The F.A.T. Manual
116
Twitter Fileshare by Greg Leuch and Theo Watson April 2010 http://fffff.at/twitter-fileshare-or-how-to-tweet-any-file-on-twitter/
Governments and private organizations continue to lock down legitimate file sharing through raids, law suits, and “consumer protection” laws & treaties. And while larger file sharing arenas are targeted, many forget file sharing has existed across many different mediums for decades. Early filesharing beginning with Usenet groups, where the binary data was converted to text characters and reprocessed for download. Facsimile machines follow a similar method of dissemination of binary data. And even ham radio [1] used teletype to transmit photos across long distances by converting photos to ASCII before transmission. Today, we have advanced systems built for sharing files: websites, FTP, BitTorrent, email, CD/DVDs, hard drives. We also have many systems today that mirror prior technology of Usenet newsgroups, paging devices, IRC chat rooms, and IM status messages, of which the largest modern equivalent today is Twitter. If Twitter is today’s Usenet and Usenet was used for file sharing years ago, why shouldn’t Twitter be utilized today for file sharing? Twitter Fileshare (originally located at http://tweetfil.es) was an attempt to seed movies, images, code, and other items of copyright or intellectual property on Twitter. The project is not running anymore, but the code is still available on Github for further development: https://github.com/gleuch/twitterfileshare.
Notes [1] “Amateur radio (also called ham radio) is the use of designated radio frequency spectra for purposes of private recreation, non-commercial exchange of messages, wireless experimentation, self-training, and emergency communication.” From Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_radio.