Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, January 9, 2002
18:04 - The File-Sharing Generation Enters its "80's" http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2002/nf2002013_5627.htm	(top)
Hey, take a look. Trojans installed silently by file-swapping programs. What this says to me is not so much that file-swapping is inherently evil or anything. No, what I see is the end of the Free Love era of Napster and the countless Naplets. I could go ahead and draw the parallels if you want me to: AIDS and other STDs, along with general social change, brought about the end of the freewheeling hippie era. And in the same way, we can't be sure-- if we're running some file-sharing program-- that it isn't installing some silent password-snooper or URL-logger against our wishes. But while that's an obvious parallel that's easy to op-ed about, there's the other, less obvious, less awareness-sensitive, more insidious side. And that's the fact that file-sharing programs aren't free anymore. That's right-- you fire up your P2P application to snarf down some free music, and you end up paying for the privilege. Perhaps not in the sense that you pay-per-play, as with the recording companies' services, or in the sense that you pay each time you log on, or even in the sense that the programs are commercial. I'm talking about the fact that the Internet in general, including its grass-roots-grown software, is becoming ad-ware. Take a stroll around your favorite fan websites. Do you see a single one these days that doesn't have banner ads, pop-up ads, pop-under ads? You'd understand the big commercial sites like ZDNet embedding huge ads in the middle of articles that the text has to wrap around, but now it's extended even to the personal labors-of-love that gave the Internet its unprecedented reach. Seanbaby.com has banner ads. As the Apple Turns has banner ads. In fact, if you find a site that doesn't have banner ads, chances are that it's only because the author is independently wealthy and can afford dedicated co-location bandwidth on a scale that most people are unwilling to commit their resources to it. And the same goes for software. I was shocked to find that LimeWire (the Gnutella client for Mac OS X) now has a "free" (ad-laden) version and a "commercial" (ad-free) version... until I discovered that just about everybody else now operates by the same scheme. AudioGalaxy has banner ads. KaZaA has embedded ads. Advertising, often for companies with very shady reasons for existence (X-10 cameras for spying on your neighbor's wife? Online gambling? Porn sites?), is becoming the lifeblood even of the independent, individualistic shareware that got the file-sharing generation off to its start. So before too long, I would imagine that the financial gap between paying for music (on a CD, or from the official online music services) and getting it for "free" via P2P apps will shrink, until inevitably it will vanish altogether. Why can't you make a TV show and put it on the air? Because the airwaves are heavily regulated and the financial barriers-to-entry are very high. Who pays for the TV shows that do make it onto the air? Advertisers. And if you don't have advertisers, you have to nag the viewers, like PBS does. It'll take a long time, certainly; the Internet, by its nature, fosters free exchange of thought like nothing ever has before. But not if that thought involves serving multi-megabyte chunks of data to thousands of clients per day. That costs bandwidth. And bandwidth isn't becoming "too cheap to meter"-- the only condition where file-sharing could conceivably remain truly free. Instead, the supply of bandwidth is growing only very, very slowly, and it remains very expensive. Infrastructure is costly, and someone has to pay for it. And that means that unless the Internet's infrastructure somehow becomes irrelevant-- and, like, soon, before its costliness leads to oligopoly and regulation, like TV has-- then we're going to see a long, slow, steady decline in how "free" our Internet experience really is. Hiker notes: In the 1980s software piracy soared as people stopped wanting to PAY for stuff... ... and before long, pirates and hackers were putting ads for their BBS in, prefacing the software with annoying demos, and using them to transmit viruses. :)