via Scripting News (not that I find the site uninteresting, it’s just that it is usually out of step with my focus): Three Myths of XML by Kendall Grant Clark. A very tidy debunking of some of the more outrageous (and ahistorical) myths proposed by XML proponents. If I were ever to re-write my Master’s thesis (which is doubtful), this essay would become a central reference.
Dave Winer
: 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.
Yet another nay-saying
article about peer to peer network applications in eCompany Now [via Scripting News]. I don’t know what SETI@home has to do with p2p, however. It’s a classic client-server app, no? A central server collates the results of the work of a distributed network of machines that send it processed data. The only difference is the relationship between the machines doing the crunching and the server. Maybe I’ve missed something?
P2P is something else entirely – it’s all about eliminating (or minimizing) the central server’s position in the mix. That’s its power – and its disadvantage. It is hard to see where the profits lie in deploying P2P schemes. No harder, though, than divining the profit-potential of the internet as a whole – and that certainly didn’t hinder its development.
For me, the power of P2P is more fundamental than whether or not anyone has figured out the business model to make it work. Think of something like the old Firefly music-suggestion site (which was very cool for its day, and anticipated a lot of stuff people are looking at now). Imagine if people had the option of running Firefly within their net-aware MP3 player. And think if you could make “buddies” lists (like in an IM program) and integrate their preferences to help suggest what you might like. Say you could tell the software, “give 100% weight to my preferences, 80% confidence to my buddies list, and 60% to people one degree away from my own buddies.” Etc.
The trick with p2p isn’t to hold off until the profitable way comes along, just as that wasn’t the case with the net as a whole. The trick is to recognize that it’s there, and that people love it. That’s the world – now people have to figure out how to live in it, commercially or no.
As noted at
Scripting News today, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works. Which is the long way of saying that you can hack blocking software to figure out what it’s blocking. This rule neatly obviates many of the concerns that were noted by ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen in his excellent article in Writ Magazine, Do We Really Want a Secret Censorship System.
The question I have is about the second class of works specified in the Rule: “Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsolescence.” It’s hard for me to parse exactly what this means. But it’s interesting, and the possibilities are, to me, very positive. Anyone who still thinks the gov’t doesn’t get it is out of touch, in my opinion. As I’ve said before, the government gets it just fine (at least in the US), it’s just that things have to be worked out in terms of law and policy, which can take a while.
Since last week
, there have been several interesting articles that note the power of David Touretzky‘s testimony. The EFF noted it in their DVD Update [via Ed and Scripting News], Another take on it was published in a Wired News article explaining that the deCSS T-Shirt guys have been named defendants in the trial.
