If only. There are laws to protect fax users from unsolicited commercial material. Why not email users too?
Sorry, but FAX is still hulking along...
on
Email Turns Thirty
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax. btw, F1rst P0st!!!:-)
My God, a relevant FP?!?
Unfortuneately, E-mail has only killed FAX service in the tech sector. If you deal with any other business, FAX is still alive and strong, particularly in financial business.
I work for a financial organization in Texas. We have banks upon banks of fax machines that do nothing but do things like take credit-card applications and ATM account setup instructions.
Despite the fact that encrypted email would be significantly more secure and easier to process than the badly aging FAX protocol, the simple fact of the matter is that many "over 40" business types just don't trust email... in any form. Worse, they're unwilling to learn.
So, instead of having a single application that parses emails for relevant data and then dumps it into our DB, we pay a team of data processing kids to do the same thing, adding another layer of fallibility and error introduction to our system.
If you watch Nadesico at all, all the Characters that were born/lived on Mars are infected/gifted with worm-like nanites that live in their bodies. The nanites are the original exploratory and terraforming machinery in the story...
This is probably the most important thing any network professional can ask for.
Outlaw evil behavior, not the tools that enable that behavior. In many cases the tools have many, many more positive and educational uses than negative uses. In a lot of cases, the tools can be used to stop or examine criminal (cracking) behavior.
Say what you will about Steve Gibson, but the
guy knows a little about network security. He gives an extended discussion on how he used the tools of the IRC-based DDOS trade to help oust some script k1dd13's that were hammering his site.
Tools like L0pht-crack, the NT password cracker tool, I couldn't have convinced my execs that a company password policy was necessary and passwords like 'password01' were unnacceptable.
Just like we don't ban sledgehammers and bolt-cutters even though they can be used to break padlocks, we shouldn't ban network tools either.
Hmmm... I think it's been mentioned that this sounds like Freenet without all the extras thrown in.
Frankly, there are a few things inhibiting Freenet's popularity when compared to Gnutella and Fasttrack (Is that still running?).
1. High learning curve: Trying to figure out how to search for freenet keys is a bit of a challenge, especially compared to typing in "Matalika" in a Morpheus or Gnutella search window and getting dozens of relevent matches from Lars and co.. You don't have critical mass until you have the morons.
2. Difficult install: I have yet to see a Freenet implimentation that didn't require an attendant JRE install of some kind. Worse, it also frequently entails setting up Java class paths, a task that can confuse even Java developers from time to time. Then a user must understand that he usually has to use his or her browser to access Freenet. There is no 'Freenet' icon to point and click.
3. Difficulty of sharing: It's possible to make entire web pages available via Freenet, but if a Freenet user is firewalled for any reason, it really harms him in terms of being able to participate in the sharing.
4. Unpopular data doesn't propogate: Because the most popular data is shared and replicated most frequently. Warez and mp3s show up, but things like dissident and political theories, text files, and more personal data are lost... even to those who might be interested. (Oddly, Hotline is still a very good place to find these sorts of things. IRC fserves, as well.)
From what I read of the white-paper it looks like this project, or an open-source project very similar to it, could solve these problems and still acheive many of Freenet's goals.
Maybe the OSS community should look into something like this... a moron-safe, web-based file sharing project for the masses that ignores anonymization and encryption in order to gain a more critical mass. Better yet, because of the similarity between the two projects, once the sharing infrastructure was in place, it could accept a Freenet plugin, or vice-versa.
"I own upwards of 800 CDs, but it seems like they're on a crusade against me," he said. "It's a strange development when you seem to be hellbent on alienating your best customers."
It's a fairly decent encrypted filesystem implementation. I'm certain is has it downsides, but besides being non-free, I haven't found any others.
BC allows you to create encrypted volumes up to the max size of your harddrive, and encrypts anything therein with your choice of encryption schemas. It also comes with a 'Wipe' command that will allow you to delete a file or clean a drive with a 7-stage delete process.
Shame falls upon Slashdot today. If Bruce was busy and needed to phone in the interview, the least Slashdot could have done was to record the call and post the transcript verbatim.
Or the MP3 of said recorded call.
I'm feeling more and more like this has been the shafting of what could have been a superb interview.
