Flutterby™! : End of an era

Jay doesn't have real permalinks set up, this is in reference to the entry marked "End of an Era, Part CCCLXVIII", which links to the end of life announcement for Speak Freely:

The Internet of the near future will be something never contemplated when Speak Freely was designed, inherently hostile to such peer-to-peer applications.

I am not using the phrase "peer to peer" as a euphemism for "file sharing" or other related activities, but in its original architectural sense, where all hosts on the Internet were fundamentally equal. Certainly, Internet connections differed in bandwidth, latency, and reliability, but apart from those physical properties any machine connected to the Internet could act as a client, server, or (in the case of datagram traffic such as Speak Freely audio) neither--simply a peer of those with which it communicated. Any Internet host could provide any service to any other and access services provided by them. New kinds of services could be invented as required, subject only to compatibility with the higher level transport protocols (such as TCP and UDP). Unfortunately, this era is coming to an end.

Go read it. This speaks to so much wheel reinvention; so much wasted effort. And not to pick on Microsoft too badly, but I've used Windows on an unprotected connection recently, and that requires a firewall, which means you've got to build workarounds, and pretty soon people are no longer sure if it's parody.