Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny, Ireland -- I was walking around the foyer of the plush Ormonde Hotel, showing people how this WiFi thing works. Most were nonplussed by the technology but quite curious about the content that flowed wirelessly through it from Dave Winer, Ray Ozzie and The New York Times. They're all commenting about on-going actions by record companies that seeks to compel the companies that control the Internet backbone to intervene in pirate sites located in China. The scary thing is that the technology could be used not only to block content coming out of an internet site, but it could also be used to look inside sites.
Ray Ozzie is worried as the symmetry of the Internet at the IP level takes yet another hit.
As a result of things like this, NATs, firewalls, DNS limitations and politics, the core concepts of the original Internet are progressively being pushed to a higher level, e.g. middleware-level or application-level. IP becomes XML packet routing, TCP becomes transaction state management, DNS becomes namespace management, etc. And it's better than the original: the packet routing is secure, the state management is persistent and durable, the namespace management becomes trustworthy. You can see this happening in most of the interesting Internet applications of the past few years, e.g. IM, Napster, Gnutella, Jabber, and Groove, and I expect that it will soon be happening operating systems and key development frameworks.
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Kilkenny, Ireland -- It's a beautiful day, sitting in the lobby of The Ormonde Hotel with David Lennon (left) during the 
