Ramkumar's Log

Meet the Napster - TIME

Interesting account of Napster and its creator.

But there was a huge leap of faith involved. Nearly everyone he mentioned the idea to believed it wasn’t workable. “It’s a selfish world, and nobody wants to share,” snorted his older, more experienced buddies from the IRC chat rooms. Fanning, an inarticulate teenager at the time, couldn’t adequately explain himself. He insisted that people would do it, because, like… just because.

We talk so much about social media and sharing these days. There are social networks to share pretty much anything. Which makes that previous paragraph especially striking.

We could all become music pirates because it was just so damn easy to do—easier even than ordering a CD online. And once that happened, would we ever be able to go back to getting into our car, driving to the mall and buying a shrink-wrapped piece of plastic with a little silver disc inside? “I don’t know how to stop it,” says Atlantic Records Group co-chairman Val Azzoli, of the problems created by Napster. “It’s not just music I’m worried about. It’s all intellectual properties. If you can take music, you can take everything else too.”

Back then, he thought he would just write the application and set it free—his name would be embedded deep in the source code and known only to the other hackers and programmers who care about such things. He misses that simple time, before magazine covers and TV interviews and Britney Spears and having to put on a goofy black suit and necktie to appear in court.

Opera 10.60 is out

I tweet quite a fair bit about Opera, so a post here makes some sense.

I’ve been running this since the early alpha builds, and it’s only gotten better. Opera keeps talking about the speed. But more than anything they’ve done before, this release is one very polished and refined browser. And you see it in the details: the UI, the way the page is dimmed when you search for a word, the slick tab previews or the way dialogs boxes and javascript prompts slide down and out of the way when dismissed. It all works and works well. And as much as I like Opera, that’s something I couldn’t always say in the past.

Google opens VP8 codec, aims to nuke H.264 with WebM

Finally, an open alternative. Good on you Google.

The State Of Web Development Ripped Apart In 25 Tweets By One Man

Great points here.

Court: RapidShare doesn't need to filter user uploads

Interesting points in this article.

…RapidShare cannot be held responsible for actions of third parties, since it forces people to choose how their content should be distributed rather than making it automatically available to the public.

Notwithstanding the tracker, if sites such as The Pirate Bay allowed users to set access controls over their uploaded torrents, would they also stand a chance to be absolved in a similar fashion?

Numerous filtering schemes were discussed, and none of them was deemed to work.

In addition, the appeals court took aim at several filtering schemes. Blocking all files of a certain type (such as RAR files) was deemed inappropriate, since a file type has no bearing on the legality of an upload. Scanning by IP address was also tossed, because numerous people can use a single IP address. File name filtering tells you nothing about the contents of a file, so that was tossed. Even content scanning was problematic, as the court noted that this would just lead to encrypted files. Besides, even if you could know that a file was copyrighted, it could still be a legal “private backup” not distributed to anyone else.

A sign that things will only become more murky and complicated after that fight with The Pirate Bay.

On music journalism

Criticism isn’t dying because we made an aggregator — it’s dying because people don’t exercise their critical thinking. It’s dying because they’re tired of having some guy in a baseball cap scream in their face about what they should and shouldn’t appreciate, because now that all of their friends and their mom, too, have a blog, they can’t see why they should listen to him instead.

Spot on.

April 22, 1993: Mosaic Browser Lights Up Web With Color, Creativity | This Day In Tech | Wired.com