Posted on: Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Get the lowdown on your camera
By Burt Lum
Internet innovation abounds and a new shift is occurring. Over the last several months, all the attention has been given to B2B (business to business), B2C (business to consumer) and dot-coms. Granted, many are down on the Internet momentarily, but I say, damn the naysayers, Internet innovation still rules. The latest buzz is "P2P," or peer to peer, found at www.openp2p.com.
Whether or not you’ve heard the term, you’re probably already aware of how P2P works. The concept was made widely popular by programs like Napster.
Unlike the client-server model, commonly used when you launch your browser and pull data in from a Web server, the P2P model lets clients transfer data directly with other clients.
As in the case of Napster, the user downloads software that allows the sharing of MP3 files with other users. With millions of users downloading this software, each user is now able to share their library of songs. There are no intermediary servers involved except for keeping indexes and maintaining search engines.
On the surface, the sharing of files seems innocent enough, although underlying this capability is an ensuing battle over the fundamental freedom of information and speech. As we’ve seen with MP3s, anyone can copy a song and make it available. If you can digitize it and turn it into a common file format, you can load it onto your network and spread it across the Internet. Common file formats already exist for audio (.mp3), text (.txt) and images (.jpg or .gif).
As P2P picks up, what about sharing DVD files? If you have a DVD player, you already realize you cannot make copies of your movies. There is a "content scrambling system" (CSS) built into your player. A Norwegian named Jon Johansen, frustrated over his inability to play any DVDs on his Linux system, decrypted CSS and made the code, called DeCSS, available to everyone. What happens next is fodder for my next column. So stay tuned. ;-)
Burt Lum, cyber-citizen and self-anointed tour guide to the Internet frontier, is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net
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