From Wired: The Shadow Internet

An excellent article on how files, whether major motion pictures, the latest software, or newest albums, make it from the “topsites” down to the P2P networks.

Goodbye, 2004…as a year, you were good, and bad, and middlin’. You gave us a national election, but no national agreement. You continued the trend of people getting their “news” from places they agree with ideologically, instead of spending a moment to see the world from a different perspective. You watched over democracy growing in places of the world completely unexpected, while in the countries in which this country fights for democracy, the outlook ain’t so rosy.

You were the year wherein we discovered that National Public Radio isn’t our network the way we always assumed it was, but just another Clear-Channel-like corporation that does whatever the hell the people in charge decide in their unseemly search for ratings regardless of what the listeners want. You were also the year that convinced many of us to move to XM Satellite Radio in a desperate and ultimately successful search of a replacement.

You saw more and more of our personal privacy dissapear; yes, by the government, but even more frighteningly by private concerns who profit from exposing us publically. From grocery stores to credit card providers, more and more of our private lives are being cataloged, processed and used against us to take what little savings we have away from us. RFID tags were promised to track even those things we pay for with cash, so in future years everything we purchase can be tracked back to us. At the same time telemarketers screamed “free speech!” while attempting to circumvent the clear wishes of the majority of the population that they stop coming into our homes uninvited.
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