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LAS VEGAS – Round-by-round coverage of Manny Pacquiao’s WBC super featherweight championship victory over Juan Manuel Marquez on Saturday. Pacquiao won on a split decision, with official scores of 115-112 and 114-113 Pacquiao and 115-112 Marquez.

KEVIN IOLE’S UNOFFICIAL SCORECARD
Round     1     2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9     10     11     12     Total
Manny Pacquiao     9     9     10     10     9     9     9     9     10     10     9     9     112
Juan M. Marquez     10     10     8     9     10     10     10     10     9     9     10     10     115

ROUND 1
Crowd at a fever pitch as the fight begins. Pacquiao lands a jab after about 30 seconds of each man looking for an opening. Left by Pacquiao lands. Marquez jabs are coming up short. Left by Pacquiao. Nothing big has landed yet. Marquez using a lot of upper body movement, but not throwing punches. Marquez lands a straight right. They bump heads. Right by Marquez. Combination by Pacquiao and Marquez lands a right to the body. Marquez lands a right at the bell.
Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 2
They exchange to the body. Left by Pacquiao lands. Right by Marquez lands on the cheek. Marquez right to the body. Pacquiao is not throwing a lot of punches at this point, midway through the round. Pacquaio pops a jab without conviction. Combination by Marquez lands and then a left by Pacquiao. They clinch after a Pacquiao left misses badly. Pacquiao lands a lead right. Marquez hooks to the body. Combination by Marquez, Pacquiao hurt by a left hook.
Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 3
Pacquaio jabs to the body. Hard right by Marquez hurts Pacquiao. They butt heads again. Referee Kenny Bayless inspects, but neither man is cut. Marquez flicking his jab. Pacquiao is backing up now. Jab-left hand by Pacquiao lands. Left by Pacquiao lands. Hard right by Marquez. Left by Pacquiao floors Marquez. They trade on ropes and Marquez hurt again at the bell.
Iole scores it 10-8, Pacquiao

ROUND 4
Marquez doesn’t look sturdy as round begins. They trade along the ropes, both land big. Pacquiao lands a hard left. Combination by Marquez and Pacquiao smiles. Pacquiao backs Marquez to a corner. Marquez throws a hook and Pacquiao lands a 1-2 combination. Lead left by Pacquiao. Left hook by Marquez lands. Right by Marquez connects.
Iole scores it 10-9, Pacquiao

ROUND 5
Pacquiao opens rounds stalking. Pacquiao flicks a jab. Pace has slowed. A minute into the round, not much occurring. Counter right by Marquez. They trade and Marquez lands a right. Marquez has a lot of swelling around his left eye. Hook to the body by Marquez. Marquez lands a right as Pacquiao hooks to the body. Left by Pacquiao. Marquez lands a hard right. Marquez lands two rights as they battle on the ropes at the bell.
Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 6
Right by Marquez to the head. Another hard right by Marquez. Hook by Pacquiao. Right by Marquez. Pacquiao’s punches are being blocked. Right and then a left by Marquez. Big round for Marquez at this point. Counter right by Marquez. They trade on the ropes, Marquez gets the better of it. Combination from Marquez.

Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez (57-56 Marquez at the midpoint)

ROUND 7 Left hook by Marquez to open the round. Marquez lands a right. Marquez goes to the body. Left by Pacquiao snaps Marquez’s head back. They bump heads again. Pacquiao is complaining. Marquez is cut on the right eye. Doctor examines it. Referee Kenny Bayless rules it was an accidental butt. Right hand by Pacquiao staggers Marquez. Great exchange. Pacquiao backed up by a right form Marquez. Marquez lands a combination. Pacquiao lands a hard jab. Marquez’s cut is on the outside of the right eye and could be a big, big problem.

Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 8
Right by Marquez hurts Pacquiao. Good left to the body by Marquez. Pacquiao is hurt. Pacquiao is cut on the right eye. Another left to the body by Marquez. Left hook to the head by Marquez. Combination by Marquez. Pacquiao is having problems. Good combination on the ropes by Marquez. Pacquiao needs to land something to change the momentum. Hard right by Marquez lands to the head. Great right uppercut by Marquez.

Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 9
Pacquiao fires a combination to the body. Marquez is not throwing much in first minute. Good left by Pacquiao. Right by Marquez. Pacquiao’s left eye is swelling. Left by Pacquiao. They trade in the center. Left hook by Marquez. Left by Pacquiao backs Marquez to ropes. Pacquiao lands a combination. Bayless halts it to check Marquez’s cut. Dr. Jeff Davidson says the fight can continue. Right uppercut by Marquez wobbles Pacquiao. Pacquiao fires a left in return.

Iole scores it 10-9, Pacquiao

ROUND 10
Pacquiao lands a huge left at the open that wobbles Marquez. Wild exchange on the ropes. Crowd on its feet. Combination by Pacquiao. Left hand by Pacquiao. Marquez flicks his jab. Marquez’s eye looks bad. Marquez warned to keep it up. Marquez right to the body. Right to the head by Marquez. Combination by Pacquiao. Crowd is roaring. This is a wonderful fight. Straight right by Marquez. Right by Marquez.

Iole scores it 10-9, Pacquiao

ROUND 11
Pacquiao’s right eye is swollen badly. Pacquiao misses a hook. Marquez pops a jab. Marquez warned for a low blow. Time called briefly so Pacquiao can recover. Left by Pacquiao. Right to the head by Marquez. Right and left and right by Marquez. Pacquiao lands a straight left. Right hook by Pacquiao. Marquez lands a right. Left hand and then a right by Marquez. Pace is a bit slower in this round. They trade just before bell.

Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

ROUND 12
Many in the crowd are standing. Marquez’s cut was shown on the big screen and it is grotesque. Marquez lands a hard right. Hook to the body by Marquez and right to the head. Lead right by Marquez. Left by Pacquiao. Right by Pacquiao. Right by Marquez. Another right by Marquez. Combination by Marquez. Pacquiao pops a jab. Right to the head by Marquez. They trade at the bell. Both raise their arms.

Iole scores it 10-9, Marquez

Believe it or not, spring is mere days away (well, technically speaking, at least!). Now’s the time to start repairing any damage winter left behind so you’ll be positively glowing by the time summer vacation (and bikini season…) rolls around:

* Slough off a winter’s worth of dull, flaky skin with Murad Intensive Wrinkle Reducer. During colder months, dry skin types can become too sensitive for exfoliation; as temperatures rise and skin becomes less fragile, though, you’ll see dramatic results from removing dead skin cells. This non-abrasive product stimulates cell turnover with glycolic acid and contains moisturizing glycerin, making it suitable for dry or sensitive skin, and also includes glucosamine, an excellent hyaluronic acid-stimulating anti-aging ingredient.
* For oily types, though, the return of warm weather can spell trouble as their skin becomes even oilier. If you’d rather not pile on the powder - but don’t want to shine your way through spring and summer - check out OC Eight Professional Mattifying Gel. Applied after your normal skin care products, and before any makeup, it controls oil for up to eight hours.
* Of course, very oily types who eschew moisturizers altogether run the risk of missing out on the valuable ingredients those products often contain. That’s why I love facial serums - they’re extremely lightweight, but offer a concentrated dose of skin-nourishing ingredients. Celazome Serum Vitae is particularly high in antioxidants and offers all the attendant benefits: It neutralizes free radicals to fight aging, reduces inflammation, and even helps repair the cellular damage that UV exposure can cause.
* As the sun starts shining more and the trees bloom once again, I always find myself particularly inspired to try natural, plant-based products. Korres Magnolia Cleansing Emulsion is a fabulous option. It contains aloe, calendula, and almond oil to soothe dry, sensitive skin (like mine!) - and none of the detergents that strip crucial lipids from the skin barrier.
* Ready to add a dose of fun and excitement to your daily routine? Philosophy’s The Alchemist is as transformative as its name suggests: It contains a pheromone that promises to improve your sense of well-being…and draw people to you. Valentine’s Day may be behind us, but you’ll never know it once you dab on a drop or two of this potion!

