chat mechanisms firewalled makes for diplomacy lessons

I would prefer a instant message to telling mutual words in "postcard as
xml's".

I found a particular chat mechanism, iChat, firewalled in Redlands
California library before I went back home to Dallas. It didn't show the
AIM movie robot enabled but rather greyed or not at all (I don't quite
recall). The AIM movie robot chats with you through menus to tell you
movies at theaters. It is always on.

I noted their saying, whatever P2P means, that they firewalled what they
called P2P. The system administrator/tech person gave reasons for their
firewalling what they called P2P. They feared huge file transfer sucking
bandwidth from "nicer patrons". However, management decisions are
decisions (based on opinions that hold sway locally) and aren't
universally correct truths.

Last night an internet cafe exhibited aim robots. My library in
Richardson allows me chats and huge system upgrade file downloads. It
could be they haven't caught wise that I suck bandwidth, but I suspect
something is wrong with this fear based on "if I let you do it, 10,000
others will and the entire internet will get clogged up". This is worst
case scenario thinking to enforce control freaks. The game can be played
better than that with more obscure utility functions.

Must I negotiate with this administrator for a family that probably
can't buy a pc with a fast graphics card and operating system to allow
punching through firewalls or is that to miss the point.  I might
imagine city officials plausibly, as in Richardson, affording the wifi
would raise eyebrows and possible illegal  digital asset theft by file
transfer. They might, so lobbied, want to make expensive cable companies
legitimize anything of that sort as PC.

On that front :
Steve Jobs mentioned the RIAA paranoia was made uninforcible by such
file transfers and that the record association would just have to deal
with the change of media for the distribution of digital assets that
really belong to their creators not distributers.

(Or something like that)

Now, how do I pitch to Redlands California library precident on punching
holes in such firewalls. Apple?

http://darwinsource.opendarwin.org/Current/network_cmds-245.1.4/alias/alias_smedia.c

Apple copyrighted some c code to do holepunching.

I don't think I would tell. If they don't notice the bandwidth suck, in
my philosophy, it won't hurt anybody. I wouldn't brag about it either.

The firewall may be but one bottleneck issue. I suspect older operating
systems also can slow down what I would call a graphics preamble. I've
failed in croquet working install with Jaguar/Panther machine. Windows
xp on an ancient pc also failed working install miserably.

Summary :
I thought it intriguing that Apple would explicitly copyright c code to
punch holes in firewalls. That's sending some sort of message of
precident to those who would be paranoid and make up rules against chats.

I'd suggest perhaps a library could afford an Amazon EC2 subscription for such scenarios (for the conditions where a fast graphics card isn't need and Linux would do). A library patron would VNC into the server and download P2P applications into that. The library would only pay by each hour of patron use on that server at a minuscule fee. Everything gets erased when the virtual PC is ended at the end the the patron's session. The patron could have their own S3 account if they must download large files to retrieve later. For running applications needing a powerful graphics card, I wonder if there is a hosted service for that somewhere that the library could use in a similar fashion.

Otherwise, patrons should use web based applications in such environments. There are many web based AJAX applications that duplicate the basic functionality of native applications. That way the patron's content is preserved on the net and retrievable anywhere they are located.

For P2P applications that require MS Windows, that certainly limits who you can call your peers :-).

Cheers,
Darius