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?"

Comments

Middle ground, anybody?

[NedR]

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).

Just ONE advantage?

[El]

The corporation 1) Can afford better lawyers 2) Can afford better lobbyists 3) Can afford better advertising

many thanks

[miseryinmotion]

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.

It's the subversion thing

[the_mad_poster]

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.

Re:It's the subversion thing

[laird]

"On the Internet, name brand means nothing."

In theory, this is true. In practice, most people trust the same name brands online that they do offline, and thus type the URL's that are the names of companies that they like and trust. So while there are certainly many new and cool "independent" web sites, etc., morepeople go to CNN.com for news, TVGuide.com for TV listings and reviews, and so on. There are of course some exceptions (Google, Amazon). So while there is an opportunity for people to explore outside of the established brands, the mainstream users stick to brands that they know.

Re:Overhyped.

[cyril3]

Justin Frankel is no more important than someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache

to someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache perhaps but he is way more influential.

As for The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status I can only suggest that if there is at least two humans involved then any communications channel will become about celebrity status.

What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi? You assume they didn't have them at the time. The early 20th century was not averse to gossip and hero worship. eg Lindeberg. How does this sentence sound

The Aeroplane is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Lindy is no more important than someone who hands tools to the guy who is tuning Spirits engine before takeoff.

Yeah, what was his name again.

Re:Just another programmer

[DiscoOnTheSide]

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.

Re:Overhyped.

[krmt]

But the interesting thing about Justin is that he's pushing the boundaries of what's going on far more than the guy who contributes 2 lines of code to apache. A bug fix is a bug fix is a bug fix, but he's actually trying to do new things. To be quite frank, the fact that he's managing to do a lot of this stuff before anyone else (or often better than anyone else) shows that he really is a force to be reckoned with. Remember, while the software may be more important than the creator, the software wouldn't be without the creator. Give the guy some credit.

I'm always interested to hear what he's doing, since he's usually coding in the unheard of places that the rest of us will be talking about as having been totally obvious next year.

Re:How geniuses come to be

[kfg]

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

Absolutely

[PotatoHead]

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!)

Re:How geniuses come to be

[SurgeonGeneral]

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.