The good folks at Red Hat released their newest product, Red Hat Linux 9 last week. As Red Hat Linux is a GPL product, allowing anyone to freely distribute it, an enterprising developer used it to promote his new peering technology, Bittorrent.

Though it’s still rough around the edges (even I had trouble installing it, and I’m an old-school Linux hacker), the technology behind it is solid. I was totally amazed to watch it download three CD’s worth of software faster than I could have ever hoped to download it from an FTP server. Many times faster.

It works by chaining folks together as they download. For instance, once one person grabs a chunk of file, that person’s chunk gets shared by others who need it. Rather than all these people flooding a handful of FTP servers, they cooperatively share the files amongst themselves. Thus the download can scale almost without limit.

Keep an eye on this project, because tools like BitTorrent will soon rule the Internet.

I read an interesting essay on the fabrications that have previously led our country into war. It is, quite literally, as old as the nation.

Some juicy quotes:

Chile, 1963-76: Americans support the fascist Augusto Pinochet, whom overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende three years earlier. While Pinochet was a bloody despot who had thousands of civilians tortured and murdered, he was also favorable to American corporate interests. [Cooper] Many of his killers were trained in the “School of the Americas,” in Fort Benning, Georgia. [Anon1]

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Henry Kissenger.

Hey, Henry. It’s called “democracy.”

The point of it all is that when the jet engines get throttled up and troops are ready to roll, dust off your bullshit detector because you’re bound to hear some doozies.

I just read an article about Kip Frey, the guys who never did a damn thing as president of Accipiter but get rich. Kip couldn’t lead to save his life, yet he keeps getting slapped into management roles at startups.

The puff piece in Triangle Business Journal calls him a “serial entrepreneur.” What a joke. He shut down Ventana publishing, sold Accipiter, sold Opensite, and shuttered Zoom Culture. I thought an entrepreneur started companies, not finished them off?

If Kip ever steps in to run your company, update your resume!