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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
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
"Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless," he says. Was this supposed to read: "Eighty percent of the people using AOL are clueless?"
...
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Rock on, Atarians...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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.
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!
He did, and got in a lot of trouble for it. He then quit/was fired/god knows what really happened from AOL. Then AOL said they owned the code and it wasn't REALLY GPL'd. There was a huge article on this "slashdot" site about it. Ringing any bells?
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!
What the hell is happening to Winamp? Used to be that you could get a version of their good old 2.x series from this site (the latest 2.x were lean, but still do video!)
The latest version I have is 2.91 with md5sum:
68f0f87b12306939e7e3c7549db5df5f winamp291_full.exe
Is there anything newer? Why can't I find these on their web site? There's version 5 now available. What is this... slackware?! (version jump)
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He was paid in AOL stock, not dollars. What are 400 million pieces of toilet paper worth?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
How about using the search function yourself? It's not too hard.
*shrug*
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.
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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.
Rolling stone appears to be slashdotted, here's a mirror from the author's web site:
The World's Most Dangerous Geekhttp://www.blorp.com/music/Full%20Jams/031115-bren nankushner.mp3
www.dhorrocks2003.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/waste 3 million plus (2.7million unique) downloads of waste from here so far, just goes to show how good justin is...
P
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
There are some pretty angry ex-AOL subscribers.
This post was meant to be Informative, not Funny.
Secured Party, Without Prejudice, UCC 1-207: Creditor
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!
"Many scientists of the day believed that wireless waves travelled only in straight lines from the transmitter and hence range was restricted to line-of-sight. Marconi proved, however, that the curvature of the earth was not an obstacle for wireless telegraphy over great distances." ~ Marconi's Atlantic Leap
In St. John's, Newfoundland in 1901 Guglielmo Marconi's kite received the letter "s", as transmitted in Morse Code from Cornwall, England.
AT&T, Verizon and AOL received $0.00.
The End
Stuff that matters.
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.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Am I the only person that thinks these two items might be connected?
Actually, it sounds like he is the sort of person who would not need to cheat.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's pretty cool... when it's up, that is. Seems like every weekend lately it's been shut down for cleaning...
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
Because the government is currently placing no restrictions on corporations. We attempt to fight the battle on both fronts: give power to ourselves and remove it from corporations.
While we already have some restrictions on the government (they've been slipping lately) we've got jack on the corps.
Hence, the reason to fight.
Also, there is no way for society to function without a government. If you can find a way, do tell. I do not see it, not in the world we live in. Corporations are a slightly different matter, so we can fight them all out (fighting governments must be reformation, fighting corporations can be eradication)
Frankel was one of the first to create something real from his ideas (Gnutella, Waste, WinAmp), but these were Windows programs. We should also be thanking or acknowledging the people that added to/reverse engineered those programs so people on all platforms could use them (mldonkey, XMMS, and etc.)
Winamp's a good thing. Gnutella was even better. I think that was his best project yet. The part of this state of affairs that I believe makes the RIAA so upset is that they do not control the technology, and given recent rulings, containing the technology will prove difficult as well.
In fact, if anything, by decentralizing the technology, Frankel has helped the RIAA spend copious amounts of money on legal fees chasing individuals (I doubt the lawyers are working pro-bono. I also doubt that the entirety of their payments will come from settlements/legal winnings) instead of facing down corporations like Napster
The article isn't too bad for a buff-puff piece
Frankel, Carmack, Jobs, Gates. What do they all have in common? They all bet big on PC technology, and changed everyone's life in ways we take for granted today. One additional attribute: They all made a lot of money.
Of course there are a number of other people who have made huge contributions: Berners-Lee and Torvalds for example, but neither made big dollars from their ideas.
In other words, people like Frankel not only innovated, but they were paid quite well for their efforts. Now that's impressive. It demonstrates that others were/are willing to pay for the things they created, which is a pretty good way to determine if you have created something of value.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
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.
>>In the near future, he says, he's going to have
>>a sit-down with his boss and enthusiastically
>>return to a riskier way of life. This could
Where is he working now, has he actually left AOL? I see a lot of comments that he is gone, but last I heard he was still there and his words were:
I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer.
he uploaded Winamp (the name is short for Windows Amplifier
Actually, it's short for the Windows port of amp (An MP3 Player) for *nix.
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
You're talking nonsense. At any moment, the copyright holder of a GPL licensed program can turn around and say "Okay, I'm closing the source, any further releases will now be under this new license." The authors can't prevent people from distirbuting/modifying the code that is already available, but they can continue their own closed source development and make releases under any terms they wish.
If you hold copyright on a work, then you always have total control over it, and I don't know of any way you could give up that control even if you wanted to, except for assigning the copyright to someone else (in theory, there's "Public Domain," but that's hard to achieve in reality).
is here: http://pron.blorp.com/sym/
(this is the same link in the paper version)
It's interesting to hear slashdot discuss these matters, but I'm a little taken aback by the choice of wording.
Referring back to the text of the original post: "subvert corporate control." I'd like to point out that there's a difference between subverting and circumventing.
First, "subvert" has a slightly
"Circumvent corporate control"... now that's got a nice ring to it. I suspect that's a better word for filesharing. The term acknowledges that there's a corporate domain, but also allows for reality, which is that there's also a domain of independents. That is, i believe, a healthier way of thinking about it.
And, by the way, i think the term "piracy" might be a bit harsh, don't you think? Consider the fact that many downloaders are merely getting an mp3 format of something they already own, or owned, on phonograph, eight track, cd, tape, record, vcr-tape, dvd, etc. I think it would be a mistake to conflate downloading with piracy. To do so puts the "front line" further back than it has to be.
I think the best way to present filesharing in a positive light would be to present it as a form of public library. Ahh. The public library. One of the best bastions of public decency remaining in America. And people love them. And the analogy is so nice.
Somebody once told me the best things in life are free. So if you insist on calling the free things in life piracy, where's that going to get you? Checking out a library book, or tape, or movie, isn't piracy. And it's free.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
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!
Lindy is no more important than someone who hands tools to the guy who is tuning Spirits engine before takeoff.
That would have been Charles Lindbergh. Then Lindy double checked the work himself. He also personally oversaw the design and construction of the Spirit personally.
Lindy was a remarkable man. You should read "We" sometime.
George Mallory was another remarkable man, even though he "failed." We don't normally admit that "failures" are remarkable men. George made it impossible not to.
I fully understand the concept that every member of a team is important. I've never understood why the last run batted in is hailed as the "winning run" when the first run batted in was just as much the winning run as any other. There is also certainly a kind of hero worship I find repulsive.
KFG
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.
" 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