ZDNet ran an interesting preview of an upcoming presentation by Intel — to
sum it up, Intel will announce near the end of August that it is working on
peer-to-peer networking or so-called virtual private network software for consumer
and business purposes. In plain English this is what that means — probably
within less than two years you will be able to run your own private Napster.
Then the record industry is really going to be in hot water.
As I have said on previous occasions, I do not believe in pirating music. I
think compact discs are cheap and when I want MP3s I actually go buy the CD
and rip it onto my hard drive. But the people I know who do use illegal MP3s
do not necessarily use Napster. A lot of people I know simply borrow CDs from
friends and rip those. One person I know actually borrowed the massive CD collection
that his DJ friend had and spent a couple weeks ripping hundreds of CDs on his
computer. I have had several people offer to burn me a CD-R filled with MP3s
— it is the 21st century version of the mix tape.
The sort of software that Intel is planning — and that others will create
with or without them — merely obviates the need to have a physical medium in
the middle. What I would like to see is an ICQ-style application (actually it
would be better to build this as an add on to ICQ). Suppose I am online chatting
with my brother and I mention that I just took my wife and daughter to the zoo.
He would love to see the pictures. Okay, I click on his username in ICQ and
instantly he has access on his end to the directory on my hard drive that contains
my most recent digitized photographs. This is what Intel is pushing as a possible
application and it would be very useful. Imagine an extended family giving each
other access to the various photographs stored on separate hard drives of the
last family reunion, for example.
But of course as my wife Lisa summed it up, the two largest uses of such a
system would be to trade in porn and music/movies. Think about it — why use
a service like Napster where you could potentially be tracked down for passing
along an MP3 for someone? Instead, set up a virtual private network so you and
your close friends can have access to each other’s MP3 files and swap those.
No central server keeping track of who is doing what — nobody would even know
what is being traded since in order for the corporate types to buy into this
sort of thing for their uses, there has to be some pretty serious security built
into the system.
Obviously the main thing that is missing in this picture and in Napster to
a large extent is broadband services. There is no way I am going to let my brother
tie up my 56K connection to download JPEGS of my daughter making faces at the
monkeys, but if I had a DSL connection I might be willing to set aside a fraction
of that for a peer-to-peer network. Once broadband is widely available (and
when that is likely to happen is anybody’s guess), this is really the future
of PC networking. If the speed and the software ever arrive, this will change
the personal computing experience just as much as the rise of the World Wide
Web did. What a glorious time to be alive.
Source:
Intel
likes what it hears in Napster. John G. Spooner, ZDnet.Com, August 9, 2000.