Daily Archives: July 26, 2003

Subpoena Searcher

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If you’re one of the American consumers that the RIAA has “declared war on,” you may want to visit this site by EFF. It will look up your name and see if it’s the target of a subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I don’t condone peer-to-peer file trading, and I don’t practice it. But I feel that if a company is going to try and collect millions of dollars from people for being music fans, they should have a right to know that they’re being spied on.

Just another example of the ridiculousness of corporate abuse of copyright law.

(Link via Wired.)

The Future of Applications

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Today, most people are used to two forms of software programs – programs that run on the computer in front of you, and client-server programs, that also run on the computer in front of you, but talk to another program (usually) running on another computer.

Recent advances in many varied technologies, including XML, greater availability of Internet bandwidth, and the ever-increasing supply of quality open-source software from places like SourceForge and the Mozilla Foundation are slowly causing a profound change in the assumptions of software design.

The software of tomorrow will most likely be based on the combined effort of code running on many different machines. This is not like the grid computing architecture I blogged about on July 13th. The difference is that rather than many computers doing the same calculation on a large collection of data, each computer in distributed software applications provides a specific function that integrates into the larger application.

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