p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- In the digital age, information now has an unlimited range.

In our realm of social networks, community and the extension of awareness is very profound. Internet users can get newsletters, RSS feeds, post an opinion or blog, chat with friends, video conference your relatives, watch live footage of their favorite beaches.

The access to information is absolutely mind boggling.

So, just like friends and relatives, they keep in touch. Instead of just snailmail, and phone calls, you can email and video conference them, send them pics of the new grandkids or the catch of the day. It enriches our lives. ‘Hey Joe!, Can I use your lawnmower? Sure Joe. Go right ahead. Just bring it back. Ok?’.

Look familiar? (John Deere is missing out on a lot of backyard-lawnmower-sharing-lost-a-sale-sue-em-all gravy money.).

It’s ingrained in our lives. Didn’t your mother ever tell you to share-and-share alike?

Relative communal theology has spilled over to the internet in a big way. It’s funny. Even the guys at work ‘photoshop’ employee heads in hilarious ways and then email them out.

Now I have more friends online as offline. I have an ‘associate’ social network, where I can present myself professionally. And I have another kind of network, my file-sharing buddies.

With the inception of Hotline, the peer to peer network began. You could easily build a small community built on socializing, chat, pics, video, homework help, advice, and (omg) files in digital format. So I did, and it was really kewl, meeting new people all over the planet. So many different languages and cultures it was staggering.

There were trackers to find new communities, and members started overlapping servers, kind of loosely connecting small webs of servers. There were great online venues to discuss anything and everything. There was a BBS (Bulletin Board System) called The Breakfast Club, and it was ran by Vlad (a well known member of the underground). You could post anything about anything and get honest feedback from others. There wasn’t much trolling back then, (we call it flame, or flaming) where mean, vindictive people would post just to indenture hurt feelings.

It was a great venue, one of the mac history’s best. I met all kinds of intelligent, opinionated people from all walks of life there, and had indepth debates on a variety of useless topics. It also facilitated ‘hook-ups’, or access to the next kewl server/community. ‘Oh ya, you can get x file at so-and-so’s server’.

It only increased the amount of community overlap. Because we were hosting servers that others could connect to, we had a level of control over who actually got access. Some sysadmins began to even charge money for access, not something we in general agreed with, but it happened. With forums to publicly filter access, and membership overlap, and the ability to host your own server, these little webs of communities began to organize.

A few friends get together and all host servers, one does music, another movies, and so on. This eliminates redundancy, and expands variety. A few friends turn into a few dozen friends all hosting servers, now you have what we call a ‘ring’.

Now things start picking up speed. Members of servers open their own server, and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on. Not only is there Hotline, with a Tracker, there are specialty trackers now, fonts, music, movies, games, desktop publishing, mac and pc.

This is getting kewl. Ok, with the population growing, more and more members get filtered out, and you start seeing the cream rise to the top.

Insiders at television stations, insiders in software companies like Macromedia, Adobe, Microsoft, insiders at Warner Bros, United Artists, Virgin Records and others, start showing up.

I’m not kidding.

I met the software engineer at Macromedia who did the serial number encryption for the entire suite of their products once, and built a generator to hand out.

Now the membership with access to high demand content starts increasing, and the variety of accessable content increases with it.

Not just elite content providers are in this mix.  There are [k]rackers, software de-engineers with enough talent to build another application that either bypasses authentication, or validates the software to ignore its requirement.

These are members who are creating their own high demand content.

DND (Do Not Distribute) was a label that denotes just get your own copy, and do not share it. There is some ‘honor among theives’ in that it was shared in tight-knit groups, and not to the ’sheeple’ in general.

BSNG, Buck Rogers Serial Number Generator was massively popular before they went totally underground.

NOP is another group of de-engineers (Next Operating Procedure) who’d krack software and distribute their goods. There is also Serial Box, and mac platform database of serial numbers for software. As more and more quality elite members join these rings, the amount of talent just exponentially increases. And over time, organizes more and more and more. This is still circa 2000, imagine what has happened since.

The same adage of borrowing your neighbors’ lawnmower is similar to how the community thinks.

In our case, ‘Joe’ might be in Buenos Aires, or Sydney, so instead of walking next door to let him listen to your ‘U2 Greatest Hits 1-2′ CDs, you put it online so he can download it. I’m not condemning this,  nor condoning it. It’s the mind-set behind sharing files in a community.

No harm done.

If we didn’t share your content, we probably don’t like it. I don’t see a lot of girly girl movies on bittorrent. Anyone else?

Many sysadmins are intelligent people, internet savvy and highly computer literate.

We kick the trolls and keep the quality members and the community experience improves.

I’ve known some members online for 10 years or more. Eventually, most servers/communities evolve into a well tuned machine, with a quality list of members that don’t just leech (download only) but distribute what they do have access to.

This is Share The Wealth™.
Surfer – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:22 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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