Trying to discount the fact that Bruce Campbell's interview was related third-person, I felt like Wil Wheaton's interview was more interesting, and answered the questions more thoroughly. Wil Wheaton was more interested in participating in the interview process, and getting his opinions out in the air.
Users who perenially search outside of corporate sites could be able to customize their setting so that they'd have to select when they want to include corporate sites. Could it work? I don't know.
Google already has a 'customized' interface that allows users to do things like change language, etc...
I think the sugestion of separating corporate and non-corporate searches has its merits. I hate searching for an anime fanfiction and being directed to Best Buy's website because they happen to carry the anime title I mentioned in the search query.
It has its problems too, however. Tagging each of the pages in Google's truly massive search database with a corporate or non-corporate tag is a non-trivial problem. For obvious reasons, website owners cannot be trusted to tag their own pages.
You're also opening a can of worms here, since many website owners will protest either a commercial or a non-commercial tagging.
Even if you tagged sites by domain, you'd still have hundreds of thousands... possibly millions of domains, not to mention sites that carry both corporate and private content like Geocities, Tripod, or other free webhosts.
Then you have to consider what to do with semi-for-profit pages? Many pages have 'tipping jars' now. Many open-source software development pages have information about for-profit works, or are developed by for-profit organizations. Should companies like Redhat be excluded from non-profit searches? Probably. How about Vorbis Ogg? That's not nearly so clear. How about web-comics, almost all of which give away their content freely, but sell merchandise, dead-tree books, or other premiums.
In the end, I think that I'd rather put up with having to sort through twenty or so highly relevant results to get the search result I wanted rather than having to search twice to make sure that I get all the possible relevant results.
The decision has its limitations, being merely a vacation of an earlier judgement. Given the powerful interests of the shrinkwrap software industry, it's likely to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
Rather than completely invalidating the DMCA, this ruling is a lot more likely to be one of the many holes being poked in the whole 'intellectual property' balloon.
IANAL, but from what I read, what it does do is more or less state that data... software in particular... is not immune from first sale doctrine. You're breaking copyright law if you make copies and give them away. You're not breaking the law if you decide to sell your extra legit Windows ME/2000/XP CDs after you install Linux.
This has important ramifications, because there is a very minor difference between applications and data of any other kind. It's not precident setting in and of itself, but it could be used to help set a larger precident.
(Believe me, there's so much to do at Disney World, that you won't have time to browse the Net.)
And here I am thinking that the best way to while away those 1-2 hour waits in line for all the most popular attraction would be with Unreal Tournament or Q3Arena. If lag became an issue because of the sheer number of devices and users drawing bandwidth, you could always play something turn-based, like CivNet.
By definition, any given network is crackable. It's just a matter of time, right?
Here are some exploits that we can be sure of seeing in the future:
1. 'It's a Small World' animatronic dolls reprogrammed via wireless network to share their cultural feelings via a massive animatronic orgy of all nations.
2. Michael Jackson's "Captain Eo 3D" video replaced with low-quality MPEG of a video taken of what really happened at Macaully Caulkin's last birthday party.
3. Ride Space Mountain during DDOS season? Only if you're feeling suicidal. You never know when that modified Nimda worm is going to kick in.
4. Parade of Lights all flash in sequence to spell out "L33+ X1DD135 OWNZ JOO DIZNY"
5. Animatronic Abe Lincoln now shouts, "Beefcake. BEEFCAKE!!!!"
IBM is doing what they do best... making damn good hardware.
Redhat is doing what they do best... making a damn good server OS. Apparently, it's better than AIX. At least it's costing IBM less, which is a good goal as well. IBM gets Free software to run on its high price enterprise-class servers. Redhat gets paid a lot by a huge company for support, and incidentally for further development. They also get a lot of prestige... and more penguins spraypainted on sidewalks, I'd imagine.
Everyone else gets the fruits of IBM's and Redhat's labors in the form of GPL and other open-license software. Win-Win-Win
What I found most interesting about this article was the amount of time it spent name calling-- in particular, the IPS's users 'thieves'.
Of course any movement has its particular socialization. The OSS movement in particular hangs on the 'Information Wants to Be Free' slogan.
It's a little more extreme in this case. The author of the article, and probably the magazine that published it, has a definite agenda to push. The agenda here is to try to limit the amount of bandwidth any one user uses per month. In this case, they're pushing their new 'standard' (*snicker*), and are trying to convince the readers of the article that it's not only right to force that on their users, but that the users need have done something wrong and criminal that they need to be punished for.
