate scan lines to double your horizontal screen resolution. (Yes, you can get an Atari to display 640x192, though it is a slow beast while doing it. Heck, if you had a broken TV that could display the entire NTSC signal, the Atari was capable of using almost the entire overscan if you wanted.)
Anyway, I only purchased a few pieces of software. MAC/65 -- Best damn assembler/editor/debugger ever for 8bit machines, Star Raiders, and Archon along with a few other disk games. Did the same thing others did. Wrote lots of interesting programs, learning at the same time.
(One nostalgic Atarian thinking about seeing if the old beast still boots!)
Blogging because I can...
"Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster."
We have a word for that in the joint: rat-fink.
Another word we use is "shanked".
Justin himself seems a little schizo over the issue. On the one hand, Napster using their servers to promote file sharing is "wrong". On the other, Gnutella is "right". Make up your mind, Justin.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Nobody tries to fix their radio anymore because it is too complicated with all of the integrated circuits and solid state, specialized, components. I don't think there is any place for cutting teeth on the latest technology in this age.
That is so true. I was just daydreaming about the old days where you flicked on the computer and all you had was a flashing cursor. It really couldn't do much at first glance, but a little exploration could make it do some nifty things.
I feel like computers are always trying to make me do stuff now. Download this, install that, configure this, register that. As a Windows user I am so far removed from the actual programming that the programmers and hardware manufacturers are completely out of touch with my needs. A perfect example is that Keyboard and Mouse article on CNet that was just posted. Read the forums and you'll see that only ONE keyboard manufacturer (Kinesis) actual lives up to even a few of the REAL needs people have.
What I need is barely anything. I could use the internet with text-characters only for interface purposes. Hell, I could use my entire computer in text only, and I would if I wasnt so locked in to the decadent lifestyle that I live. I cant help but to depend on corporations for my computing needs, let alone my basic ones.
Justin Frankel is dead on in his assessment. Every aspect of the internet is now controlled by corporations that are gobbling up more and more internet landscape. If you cant connect to the internet without a corporate mediator, that is a problem. On these forums I would give the great majority of the people the respect to assume that they are aware of the problem of freedom of information. You guys all have good brains: so use them for something more valuable than money. Programs like WASTE are revolutionary in their ability to connect people securely. There is currently an effort to port it to linux, and there are many more things like this that need smart people like you guys.
You dont have to be a progammer either. I am finishing my degree this year and plan to go to Law School next year. I plan to dedicate my life to making information free and secure.
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
" I couldn't see why he would not have quit long ago."
Because they're holding his baby(WinAmp) hostage. He leaves, then winamp is theirs to reassign to Joe Newbiecoder (or the indian name for 'joe'). If he stays he atleast gets to play with his baby and make sure it doesnt get too detestable.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
No, the reason why Winamp 3 failed was that it SUCKED.
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