Posted on 04/24/2005 9:46:08 PM PDT by r5boston
College kids looking for free music may have popularized Internet file-trading software, but the technology is now used by everyone from penny-pinching phone callers to polar explorers.
Even the recording industry is changing its tune as labels that for years have waged a legal war against peer-to-peer companies are now allowing authorized uses of the technology.
"I never thought you'd hear this from me, but the record industry has, mostly, been fairly cooperative," said Wayne Rosso, who is launching an authorized service called Mashboxx while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the entertainment industry's copyright suit against Grokster, his old peer-to-peer company.
Peer-to-peer software allows users to connect directly to each others' computers, bypassing the powerful servers that underpin much of the Internet. Web pages, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and other material usually stored on servers can thus be made public directly from a user's hard drive.
That makes online communication much simpler, said Steve Crocker, who helped develop an early version of the Internet as a graduate student in the 1960s.
"When you think about the amount of hardware and bandwidth and storage that we all have available on the most common of machines and then you think about how hard it is to actually work together, there's a huge disparity," said Crocker, whose Shinkuro software allows people in different locations to work on the same document. Encrypted communication keeps snoops and hackers at bay.
High school teachers in Washington have turned to Shinkuro to develop lesson plans, and researchers on a polar icebreaker have used it to send back photos of unusual ice formations, Crocker said.
Two online standards-setting bodies, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, have developed agendas and other material with Shinkuro, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
...cult artists like Sananda Maitreya, formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby.
"Terence Trent D'Arby" WAS kinda awkward, good thing he's gone simple on this one...
LOLOLOL
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