Personally, when I pay for cablemodem service, I figure that if I pay $50/month for 384kbyte/s service, then I'm paying $50 for
384kbyte * 2678400 and whatever I don't use is just a bonus for the cable co.
It's obvious that Cable providers would have a different viewpoint, but to criminalize their oppozing viewpoints is altogether more than is called for.
Most of the portable CD and MP3-CD players I've seen recently read ahead almost a full minute. Mine works just fine if I carry it or leave it in my pocket, even while I'm jogging. If I work out at the gym, there's usually a notch or caddy on whatever aparatus I'm using that keeps me from even having to carry my own audio player while I exercise.
Funnily enough, IIS defaults to hide directory contents where Apache doesn't. The option to display directory contents can be turned on easily enough, but an administrator does actually have to make the concious decision to do so.
This is a good reason not to let developers have administrator access to any boxen they are developing on.
PASSWORD PROTECTION is one way to guard your stack against unauthorized access.
Unlike locking your stack which prevents others from making changes, this surprisingly simple script won't allow anyone to view your stack without the password. For you Ursula K. Le Guin fans, the password for this stack is "Antwerp".
I don't see what's so hard about this problem. It's very simple... don't keep data of any kind on the web server. That's what firewalled, password/encryption protected DB servers are for.
Despite the fact that there is both tons of 'prior art' and a very strong case of 'obvious nature' for this particular patent case, I think it would be interesting if BT did manage to win their case. They're hoping to claim massive amounts of royalties from companies who run websites, but I think the real effect would be that the majority of website owners, corporate and private, would simply terminate their websites.
I think that if you kill hyperlinks, you pretty much kill the whole http-based World Wide Web.
Where does that leave us? Well, for starters, it gets a whole lot of companies back *off* the internet, where they don't really belong. I think that the last decade has proven that the e-commerce model doesn't really work when brick-and-mortar sales models are more efficient. There are a few, very specialized business who manage to do business over the internet, but these are almost always in the same area that phone and mail-order business have always dominated. The major auto manufacturers are a good example of companies who don't belong on the internet. The music industry is probably another good case, since they absolutely refuse to embrace the sharing model that the internet and P2P apps have made so popular. They don't want to do business on the internet. They want to use the internet to make their brick-and-mortar businesses more profitable.
So, let's say that all these companies get off the internet. What's left of the internet?
E-Mail, for one. Despite the popularity of the web, E-Mail still accounts for the vast majority of internet traffic. FTP is another. Just because graphical websites go away doesn't mean that we can expect FTP sties to go away as well. FTP sites *after* websites, however, can be expected to have much, much more in the way of content. We can expect 'pub' directories to have much, much more in the way of specialization and indexing. Personal FTP sites would have vast amounts of things the site's owners would like or find interesting. MP3's, images both conventional and pornographic, movies, text files like e-books and fan-works, applications... The list goes on and on.
This model for MP3 sites was *almost* the way things worked. In 1993, there were about an equal number of FTP- and Web-sites. HTML was so much more versatile than an FTP site, so it dominated.
I think we'll also see a resurgance in the use of Usenet, which has been supplanted in many ways by weblogs and online message boards for BBS-type use. We may even see a resurgance in telnet-based BBS's. That would be cool.
The thing I think we'll see the most of if the web magically went away, would be the proliferation of internet sites that use Post-http era technology. This includes any of the P2P protcols like Gnutella or FastTrack, CVS, Freenet, streaming music and video, distributed problem solving like Seti@home and Folding@home, and many, many more.
The web is stagnant already, so this process is already beginning. Just look at the statistic figures for Gnutella or FastTrack to get an idea. I don't think BT will win their lawsuit, and I don't think that the web is going away anytime soon.
I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if it did.
Slashdot Mirror
If only. There are laws to protect fax users from unsolicited commercial material. Why not email users too?
Am I insane, or did Email already kill the fax machine? I get about 20 emails a day, and not one fax. btw, F1rst P0st!!! :-)
My God, a relevant FP?!?
Unfortuneately, E-mail has only killed FAX service in the tech sector. If you deal with any other business, FAX is still alive and strong, particularly in financial business.
