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Monday, April 10, 2006
Geekboy answers his fans!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I finally read my e-mail! I get a lot of good questions, this is not one of them.
AngryKeyboarder writes: Nothing irritates me more than misinformation from the media. Despite your statements to the contrary, Limewire, Gnutella, BitTorrent, Azureus, Kazaa, eMule and so on do not connect via the “World Wide Web”.
They connect via proprietary protocols on completely different ports than “The Web.”
“The Web” is a means to communicate and share files over the Internet. It is not the Internet itself. The media almost never points out popular, useful and perfectly legal use of file sharing on the Internet. Most notably, via Bittorrent.
I don’t suppose you’ll point this out in your blog anytime soon eh?
Geekboy writes: Did you even read the file sharing column? I pointed out BitTorrent.
Programs used to share files are not illegal. You can download any and all of them, and as long as you are not downloading something that is copyright protected your activities are legal.
But sharing copyright protected software, music or movies is illegal, no matter what program (or protocol) you use.
You seem to think “the Web” is nothing more than the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) protocol.
Any protocol, especially those employing a distributed load scheme like BitTorrent, is using “the Web” to enable communication between remote computers.
What port any particular software uses doesn’t matter! It is funny you would argue such a thing.
HTTP (the protocol used by servers to disseminate Web pages) uses port 80, generally, but many servers use another port. Are these servers no longer part of the Internet because they are not using a particular port?
Thanks for the jokes!