Wishing you great skin!

In the Roman calendar, the term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other 8 months.

In modern times, the term Ides of March (Latin Idus Martiae) is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated, in 44 BC, the story of which was famously retold in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.[2] The term has come to be used as a metaphor for impending doom.

Assassination of Julius Caesar

Caesar summoned the Senate to meet in the Theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March. A certain seer warned Caesar to be on his guard against a great peril on the day of the month of March which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had come and Caesar was on his way to the senate-house, he greeted the seer with a jest and said: “The Ides of March has come,” and the seer said to him softly: “Yes, the Ides of March has come, but it has not passed.”[3]

As the Senate convened, Caesar was attacked and stabbed to death by a group of senators who called themselves the Liberatores (”Liberators”); they justified their action on the grounds that they committed tyrannicide and were preserving the Republic from Caesar’s alleged monarchical ambitions.

Popular phrase

A popular phrase, “Beware the Ides of March”, originates from Shakespeare and refers to impending doom. In Julius Caesar (Act 1, scene 2, 15–19), a soothsayer relates to Caesar “Beware the ides of March”, warning Caesar of his impending death.

Usage in modern popular culture

In Music

* Thee Mighty Caesars, a garage/punk group fronted by Billy Childish, named an LP “Beware the Ides of March” released in 1985.
* British heavy metal band Iron Maiden opened their second album (Killers) with an instrumental entitled “The Ides of March.”
* In 1970, the American band The Ides of March had a number 2 hit on the Billboard charts with the song “Vehicle.”
* In 2005, the Canadian band Silverstein released a song called “Ides of March” on the album “Discovering the Waterfront”.
* In 1994, the American band Codeine released the song “Ides” on the album “The White Birch”. A stripped down version of the song was released in March 1993 on a 7 inch single released by Simple Machines as part of their “Working Holiday” series of singles.
* The second track of 1972’s Matching Mole’s Little Red Record is named “Marchides”.
* “Ides of March” is a song recorded by Guns N’ Roses during their Chinese Democracy sessions

In Film and Television

* In Back to the Future II, George McFly was killed on the Ides of March in 1973.
* In the Weebl and Bob episode “history5″, Bob tells Weebl to “beware the Pies of March.” He explains that it is currently December, and that “they’ve gone off by now.”
* In The Simpsons episode “Homer the Great”, Lisa warns Homer, “beware the Ides of March”, after Homer claims he now knows he is God. Homer replies, “No!”
* In Xena: Warrior Princess episode “Ides of March”, Xena and Gabrielle are crucified on the Ides of March, and Caesar himself is murdered. It is Xena who utters the famous warning, however, she directs it to Brutus rather than Caesar.
* In the film The House of Yes, Parker Posey’s character goes by the name Jackie-O ever since she attended an Ides of March party dressed as the former first lady.

Other References

* The internet group Anonymous used the phrase “beware the Ides of March” when referring to its then-upcoming March 15th, 2008 mass protest of the Church of Scientology.
* The Ides of March are celebrated every year by the Rome Hash House Harriers with a toga run in the streets of Rome, in the same place where Julius Caesar was killed.
* A paperback reprint of material from MAD Magazine, from the late 1950s, is titled The Ides of MAD.
* In Civilization IV, if the player is on poor terms with Julius Caesar and opens the diplomacy screen with him, Caesar will comically ask why the player is there and if it’s “the Ides of March already”.
* In Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, if the player hits enter and types “Ides of March” into the opened chat bar and hits enter again, he will be taken to the final sequence in the current campaign.
* In the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s version of Julius Caesar, Adam Long (playing the seer) tells Reed Martin (playing Caesar) to beware the Ides of March, to which Caesar asks, confused, “What the hell are the Ides of March?”