I work for a financial organization in Texas. We have banks upon banks of fax machines that do nothing but do things like take credit-card applications and ATM account setup instructions.
Despite the fact that encrypted email would be significantly more secure and easier to process than the badly aging FAX protocol, the simple fact of the matter is that many "over 40" business types just don't trust email... in any form. Worse, they're unwilling to learn.
So, instead of having a single application that parses emails for relevant data and then dumps it into our DB, we pay a team of data processing kids to do the same thing, adding another layer of fallibility and error introduction to our system.
Sad, but true.
If you watch Nadesico at all, all the Characters that were born/lived on Mars are infected/gifted with worm-like nanites that live in their bodies. The nanites are the original exploratory and terraforming machinery in the story...
This is probably the most important thing any network professional can ask for.
Outlaw evil behavior, not the tools that enable that behavior. In many cases the tools have many, many more positive and educational uses than negative uses. In a lot of cases, the tools can be used to stop or examine criminal (cracking) behavior.
Say what you will about Steve Gibson, but the
guy knows a little about network security. He gives an extended discussion on how he used the tools of the IRC-based DDOS trade to help oust some script k1dd13's that were hammering his site.
Tools like L0pht-crack, the NT password cracker tool, I couldn't have convinced my execs that a company password policy was necessary and passwords like 'password01' were unnacceptable.
Just like we don't ban sledgehammers and bolt-cutters even though they can be used to break padlocks, we shouldn't ban network tools either.
Happens all the time.
A bunch of the guys I work with left a pharmaceutical firm because their development jobs got outsourced to Romania.
But this could actually mean the *end* of the razor scooter.
*BUDUM-CHING!*
Hmmm... I think it's been mentioned that this sounds like Freenet without all the extras thrown in.
Frankly, there are a few things inhibiting Freenet's popularity when compared to Gnutella and Fasttrack (Is that still running?).
1. High learning curve: Trying to figure out how to search for freenet keys is a bit of a challenge, especially compared to typing in "Matalika" in a Morpheus or Gnutella search window and getting dozens of relevent matches from Lars and co.. You don't have critical mass until you have the morons.
2. Difficult install: I have yet to see a Freenet implimentation that didn't require an attendant JRE install of some kind. Worse, it also frequently entails setting up Java class paths, a task that can confuse even Java developers from time to time. Then a user must understand that he usually has to use his or her browser to access Freenet. There is no 'Freenet' icon to point and click.
3. Difficulty of sharing: It's possible to make entire web pages available via Freenet, but if a Freenet user is firewalled for any reason, it really harms him in terms of being able to participate in the sharing.
4. Unpopular data doesn't propogate: Because the most popular data is shared and replicated most frequently. Warez and mp3s show up, but things like dissident and political theories, text files, and more personal data are lost... even to those who might be interested. (Oddly, Hotline is still a very good place to find these sorts of things. IRC fserves, as well.)
From what I read of the white-paper it looks like this project, or an open-source project very similar to it, could solve these problems and still acheive many of Freenet's goals.
Maybe the OSS community should look into something like this... a moron-safe, web-based file sharing project for the masses that ignores anonymization and encryption in order to gain a more critical mass. Better yet, because of the similarity between the two projects, once the sharing infrastructure was in place, it could accept a Freenet plugin, or vice-versa.
Just an idea...
"I own upwards of 800 CDs, but it seems like they're on a crusade against me," he said. "It's a strange development when you seem to be hellbent on alienating your best customers."
This is the decision of a Dutch court. Now, whether or not they're being paid off by RIAA interests is another matter entirely.
Corrupt courts? I must be kidding, right? If only...
It's a fairly decent encrypted filesystem implementation. I'm certain is has it downsides, but besides being non-free, I haven't found any others.
BC allows you to create encrypted volumes up to the max size of your harddrive, and encrypts anything therein with your choice of encryption schemas. It also comes with a 'Wipe' command that will allow you to delete a file or clean a drive with a 7-stage delete process.
Don't forget John Ashcroft. He's at least as guilty as George Bush in the 'pissing on the U.S. Constitution' contest.
Shame falls upon Slashdot today. If Bruce was busy and needed to phone in the interview, the least Slashdot could have done was to record the call and post the transcript verbatim.
Or the MP3 of said recorded call.
