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tHoWzAnDz of pHiLeZ
Wednesday, June 25 2003
It was hot yesterday, but things were a little more extreme today and it finally felt like genuine East Coast summer. This part of the country is extremely seasonal and, right on schedule, the weather does exactly what it is said to do in age-old songs sung to children. Gretchen and I were both making a housecall at a mutual client when the heat first hit me. I hadn't had much sleep last night, and something about that, the heat, and the frustration of waiting for things to happen on an incredibly slow computer had me sweating profusely. By the early afternoon we'd both accomplished our business. Gretchen had reorganized a cluttered basement and I'd installed a wireless network. After that we hit the low-rent health food store out on 9W and had our increasingly-customary lunch of salad bar and tempeh reubens.
By the time we made it back to the house, it was time to jump into our kiddie pool, which we've relocated from a patch of anærobically-decaying lawn to the flattest part of our overlarge McMansion driveway.
In the afternoon I caught up on my sleep deficit by taking a nap in the second guest room. Though the rest of the house (particularly the attic) is too hot for comfort, it was cool enough in the basement for me to use a blanket.
The latest news about the RIAA warning of "hundreds" of suits to be filed against file sharers has me worrying a little about whether or not it could actually be effective. I certainly hope not; I depend on file sharing as my chief means of discovering new music. There will always be the vast difficult-to-regulate rest of the world for the RIAA to contend with, and so far they're acting as if the internet is a phenomenon restricted to the United States. Should internet music file trading ever be effectively eliminated by the RIAA, I'm hoping to see replacements, particularly those that bypass the internet entirely. My favorite idea (which I've mentioned before) involves portable music devices with incredible capacity and the ability to spontaneously build temporary ad-hoc wireless networks. There's a potential for huge amounts of untraceable data to flow over such networks, particularly in large population centers. You'd have to specify what files you were looking for before venturing out with your pocket-sized data-gathering device, but with reasonably-intelligent software, the machine could handle things from there. Short of teams of plains-clothed-but-jack-booted RIAA agents equipped with triangulation antennas and arrest authority, there would be no way to stop the flow of anything over such a network. You'd carry your little device with you in your car driving down the freeway and pass through the effective range of thousands of other such devices on your way to your destination, networking with each briefly but long enough to pass any files you may need. File sharing is too much of a killer app to scare away with litigation.
Indeed, think of all the wireless nodes already established in this country. Anyone lucky enough to have anonymous internet access through a wireless node would face no risk from sharing out his entire music collection. Indeed, if I really wanted to be Robin Hood about giving MP3s away, I could build a bare-bones computer, install KaZaA Lite on it, power it with solar cells, put my entire music collection in a shared folder on its hard drive, and hide it in a tree near where I installed the wireless hub today. Every time the sun shone brightly enough pHoKeS would suddenly have access to tHoWzAnDz of pHiLeZ. Once the jack-booted RIAA agents tracked down the source of these files, they would prove to be coming from an IP address leased to my client - but her ignorance should be an adequate defence. I expect a few of the people "named" by the RIAA in the coming weeks will use just such a defence, legitimate or otherwise.
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