: Notes from the O’Reilly P2P Conference. Interesting stuff. P2P is very interesting, and the trick for me is that it seems that the flexibility of the very idea is built in. In many ways it’s just restating the original vision of the web, which has ended up being hampered by the narrower vision of the first couple of waves of development. I would hate to see a proscriptive definition of P2P overtake the openness of the concept.
Just back from
Vancouver, where it turned out that a) I didn’t have enough spare time to even look at anything on the net, let alone post anything; and, b) where my road ISP’s line was busy every single time I tried to dial up. At the conference I was at I had a nice connection, but no time to do anything with it. Vancouver’s nice enough, but not really my kind of place. Oh – and if you sent me email in the last few days I’ll be getting to it soon.
I’ve always given
Courtney Love the benefit of the doubt when people were tearing her apart about some of the things she’s been involved in. Salon (yes, Salon) has published a speech she gave at an online entertainment conference that strongly confirms my high opinion of her. A must-read in the Napster/mp3.com/piracy/RIAA files.
Wired is running
a fantastic story about Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the Ninth World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam. One thing that he neglects to mention but forms the backdrop of the whole story is that the Telecom Reform Act (the one that the CDA came packaged within) explicitly paved the way for AT&Ts current behaviour. That should have been a bigger story than the CDA at the time – it sure is now. By allowing mergers and combinations in the telecom space that were previously illegal, it opened the door to many really cool business combos that weren’t possible before. But it also raised the spectre of a virtually private network that could be controlled by capital in ways that the net cannot be. And, really, who needs CDA-style censorship when you have a closed network in the first place?