I'm feeling more and more like this has been the shafting of what could have been a superb interview.
Which was the better interview?
Trying to discount the fact that Bruce Campbell's interview was related third-person, I felt like Wil Wheaton's interview was more interesting, and answered the questions more thoroughly. Wil Wheaton was more interested in participating in the interview process, and getting his opinions out in the air.
+5 Funny, yes, but damned good advice all the same. Are you listening, Taco?
Changing the line to something like
"All comments are the opinions of the owner and not the property of Slashdot"
might just save you a world of grief down the line.
Users who perenially search outside of corporate sites could be able to customize their setting so that they'd have to select when they want to include corporate sites. Could it work? I don't know.
Google already has a 'customized' interface that allows users to do things like change language, etc...
I think the sugestion of separating corporate and non-corporate searches has its merits. I hate searching for an anime fanfiction and being directed to Best Buy's website because they happen to carry the anime title I mentioned in the search query.
It has its problems too, however. Tagging each of the pages in Google's truly massive search database with a corporate or non-corporate tag is a non-trivial problem. For obvious reasons, website owners cannot be trusted to tag their own pages.
You're also opening a can of worms here, since many website owners will protest either a commercial or a non-commercial tagging.
Even if you tagged sites by domain, you'd still have hundreds of thousands... possibly millions of domains, not to mention sites that carry both corporate and private content like Geocities, Tripod, or other free webhosts.
Then you have to consider what to do with semi-for-profit pages? Many pages have 'tipping jars' now. Many open-source software development pages have information about for-profit works, or are developed by for-profit organizations. Should companies like Redhat be excluded from non-profit searches? Probably. How about Vorbis Ogg? That's not nearly so clear. How about web-comics, almost all of which give away their content freely, but sell merchandise, dead-tree books, or other premiums.
In the end, I think that I'd rather put up with having to sort through twenty or so highly relevant results to get the search result I wanted rather than having to search twice to make sure that I get all the possible relevant results.
The decision has its limitations, being merely a vacation of an earlier judgement. Given the powerful interests of the shrinkwrap software industry, it's likely to be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
Rather than completely invalidating the DMCA, this ruling is a lot more likely to be one of the many holes being poked in the whole 'intellectual property' balloon.
IANAL, but from what I read, what it does do is more or less state that data... software in particular... is not immune from first sale doctrine. You're breaking copyright law if you make copies and give them away. You're not breaking the law if you decide to sell your extra legit Windows ME/2000/XP CDs after you install Linux.
This has important ramifications, because there is a very minor difference between applications and data of any other kind. It's not precident setting in and of itself, but it could be used to help set a larger precident.
(Believe me, there's so much to do at Disney World, that you won't have time to browse the Net.)
And here I am thinking that the best way to while away those 1-2 hour waits in line for all the most popular attraction would be with Unreal Tournament or Q3Arena. If lag became an issue because of the sheer number of devices and users drawing bandwidth, you could always play something turn-based, like CivNet.
By definition, any given network is crackable. It's just a matter of time, right?
Here are some exploits that we can be sure of seeing in the future:
1. 'It's a Small World' animatronic dolls reprogrammed via wireless network to share their cultural feelings via a massive animatronic orgy of all nations.
2. Michael Jackson's "Captain Eo 3D" video replaced with low-quality MPEG of a video taken of what really happened at Macaully Caulkin's last birthday party.
3. Ride Space Mountain during DDOS season? Only if you're feeling suicidal. You never know when that modified Nimda worm is going to kick in.
4. Parade of Lights all flash in sequence to spell out "L33+ X1DD135 OWNZ JOO DIZNY"
5. Animatronic Abe Lincoln now shouts, "Beefcake. BEEFCAKE!!!!"
IBM is doing what they do best... making damn good hardware.
Redhat is doing what they do best... making a damn good server OS. Apparently, it's better than AIX. At least it's costing IBM less, which is a good goal as well. IBM gets Free software to run on its high price enterprise-class servers. Redhat gets paid a lot by a huge company for support, and incidentally for further development. They also get a lot of prestige... and more penguins spraypainted on sidewalks, I'd imagine.
Everyone else gets the fruits of IBM's and Redhat's labors in the form of GPL and other open-license software. Win-Win-Win
What I found most interesting about this article was the amount of time it spent name calling-- in particular, the IPS's users 'thieves'.
