Data — Page 2

Yet another nay-saying

December 21, 2000 by Michael Boyle

article about peer to peer network applications in eCompany Now [via Scripting News]. I don’t know what SETI@home has to do with p2p, however. It’s a classic client-server app, no? A central server collates the results of the work of a distributed network of machines that send it processed data. The only difference is the relationship between the machines doing the crunching and the server. Maybe I’ve missed something?

P2P is something else entirely – it’s all about eliminating (or minimizing) the central server’s position in the mix. That’s its power – and its disadvantage. It is hard to see where the profits lie in deploying P2P schemes. No harder, though, than divining the profit-potential of the internet as a whole – and that certainly didn’t hinder its development.

For me, the power of P2P is more fundamental than whether or not anyone has figured out the business model to make it work. Think of something like the old Firefly music-suggestion site (which was very cool for its day, and anticipated a lot of stuff people are looking at now). Imagine if people had the option of running Firefly within their net-aware MP3 player. And think if you could make “buddies” lists (like in an IM program) and integrate their preferences to help suggest what you might like. Say you could tell the software, “give 100% weight to my preferences, 80% confidence to my buddies list, and 60% to people one degree away from my own buddies.” Etc.

The trick with p2p isn’t to hold off until the profitable way comes along, just as that wasn’t the case with the net as a whole. The trick is to recognize that it’s there, and that people love it. That’s the world – now people have to figure out how to live in it, commercially or no.

Is there anywhere

December 19, 2000 by Michael Boyle

you can get reliable data on the current state of the internet down to the local level? I know of the Internet Traffic Report, but that doesn’t seem to indicate that there’s anything wrong, and anyhow talking about North America as a whole seems a little broad to me.

I’m prompted by the problems that some folks in San Francisco seem to be having, but also because we had the same situation at work a couple of weeks ago when UUNet went down here in Montreal for 8+ hours. Our sites stayed up cause they’re cloned elsewhere, databases and all. But the ISP whose BoD I’m on had huge problems – their backup bandwidth from Videotron relied on UUNet as well (which was news to everyone).

There was more on the privacy front

December 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

in Canada today. Jen Ditchburn (who I knew when she lived here in Montreal) reports that the privacy of personal data is to become a right that will be protected by law. The new law will apply pretty broadly too, it seems. Good news.

As noted at

November 3, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Scripting News today, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works. Which is the long way of saying that you can hack blocking software to figure out what it’s blocking. This rule neatly obviates many of the concerns that were noted by ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen in his excellent article in Writ Magazine, Do We Really Want a Secret Censorship System.

The question I have is about the second class of works specified in the Rule: “Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsolescence.” It’s hard for me to parse exactly what this means. But it’s interesting, and the possibilities are, to me, very positive. Anyone who still thinks the gov’t doesn’t get it is out of touch, in my opinion. As I’ve said before, the government gets it just fine (at least in the US), it’s just that things have to be worked out in terms of law and policy, which can take a while.

I’m absolutely convinced

September 16, 2000 by Michael Boyle

that publications that place their editorial material online stand a much greater chance of increasing their subscription and newsstand revenue. I don’t have a lot of firm data to support my point of view, but I have lots of experience – I’ve been involved in publishing original material online for over 6 years now. And the only conclusion I can reach is that if the media are different, alternative channels support each other, they don’t undercut one another.

In Wired News today there’s an article that looks at magazines who don’t have much of an online presence: Publishing Without a Net. It’s interesting to read alternative views to my own.