Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Flash It

So far I have been through three complete introductorycourses of FLASH. Three. And they were all the same.The same. Except for the last one. In the last one,held by invitation at the Grad Center, Marlboro College, our leader, Annisa Hartman, pushed the class into buildinga button. Now, atleast, the cartoon can be made to 'start'and 'stop'. The default in Flash is to 'loop'. Three vanilla intro courses into Flash. My own research ledme to a fourm page where different users were commenting onjust what Flash was good for. The collective opinion was more ofwhat is wasn't good for. And cartoons is definitely not whatit is good for.Now, this is irony. What I learned about what Flash is good foris from a search on an Adult search engine. Here I found a pagefor a conference held in ARIZONA. Tempe, Arizona. One of thoseconferences that my finances would never permit me to attend.But, here I was. Year(s)after the fact. But still. To view the content, and this was a forum on DRM(digital rightsmanagement), I first had to download a KEY. That's right. A KEY.A simple copy and paste, from my mail client into the sign on pageof the forum, and I was in!One of the reasons this was easy for me was because back in 99'I was researching security developement packages, or PKI and this from Verisign, who, by the way, controlls ULD's and are stilljockeying for position. And the war is a stiff one, believe you me!Then came FOAF. Friend of a friend and KEY signing party. Just what was, is, a KEY signing party. And just how does one generate a KEY.I was really into digital signatures. Outlook Exp. gives it a redribbon. Really looks COOL. And the Internet and WWW is all about COOL. Only how does somebody who has your public KEY get your PRIVATE KEY so they can open your mail?? Well, good time to havea KEY signing party.But, today, if you look at digital signatures and certificates, theseare predominately held in the corpirate sector. FOAF went the wayof the dodo bird...not COOL enough. And Open Source is conducting a hell of a war with RIIA over copy right and left. Creative Commonsis wagging their tails over their code...and the legal begals eatit up...WAY COOL$$$$by the hour. So, here I was at a forum about DRM and how to get your 'CONTENT'over the net without it being ripped off%2