Of course any movement has its particular socialization. The OSS movement in particular hangs on the 'Information Wants to Be Free' slogan.
It's a little more extreme in this case. The author of the article, and probably the magazine that published it, has a definite agenda to push. The agenda here is to try to limit the amount of bandwidth any one user uses per month. In this case, they're pushing their new 'standard' (*snicker*), and are trying to convince the readers of the article that it's not only right to force that on their users, but that the users need have done something wrong and criminal that they need to be punished for.
Personally, when I pay for cablemodem service, I figure that if I pay $50/month for 384kbyte/s service, then I'm paying $50 for
384kbyte * 2678400 and whatever I don't use is just a bonus for the cable co.
It's obvious that Cable providers would have a different viewpoint, but to criminalize their oppozing viewpoints is altogether more than is called for.
Most of the portable CD and MP3-CD players I've seen recently read ahead almost a full minute. Mine works just fine if I carry it or leave it in my pocket, even while I'm jogging. If I work out at the gym, there's usually a notch or caddy on whatever aparatus I'm using that keeps me from even having to carry my own audio player while I exercise.
Funnily enough, IIS defaults to hide directory contents where Apache doesn't. The option to display directory contents can be turned on easily enough, but an administrator does actually have to make the concious decision to do so.
This is a good reason not to let developers have administrator access to any boxen they are developing on.
From a site indexed by google:
PASSWORD PROTECTION is one way to guard your stack against unauthorized access.
Unlike locking your stack which prevents others from making changes, this surprisingly simple script won't allow anyone to view your stack without the password. For you Ursula K. Le Guin fans, the password for this stack is "Antwerp".
I don't see what's so hard about this problem. It's very simple... don't keep data of any kind on the web server. That's what firewalled, password/encryption protected DB servers are for.
Despite the fact that there is both tons of 'prior art' and a very strong case of 'obvious nature' for this particular patent case, I think it would be interesting if BT did manage to win their case. They're hoping to claim massive amounts of royalties from companies who run websites, but I think the real effect would be that the majority of website owners, corporate and private, would simply terminate their websites.
I think that if you kill hyperlinks, you pretty much kill the whole http-based World Wide Web.
Where does that leave us? Well, for starters, it gets a whole lot of companies back *off* the internet, where they don't really belong. I think that the last decade has proven that the e-commerce model doesn't really work when brick-and-mortar sales models are more efficient. There are a few, very specialized business who manage to do business over the internet, but these are almost always in the same area that phone and mail-order business have always dominated. The major auto manufacturers are a good example of companies who don't belong on the internet. The music industry is probably another good case, since they absolutely refuse to embrace the sharing model that the internet and P2P apps have made so popular. They don't want to do business on the internet. They want to use the internet to make their brick-and-mortar businesses more profitable.
So, let's say that all these companies get off the internet. What's left of the internet?
E-Mail, for one. Despite the popularity of the web, E-Mail still accounts for the vast majority of internet traffic. FTP is another. Just because graphical websites go away doesn't mean that we can expect FTP sties to go away as well. FTP sites *after* websites, however, can be expected to have much, much more in the way of content. We can expect 'pub' directories to have much, much more in the way of specialization and indexing. Personal FTP sites would have vast amounts of things the site's owners would like or find interesting. MP3's, images both conventional and pornographic, movies, text files like e-books and fan-works, applications... The list goes on and on.
This model for MP3 sites was *almost* the way things worked. In 1993, there were about an equal number of FTP- and Web-sites. HTML was so much more versatile than an FTP site, so it dominated.
I think we'll also see a resurgance in the use of Usenet, which has been supplanted in many ways by weblogs and online message boards for BBS-type use. We may even see a resurgance in telnet-based BBS's. That would be cool.
The thing I think we'll see the most of if the web magically went away, would be the proliferation of internet sites that use Post-http era technology. This includes any of the P2P protcols like Gnutella or FastTrack, CVS, Freenet, streaming music and video, distributed problem solving like Seti@home and Folding@home, and many, many more.
The web is stagnant already, so this process is already beginning. Just look at the statistic figures for Gnutella or FastTrack to get an idea. I don't think BT will win their lawsuit, and I don't think that the web is going away anytime soon.
I don't think it would necessarily be a bad thing if it did.