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September 20, 2003

Speak, Freely

Speak Freely end of life announcement. Actually an impassioned rant against the disappearance of an end-to-end era in the Net.

The Internet of the near future will be something never contemplated when Speak Freely was designed, inherently hostile to such peer-to-peer applications.
...In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT... There are powerful forces, including government, large media organisations, and music publishers who think this situation is just fine.
And more -- much more -- in The Digital Imprimatur:
Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past.
(via Hack The Planet).