p2pnet - rss feed: Meet p2pnet.ca
p2pnet.net News:- p2pnet has now been online since August, 2002, and with this post, we’re clocking up our 10,000th item.
Actually, what with pre-p2pnet p2pnet.nets (if you see what I mean 
there have been quite a few more posts than that. But who’s counting? heh
Anyway, here’s how p2pnet started out:
When my wife and I found we were about to become parents 10 years ago, I was 54 and Liz was in her early 30s. We decided we wanted to be around while our child grew up, which meant finding a new way of earning a living.
A long time ago, I became a writer entirely by accident and I’ve been trying to find another source of income ever since. But somehow, I always end up writing again.
When I was a reporter, I had a good friend who achieved a very senior rank in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and we often mused that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between journalists and police offices. Basically, they both asked questions for a living.
My friend eventually became a partner in a large international firm with a forensic accounting division and thanks to him, I stopped writing and became a forensic investigator. Liz is a linguist and she acquired a Private Investigator’s license.
We often worked together in various parts of the globe but after six or seven years our daughter, Emma, was born and since we’d always been collectors, we opened a small antique store in a tiny village in Ontario.
Freezing cold winters
I’ve always loved music and file sharing (MIDI, not mp3) got me online in the first place. This exposed me to p2p communications, peer-to-peer networks, which, I believed, were going to become THE distribution and communication vehicles of the 21st digital century.
However, although I love old things, I didn’t like the retail trade very much and I decided to start a web page (blogs didn’t exist, back then) and I moved my computer into the store, set it up on the counter and decided I wanted something with p2p and networks in the domain name. I figured p2pnet.net would be good but although p2p wasn’t what it is today, it wasn’t unknown and I was sure it would have been grabbed. But to my amazement, p2pnet.net was still available.
Meanwhile, we’d had enough of freezing cold winters and hot and humid summers and moved to the far more temperate Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
We drove across Canada with a small supply of stock and when we arrived in BC, started dealing in antiques. But by now I was hooked on p2p. For the first time in history, thanks to the Net, ordinary people such as myself were taking on the Big Corporations and making them listen. And I wanted to keep on being a part of that. So we stopped selling antiques and used what was left of the money we’d made when we sold up in Ontario to try to get p2pnet to a point where it would provide our income so I could continue with it full time.
We reached that point early this year, thanks to BearShare, Blubster, LimeWire, Morpheus and Warez P2P, who’ve been supporting the site and providing our sole income.
Meet p2pnet.ca
Sadly, thanks to the depredations of the corporate entertainment cartels and their grim efforts to maintain their iron control of the so-called ‘consumers’, the people who keep them so very, very rich, Bearshare and LimeWire have been shut down and financially, Liz and I are stretched tight again. Too tight.
For that reason, I’ve decided to revamp the existing p2pnet.net, and add a ‘personal’ p2pnet blog called p2pnet.ca.
My friend Jason Rohrer, who built the very cool MUTE anonymous indie p2p file sharing application, modified his equally cool seedBlog and seedBlog is now the backbone of p2pnet.ca, which will continue to be simple, no-glitz and utilitarian.
Over the next few months, p2pnet.net will change in both look and approach, although it’ll continue to carry the kinds of posts that have become its hall-mark fare, including stories on the RIAA, et al and etc, but they’ll be more or less straight reports, with links to p2pnet.ca stories.
p2pnet.net will no longer carry items which interest me personally, ie Big Music and Big Movies stories with my own slant, posts on home-schooling, attempts by the cartels to brainwash our children wholesale, and so on. These topics will instead be featured exclusively in the p2pnet.ca and I plan to gradually move relevant p2pnet stories to p2pnet.ca, where they’ll be archived.
Comments will continue to be named or anonymous, although I’ll be approving them before they go online. This isn’t because I want to monitor or censor anything and I give you my cast-iron, solid-gold, carved in rock word that with the same qualifications that are on p2pnet (see below), comments will be posted as is.
