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P2P's Hit on Software, Video, and AOL

I've been particularly amazed at both the 1) ease and 2) variety of pirated copyrighted software packages on Kazaa (and the other peer-to-peer file sharing systems). It's as easy as typing in the application name and downloading whatever you wish. It's clear that the hit that the music industry is taking regarding album sales will soon transfer to software itself and then to video. The software piracy industry once had the need to go develop relations with the 3l1t3 HaX0rs out on IRC and learn how to use FTP. Today, anonymity is provided easily through a P2P file sharing app. Kazaa today is easy enough for even the most backward of 12-year-old kids.

Video will be the next hit after software. Fortunately, for the movie studios and distributors, the hardware (mostly disk space requirements) and bandwidth haven't caught up yet. But, it's coming quickly. People have mentioned to me that it'll be interesting to see how the likes of TiVo, etc. are able to capitalize on the allowing people to buy and download movies onto their set-top boxes. I think this will not take off, as P2P will hit it as well. Why pay $3 a movie when you can just download it yourself onto the PC and then copy it directly to your TiVo?

Perhaps this also signals an interesting development around the combination Pipe+Content companies that were created in the late 1990's. The foremost example here is AOL. Sadly, AOL is providing 1) content, for which margins will be decreasing greatly and 2) a pipe to the Internet, which is commoditizing. Perhaps it's time to sell AOL and perhaps this is the reason that Ted Turner is so pissed at Steve Case.

Spam Killer

Product Idea to fight Spam:

Problem: Everyone is completely fed up with Spam. In fact, I just received THREE copies of the same spam email purportedly from "Gore Vidal". (If only Mr Vidal knew that his name was being used to sell photos of underage girls through spam...)

Solution: Use the combined filtering of everyone on the web to automagially weed out email from people's inboxes before they read it. How? Develop a mail reader (Outlook) plug-in that scans each piece of mail and develops a signature for that mail. Each user reading the mail can identify it as "Spam" and the plug-in will register that vote in a central server. After a threshold of votes is realized in the central server for a piece of mail, a piece of mail can be identified as "Spam." When mail is downloaded into the client, the plug-in contacts the server to see if any of the new mail is Spam.

Business Model: Interestingly enough, this is likely a bootstrappable business. Set up the server, offer the plug-in for free for non-commercial use. Commercial use is $50 per client.

Update: Someone's already doing this idea: SpamNet. Also, I downloaded it and it works very very well. Has caught all of my spam so far and hasn't made any mistakes yet. Very nice.

How to Make Millions without Writing a New Business Plan

I wrote a brief essay on the return of the Dot-Com's. It's here. Update: I submitted this to news.com but was denied. If you ask me, this is emblematic of why CNET is losing $100mm per quarter. Maybe I'll sell them short. ;)

I've also become obsessed with getting my Kazaa ranking up. I have finally reached Guru status. To do my little part for the Internet community, I spent some time rehabilitating my old Celeron 400mhz PC and am going to have it run file sharing while I'm out of town on the road for the next couple of weeks.

Wardriving and Jenine

Went to see Jenine Garafolo last night as part of our 3rd anniversary celebration. Overall, a nice show though my legs are always crammed into the Warfield's seats.. painfully so. I like going to shows like this and seeing the type of folks that show up. One thing very noticable was the lack of the "beautiful people" in the audience. Jenine's best moment was when she acknowledged this in a very sly way by mimicing a boyfriend asking, "Why do you like her anyway? She's not funny." and his girlfriend retorting, "Because she looks like me." Cleary so.

Also, went wardriving today. It's super simple, just download Net Stumber and drive around with your laptop on batteries. In a short trip from my house to the cleaners in the Haight, I found 45 WiFi networks, of which 22 were unsecured. 5 were found in my building itself, which is a testament to the creative types floating around.

My weblog is now operational. And, given that I am no longer gainfully employed in the conventional sense, I have plenty more free time to add to this. Time will tell!

I'm hanging around SF for the next couple of weeks until after my final triathlon of the season (http://www.tricalifornia.com/treasureisland/2002/home.htm), and then I'm going to hit the road. First stop will likely be the Great Canadian North to hang with my friends in Vancouver, and then over to Denver. Growing up, my family was well off enough to visit overseas, but I never saw much of America. For example, Montana.

ETD of about 10 days.

test.