i’m going to try to stop posting articles about the client as server thing. i’m getting burned-out on the whole issue – but i still can’t help myself. from the washington post we get a piece that predicts big changes afoot [and gives a good overview of the development of gnutella]:

“Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster’s developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there’s no central authority.”

“Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a “revolutionary” program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer.”

the gate continues the festival with an article on scour

“Napster’s huge underground success has unleashed the maverick concept of creating a shared online library of free songs.

Now, a new program called Scour Exchange takes the Napster concept and extends it to photos, videos and feature-length films.”

i’m not sure why they chose to highlight scour, when there are plenty of alternatives.

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