Appearances

This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness.
Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.

* Cao Cao, one of the greatest warlords of the Three Kingdoms Era of China, also died on the Ides of March in AD 220 and a year later the Kingdom of Shu Han was established by Liu Bei.

* Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated his power as ruler on the Ides of March, 1917. It is mentioned in the film “Nicholas and Alexandra.”

* The Atlanta Chapter of the Dagorhir Battle Games Association hosts an annual spring event at Red Horse Stables on the weekend closest to the 15th of March. The event is appropriately named, “The Ides of March”.

* American horror author HP Lovecraft also died on this day.

* In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gollum destroys the Ring of Doom on the Ides of March.

Identity theft has become a huge problem in the United States. The FTC recently reported that identity theft was the number one complaint again last year for the eighth consecutive year! There are literally thousands of scams out there, and you’re probably familiar with most of them, but new scams are getting more sophisticated as people get savvier. For this reason, I thought I’d highlight some of the newest scams making the headlines.

Here are the top five scams you may not know about:

Tax and Rebate Scams

The Scam: Consumers get a call or e-mail claiming to be from a government agency, such as the IRS or Social Security Administration, that asks for personal information to process a rebate check. These crooks ask consumers to provide personal information like their social security number, bank account number, or other details they can use to commit identity theft. If they resist giving out information, they’re told they cannot receive the rebate unless the information is provided.

The Don’ts: Never give sensitive information to anyone over the phone or email. If you get a suspicious email, delete it immediately. Don’t click on any links either, for they might take you to a phishing site or install spyware on your computer. Keep in mind that most government agencies don’t collect information by phone or email. The FTC recommends you contact the IRS or SSA directly if you have any questions or concerns. To learn more about other tax scams check out the IRS Top 2008 “Dirty Dozen” Tax Scams.

Cheap Electronics Scam

The Scam: Shopping website that appears legit sells electronic products at extremely low prices. The site is so sophisticated, even the most savvy consumer will have a hard time telling it’s a fake. One recent article on PCMag, mentions these scamming sites may be part of a bigger network, since they all have a $500 minimum purchase requirement, and may ask for payment in the form of a Western Union money order to be mailed to a foreign address.

The Signs: Things a like a foreign address, a $500 minimum purchase, or the lack of a secure payment transaction form should raise red flags. A site may appear legitimate, but if you have a hard time recognizing the validity of the website, watch out for things like a new domain registration, questionable contact information, grammatical and spelling errors, a no return policy, and untraceable payment methods. Do do some research online because chances are others may already be expressing their concerns on forums or blogs.

Chatroom Scams

The Scam: Russian cyber-crooks have developed a software robot that poses as a human in chatrooms. These bots can chat with up to 10 people simultaneously, and easily persuade them to hand over phone numbers, photographs, birthday, address, and other personal information. The site claims “Not a single girl has yet realized that she was communicating with a program!” Information harvested by these bots can be used by fraudsters to carry out various forms of fraud. Unsuspecting victims may also be tricked into visiting a ‘personal site’ that could load malware onto their computers. Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools said CyberLover, “employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems. It can monitor Internet browser activity, automatically recognize and fill in the fields in the web pages, generate keystrokes and mouse clicks, and post messages, URLs, files and photos.”

The Dont’s: Common sense says never, ever give out personal information to anyone you just met online.

Local Charity Scams

The Scam: Fraudsters claiming to be from the local police department or DARE program are calling or approaching private citizens and businesses soliciting donations purporting to benefit police officers. What’s convincing some people into handing over personal and financial information to these imposters is the spoofed number that pops up in the caller ID. Police say many victims have reported a phone number that appears to be from the local police department, so don’t be fooled.

The Do’s: If you want to support the local police or fire department, find out when they hold their annual fund drives. Most departments don’t solicit donations via telephone, so it’s best to check out their site to find out when and how they seek donations.

