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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?"
my hat is off to this guy, especially for waste. that program rox..
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Rock on, Atarians...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Frankel just might be one of the more revolutionary people we have nowadays. He seems to give people not only the ability to be productive and listen to music with a decent player, but stick it to the various corporations that'd rather have us all doing the same things and eating the same food.
Here's to Frankel!
I still remember my first MP3 and the first time I used winamp. My jaw dropped to the ground. THIS IS GOING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING!!! I thought. This was back before Napster. Back when we had to get mp3s from ftp sites and we had to scroll long ass lists of directories to find the song we wanted. There were no p2p applications with fancy search engines. Anyone here remember Blex's page of good mp3?
When I heard aol bought nullsoft I was a little disappointed because I thought Frankel was a sellout and winamp would become bloated and lame. Frankel stayed cool as hell and winamp didn't become lame. Gnutella was the first decentralised file sharing/search network and it scared the shit out of corporations like aol. And he released it after he supposedly sold out. It was opensource. So Justin is still cool in my book. Who cares if he's rich? Shawn Fanning might be a moviestar now (Italian Job) but Frankel is the real revolutionary hacker.
I often got asked who my hero was, and I never had an answer.
This man is one of my heroes.
He is pushing what America once was about, shedding the bonds of control on people. The original constitution and Bill of Rights were about removing the bonds government put on people, giving people the freedoms they deserved.
However, the government stopped being the threat: corporations took that over.
Justin Frankel is a new patriot, fighting in the true spirit of America, and battling against the corporations who are trying to dominate humanity. It has happened in the past. Monarchies ruled men. They were broken. Corporations replaced them. Now, they need to be broken.
We need more people fighting for human empowerment.
No, he gathered a bunch of cool people around him and made a kick ass product that no one else at the time could touch then sold out to corporate america for a very large sum of money. Then he went on to work on subverting corporate controll while being paid by same embodiment of corporate america. Justin was NEVER a corporate drone and when they tried to make him conform he quit.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I gotta disagree with that idea. It's funny, but not especially accurate.
:= intelligence).
Most of the people I knew at AOL were pretty smart. There are a lot of extremely cool technologies behind the scenes that make the system as a whole work very well.
That being said, many of the upper level managers have risen from the ranks and "grew" into the position they occupy today. They're frequently much better at the technological end of things and not so good at people skills (e.g. feckless yuppie bastards who think that $$$
There is also quite a bit of trust that whatever is done, the end users will swallow gladly and keep paying WAY too much money for fluff and busy signals. They also pinned too many hopes on people sticking around once they got broadband.
I used to think that most AOL users were idiots. When it comes to technology, many are. Most people are those who don't want to know about computers.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
You ever take a look at the NSIS installer by Nullsoft? Some of the example code has like "I'm a sheep fucker" in it and other miscellaneous naughty language.
;) It's pretty funny considering that AOL is "family oriented" or whatever the hell they claim to be.
Not to mention his antics, like releasing WASTE and getting AOL's panties all twisted up (by the way.. what WAS the point of that tool??
Ah well... I hope he puts his mind to good use and develops a truly anonymous P2P protocol on AOL's dollar. That'd be a very nice thing...
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I usually skip the author of articles (the way I skip ad banners at the tops of sites), but after seeing how much he interacted with Frankel during the interview (even picking up an electric guitar and jamming with him a bit!), I went back to the top and was surprised to see it was written by David Kushner, the same man who wrote Masters of Doom.
Thanks to the efforts of Justin Frankel, and Yannick Heneault the Karaoke bar I work at on the weekends was able to convert it's aging karaoke CDG collection to MP3+G's.
It's neat because we get to have AVS behind the lyrics. You used to have to buy an expensive JSUB unit if you wanted to "bluescreen" anything behind a CDG song.
We've been using the system for the last year or so. Customer response has been excellent. No more skipping or garbled words. No more confusion looking for songs. It just all runs perfectly.