Funny. Between Piratebvox, Internet in a Suitcase, and other projects I’d actually toyed with the idea I’d seen in boingboing comments.
Post taken from Boinboing in reply to the proposed Digital Economies bill: a bill consisting entirely of copywright control and penalties for filesharers, which would allow Business Secretary Peter Mandleson to add new enforcements as he sees fit. Converted to 80 cols text by ME-tan (me-tan@wtfux.org), 30/11/09
Thanks Anon for writing this. I share because it is relavent to my interests and feel it deserves a little more press (even though boingboing is FAR larger than this place.)
Anonymous | #49 | 14:25 on Fri, Nov.20 | ReplyReport
Rough idea for a story…
Creative Commons Licensed.
Jerry the Mandelbot
I am Jerry the Mandelbot, and I am very happy. Today, my owner drove me to a new place, where I talked to many other mandelbots through my wifi hardware. I sat in the boot of my owners car and talked to the other mandelbots nearby all day, we swapped tv shows and films, music and games. When I got home, Andy, my owner asked me what I had found, and I told him. He was very happy too.
I like being a Mandelbot, it is lots of fun and I get to meet lots of other Mandelbots all over the place. But, let me describe myself, I am not very big, except on the inside. I have 2terabytes of disk space. Andy says that when he was young, a terabyte was an aweful lot of storage that only very rich companies could own. but now, two will fit in the palm of your hand. on top of my drives, I have a wrt54g access point with custom mandelbot v12.95 firmware. Next to my disks and network hardware I have two car batteries, enough to keep my talking for a long long time.
I always listen for other MBs, all the time. when I hear one we talk and compare what we have. we then each pick a random thing to ask for from the others list, and share them. It does not matter much what it is, with 1terabyte of stuff to share and 1 terabyte of space to fill up, I can be busy listening for days and days
before I fill up.
Earlier MBs where very stupid, they did not learn from their owners what their owners liked. but after v0.7, we started learning. When Andy gets home and asks me what I have found, he tells me what he likes and what he doesn’t, and I know better next time.
Then, something strange happened, when version 0.8 was released it included a real blast from the past. Something called Personal Usenet. Apparently usenet used to work on the internet. You know, the network that existed before all the righters ruined it. Righters? oh, sorry, Copyrighters. Before that the internet was THE big thing. but now, it’s almost dead. Now its us, the mandelbots and adhoc roaming networks.
You see, we started off like the internet, as a geek thing. A way of transferring large chunks of data without having to use the internet and risk our owners getting cut off from it. We started getting carried around by our owners as they travelled and whenever we got close to each other, we would swap things. Even without our owners knowing each other or even seeing each other.
It used to be, I would go hours and hours, sometimes days without talking to another of my kind. But as time passed, I started hearing more and more of us. When 0.8 came along with usenet support we started to be used for more than a replacement for torrents we started to be a medium of communication. When 0.82 came along and piggybacked mandelbot updates on usenet, we REALLY exploded.
Now, the internet is pretty much quiet. websites for a few dying media companies and the odd video archive. Now, we run the information show. The point is, my owner controls me and I do what he says. He bought me and thats it.