Cancer Cure Scam

The Scam: As more people turn to the web for medical advice, they’re encountering websites that advertise natural products they claim will prevent or cure everything from cancer to diabetes. Scammers know people are searching for natural remedies online, so they exaggerate the language on their site, and even add a few medical terms to sound legitimate. Oftentimes, they’ll claim their supplies are not sold anywhere else, and sell them at a high price. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a miracle cure for cancer, but these scammers will have you believe there is, and will even discourage you from taking real medicine. The reality is many of these products are not proven, effective, or safe, and the sites are full of false testimonials.

The Do’s: Canada has already started to crack down on such sites, demanding they remove any false claims quickly. Andrea Rosen, Acting Deputy Commissioner of Canada’s Competition Bureau, says consumers should be skeptical of health-related products or services that look too good to be true. People should talk to their doctor before trying any new treatment. Check out the Anatomy of an Online Health Scam before you buy medicine online.

There are plenty of other scams out there, so the Federal Trade Commission has put together a nice list of Dot Cons to help you spot a scam. Do you have any other suggestions or advice you’d like to share? Leave us a comment.

The new Britney Spears video “Break the Ice” is animated and futuristic.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California resident Nancy Fiddler has put for sale on eBay a mastodon skeleton that takes up most of her garage. The minimum bid — $115,000 (57,000 pounds).

Her family’s relationship with the Ice Age relative of the elephant has run its course.

Fiddler said they need the money an online auction could bring, and her son would prefer to build hot rod cars in the space the creature now occupies.

The Fiddlers also would like to use their sauna, which in the last four years has served as an additional repository for the huge plastic casts containing the animal’s bones.

“We needed a safe, dry place,” Fiddler said, explaining why they chose to sacrifice the sauna. “The mastodon takes precedence.”

Mastodons, which stood 10 feet (3 metres) tall with trunks and tusks, migrated to North America about 15 million years ago and ranged all over the continent with saber tooth tigers, giant sloths and American camels. All met their extinction about 10,000 years ago.

A ranch hand discovered a mastodon tooth on the Fiddler ranch in northeastern California in 1997. Excavation revealed a rare, nearly complete mastodon skeleton that included everything but the tusks.

“It’s a beautiful specimen,” said paleontological consultant Bruce Hanson, who helped move the skeleton to the Oakland Museum of Natural History, where it was on display for several years.

After the museum made a replica, the Fiddlers moved the mastodon to the tasting room of a California wine bar. Then it found its way to their garage.

One paleontologist said he was sceptical that the Fiddlers would get as much as they want for the mastodon.

“What is it going to do? Sit on someone’s mantle?” said Mark Goodwin of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. “I would prefer to see it donated to a museum. This is our fossil heritage.”

LONDON (Reuters) - It is the one moment every man wants to get right — and which London floor-fitter Lefkos Hajji could hardly have got more wrong.

The luckless 28 year-old’s dreams of giving his sweetheart, Leanne, 26, the ultimate proposal have literally vanished into thin air.

Hajji, of Hackney, east London, had concealed a $12,000 engagement ring inside a helium balloon. The idea was that she would pop the balloon as he popped the question.

But as he left the shop, a gust of wind pulled the balloon from his hand and he watched the ring — and quite possibly the affections of his girlfriend — sailing away over the rooftops.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he told The Sun newspaper.

“I just watched as it went further and further into the air.

“I felt like such a plonker. It cost a fortune and I knew my girlfriend would kill me.”

Hajji spent two hours in his car trying to chase and find the balloon, without success.

“I thought I would give Leanne a pin so I could literally pop the question,” he said.

“But I had to tell her the story — she went absolutely mad. Now she is refusing to speak to me until I get her a new ring.”

He is hoping the ring will still turn up.

“It would be amazing if someone found it,” he added.

