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June 02, 2003

Nullsoft WASTE

Here come another interesting event in software industry. Nullsoft released a secured P2P software named WASTE on May 28, 2003. WASTE run under a enrypted, distributed network protocol, and it was released under a GPL license; the news was slashdotted. Three days later, Nullsoft’s parent company, AOL Time Warner, pulled it back and announced WASTE was an unauthorized Nullsoft’s copyrighted software. The official entry page of WASTE has been modified and declared the unauthorized software:

NOTICE OF UNAUTHORIZED SOFTWARE

An unauthorized copy of Nullsoft’s copyrighted software was briefly posted on this website on or about Wednesday May 28, 2003. The software was identified as “WASTE” (the “Software”) and includes the files “waste-setup.exe”, “waste-source.zip”, “waste-source.tar.gz” and any additional files contained in these files.

Nullsoft is the exclusive owner of all right, title and interest in the Software. The posting of the Software on this website was not authorized by Nullsoft.

It is like: “Here’s the cool stuff, you could view, modify and even distribute it. Oops, no, we regret, we made a mistake, it’s COPYRIGHTED. Don’t distribute it!!” This again, been slashdotted and brought up a hot discussion if the downloaded copy still maintain its right as it was released under GPL.

AOL is quick on its action to pull down WASTE. This isn’t the first time they are doing it. Justin Frankel, the co-founder and principal developer of Nullsoft, developed Gnutella and putting it on website in year 2000. But it was quickly taken down, though other developers had able to download the source in time or reverse engineer later to form the Gnutella network. The other time was AOL forcing Nullsoft to shutdown its MP3 search engine. AOL is obviously dislike anything Nullsoft done having conflict with its media business, not at least.

Although it looks probably AOL could claim its authority (Nullsoft’s authority), lots of copies of WASTE has been mirrored and shared among P2P network (e.g. eDonkey, Freenet). Dave Winer has posted the source code on second day of its release.

Further news:

[Update, Jun 10] The cache of google is no more caching the original page, you could get the mirror of those original pages at:

They have also setup the network based on WASTE. Download and follow the instruction if you’d like to join.

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The guru? Or the skillful searcher?

Nobody could know everything. I got the same feeling/experience as Jeremy and Kasia. I agree with his perception of “knowledge worker” in 90s, and we have more or less achieved that with the Web and of course, the search engines. That actually means the knowledge isn’t well organized, instead, it is accessible because of good work of Google, Altavista, Alltheweb, Yahoo…etc (did Yahoo’s initial categorized web into directories still working? How often did people searching information through web directory now?)

I was too feeling guilty sometimes as giving credit of solving some problems. Without actually good at the particular problem, I was just able to effectively search the web —- most of the time, google. Or more specifically, Google groups, which previously known as dejanews, store and indexing all newsgroup posts. I used to found google groups more helpful on searching technical information. Take for example, I was searching for Microsoft Global IME for NT4 for my chinese typing in office PC this morning. I got the feel that M$ is either too dump in organizing its sites, or else it’s purposely being unfriendly to Google. It’s difficult to get what you want on Microsoft, no matter you try to be specific or general. Failed to get it on web search, I found easily some other’s similar experience by turning to search on newsgroup. That’s what great of Google groups.

Nevertheless, you need to get experience for being skillful or effective to search. Being more senior position in my department, I found freshies can’t really judge what they’ve gotten from google. Or, they don’t know what to search. Take the other example, fresh VB developer could only scratch their head while facing some weird Windows development problem. Without knowledge of Windows API and how it really works under the hood, they can’t really analyze the searching result. Here’s the experience came into picture.

So is it enough by just knowing how to search? Nope. It’d never be, your knowledge foundation and analysis morph into something called searching know how. Not everybody looks the same in front of search engine. So, Kasia, you shouldn’t feel guilty over that. :)

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A call to God?

While I was driving to work this morning, I heard of this over radio: in movie Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey has gotten a phone number, which someone page him to call back, and that “someone” appearred to be God! (played by Morgan Freeman). So what would you do if you got God’s phone number in the real world? I bet you’d at least make a call to say hello. That’s story, the phone featured in the film is a actual phone number. Thousand of calls have been made to the number over weekend, since the movie showed in cinema on Friday. Hollywood film usually don’t use a real number, instead they use prefix 555 which never used in U.S.

That’s fun. What’d you going to say to God if you got a chance to talk to him/her? “Hello, may I speak to God? I need some help…”

Find the news here.

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