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Justin Frankel On AOL, Subverting The Status Quo

Posted by simoniker on from the null-to-aol dept.

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?"

4 of 364 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thanks for the quick slap, simoniker by simoniker · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    FWIW, I was eating dinner (orange glazed chicken and some egg rolls) during the period of time this 'quick slap' was alleged. But thank you for caring :)

  2. Re:Thanks for the quick slap, simoniker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    gay translation:
    orange glazed chicken = sweaty nutsack
    egg rolls = large black cock

    hope this helps!

  3. Re:It's the subversion thing by MBCook · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    True, brands do mean something (that's why we have ONLINE brands like Google and Amazon), but on the internet they don't HAVE to mean anything. We have options now that we don't get in the traditional "Brick and Mortar" world. Yes people will still believe the brand names they see like CNN, but people can easily find other views. They can find views of ordinary citizens, the government agency that CNN was reporting on, etc; things that are nearly impossible to get most of the time on many issues. Before the internet views of small groups with "untraditional" thinking was often regulated to keeping up on things in small monthly magazines or newspapers. Now thanks to the internet you don't have to wait a month to hear what "Citizens Against A Government Controlled By Aardvarks" has to say on the State of the Union address, you can find out as soon as they want to tell you.

    So the difference on whether brands mean anything is choice. Now we have a REAL choice, as opposed to (for example) only getting your news from CBS, ABC, or NBC. They are all pretty close. But on the 'net you get the Drudge Report, and tons of other things. (Not to get on a topic about ABC vs. CBS vs. Drudge, just an example).

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  4. Re:aol? by mesach · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Shouldn't that read,

    I HEARD THAT AOL SUCKS? SHOULD I BELIEVE HTEM OR SHOULD I USE IT? IW ANT THE INTERNUET

    this text is added to bypass the lameness filter
    blah blah blah, the lameness filter is just that lame of course so is this post, I wonder how much I have to rant in lower case so that one sentence can bypass the lameness filter?

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    moo.