We allow anonymous comments, but we don’t in any way accept responsiblity for them. We don’t monitor Readers’ Writes. But we sometimes post them as stories. We delete anything that’s obscene or denigrates gender or religion. And we delete all lame efforts to get free advertising by posting in Readers’ Writes.
However, because I don’t control p2pnet comment posts in any way, and nor am I able to tell from whom they come from, I’m currently being flooded by obnoxious spam comment posts, mainly from China and Russia. And I don’t intend to let that happen to p2pnet.ca.
I and friends are still trying to deal with this problem, but it may be that I’ll be forced to also introduce an approval system on p2pnet as well. I hope not, but I don’t have time to waste manually killing the spam comments, as I’m doing at the moment.
It’s a blight on freedom of expression, apart from anything else.
Nor will p2pnet.ca carry advertising, although if anyone wants to become a named sponsor, that’d be cool and I’ll feature links to anyone who helps out in that way.
That’s it for the moment.
Cheers! And thanks. And all the best …
Jon
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
October 2nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm
This approach will make it less anonymous coz of the involvement of the email address
October 2nd, 2006 at 5:18 pm
“We allow anonymous comments, but we don’t in any way accept responsiblity for them. ”
Jon, even if wanted to accept responsibility you could not. Here is why:
a. For defamation to exist a statement must be untruth.
b. To determine a truth requires research and evidence. Postings from people all over the world may have a “facts” things that are not true but are impossible to research due to limited time, resources and access to the real facts.
Additionally, if you allow only postings that off hand, without research or evidence offend no one and be critical (meaning no one is criticized) of no one, then the postings will neve be controversial. The published posts would all be lame “mutual admiration society” type that would be useless and boring.
A web news site, like a newspaper, a magazine and radio station without controversies, information that may be or may not be true or critial will soon disappear. That is not what the peopple want from news sources.
And each time you filtered a posting there will be a reader who will scream that the free speech rights were violated. Rightfully so.
Hey, may here is a good argument in your lawsuit: It is simply not possible to filter out free speech, what people say.
Jon, I know I haven’t said anything you did not know. It’s that others should know it too.
Good luck for you, p2pnet and p2pnet.ca.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com
October 3rd, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Good luck with p2pnet.ca Jon!
I certainly understand first-hand your hassles with spam. We have been dealing with the same sort of thing over at Boycott Riaa ( http://www.boycottriaa.com ) and currently, our “comments” are down due to the spam activities (although we are using DMusic forums as a backup) …but we will soon be implementing a system that uses “captcha” like you do to help thwart the automated spam-bots.
Best wishes!
Shmoo, aka “independentmusician”
Admin/Mod of Boycott Riaa
Support Local and Independent Music!
October 4th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
You have an interesting background.
p2pnet.ca looks good but I hope it doesn’t take too much away from this site.
October 5th, 2006 at 12:15 am
Some might say that you’re pulling the plug, and perhaps it might be easier if you actually did, but if you’re still about then good luck to you and to your family.
October 5th, 2006 at 11:46 am
Don’t worry, Drake, I promise p2pnet’s content isn’t going to suffer.
Cheers@
October 5th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
And Nikki Hemming supposedly has a lesser right to defend herself than people on this site had to attack her?
Freedom of speech cuts both ways, if people have the right to say what they want, then their victims have an equal right to defend themselves. And amongst the many friends that Jon undoubtedly has, he has also made more than his fair share of enemies.
Nothing personal. Time to move on, good call Jon, and good luck
October 6th, 2006 at 10:17 am
“Freedom of speech cuts both ways, if people have the right to say what they want, then their victims have an equal right to defend themselves.”
The friend here makes a true, but misleading statement.
Anyone should be able to defend his/her position, whether on a personal or non personal matter. But just because one dislikes what is said, and one has a right to refute what was said, a person’s (or the person’s children) life or business should not be disrupted and destroyed because of what was said.
Freedom of speech is, after all, the right to say what others find don’t like or find objectionable, without one’s life, family and business being disrupted or destroyed.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com