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Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and t

Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young and naïve. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed all lofty ideals in favor of blind greed.

xandrius 2y ago
I think you need to check better: piratebay and so many of older tech is still being used, for many different niches (I find each country having their own preferred way to distribute content in their native language). Nowadays the only people left are the ones wanting to put the extractor effort for the principle of it, the rest can easily find most things somewhere (and if not give up). But there are still lots of us! (or so it feels like)
mindslight 2y ago
napster asked me if I wanted to work on his project, and I told him I saw no future because it would inevitably just get shut down. From my perspective looking back, Napster was the start of the trend of startup companies based around brazenly flouting the law directly as a middleman, then when finally called out just bargaining with the incumbents to arbitrage their user base and associated hipness for a payout. I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead. Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely tell the network to not meddle with your communications, those communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question of when the network operators will eventually try to take advantage of you to extract some of that value. The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a man to understand something...") and generally use up most of the air in the room.

xandrius 2y ago

I think you need to check better: piratebay and so many of older tech is still being used, for many different niches (I find each country having their own preferred way to distribute content in their native language). Nowadays the only people left are the ones wanting to put the extractor effort for the principle of it, the rest can easily find most things somewhere (and if not give up). But there are still lots of us! (or so it feels like)

mindslight 2y ago

napster asked me if I wanted to work on his project, and I told him I saw no future because it would inevitably just get shut down. From my perspective looking back, Napster was the start of the trend of startup companies based around brazenly flouting the law directly as a middleman, then when finally called out just bargaining with the incumbents to arbitrage their user base and associated hipness for a payout. I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead. Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely tell the network to not meddle with your communications, those communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question of when the network operators will eventually try to take advantage of you to extract some of that value. The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a man to understand something...") and generally use up most of the air in the room.