If you’ve applied for Apple’s iPhone Developer program, check email for your rejection letter. The twitterati are reporting widespread disappointment and anger as thousands of iPhone developer hopefuls have received a “Thank you but no thank you” message in their inbox. The emails are arriving with the subject of iPhone Developer Program Enrollment Status.

Did you get accepted? Do you know anyone who did? Let us know in the comments. Some readers are reporting acceptance — if you’ve been accepted please send us some more details — but they appear to be confusing the iPhone online developer SDK download with the “iPhone developer program,” which you can learn more about at Apple’s site. What we are talking about here is the $99 signup for the developer program, which includes a signing certificate to allow applications to run on physical iPhones and not just in the Aspen simulator. Just because you have downloaded the Xcode SDK components does not make you an iPhone dev Jedi — if you haven’t paid your $99, or you haven’t been invited to pay it, you have no lightsaber.

Corporations have been rejected and so have individuals. Premiere members, Select members, Online members, all rejected. To be clear, these rejections are not for the general iPhone SDK download program but for the paid $99 developer/AppStore access program. I have not been able to confirm any acceptances into this latter program.

Out of country developers are reporting slightly different rejections. One anonymous developer received this message: “At this time, the iPhone Developer Program is only available in the US, and will expand to other countries during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.”

An absolutely LOL moment from Daniel Jalkut, which I quote in full: “In other news, it looks like the Jailbreak Developer Program still has open slots, and people are getting approved as I type.”

TUAW reader UO perfectly summarizes the dilemma: “I got a rejection this morning too. What if I never get accepted? Spending that much time (until June?) working on code I may never be able to ship is an unacceptable risk right now.”

Dear Registered iPhone Developer, Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time. Thank you for applying. Best regards, iPhone Developer Program

And just one more reminder: this is less about ‘rejection’ than it is about developers being unable to commit resources when Apple won’t give a firm go-ahead. Feel free to think about it as a “limbogram” rather than an outright rejection.

Unconfirmed insider reports are trickling in. One blue & green anonymous tipster tells us that Apple has yet to set up its certificate management system and cannot issue developer certs until this is finished and put in place. While this doesn’t explain why Apple sent out its letters worded the way they were, it might explain why TUAW cannot find a single developer who has documentedly been accepted into the system.

Justin Frankel, the man who popularized file-sharing, has even bigger plans

The most dangerous man in music is ready to rock. It’s Saturday night in San Francisco as Justin Frankel, gangly and bed-headed, ambles through the warehouse garage he aptly calls his “playground.” He has come here, as he often does, to screw around on his drums or his Moog or electric guitar. But first he needs his fog machine.

“It’s around here somewhere,” he says, checking under his makeshift concert stage, a riser set against a wall postered with naked women. Then he looks under his Porsche, his VW van, his Swiss military truck, his Go Big scooter, his gutted Audi. He pokes his head behind a hacked Xbox, pulsing the word SeXbox onto a forty-eight-inch flat screen. No luck. “I don’t know if I have any CO2 cartridges for it anyway,” he says, bumming. Not to worry, there’s always his light-show laser. A twenty-five-year-old with $100 million deserves his toys.

If you’ve downloaded a song in the past few years, it’s in large part because of Justin Frankel. Seven years ago, when he was just eighteen, he invented Winamp, the first software program that made it easy to play digital music on your computer. A few years later, he created Gnutella: the vast, and vastly controversial, online network that lets you swap songs. The fact that Frankel secretly did the latter while working at America Online, the company behind his multimillion-dollar buyout, made him both the Internet’s greatest punk — and hero. Now he’s about to punk the industry again.

That’s because, after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence. “This is an environment where I don’t get to do what I want to do,” he says. What he wants to do is even more radical than Gnutella. And to do this, he needs to break free. “Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless,” he says. When I ask him if they have anything to fear by him leaving, he replies, half-jokingly, “If anything, they have more to fear when I’m working for them.”

Frankel kills the lights and gets behind the drums. Despite my rusty chops, he encourages me to strap on an electric guitar. “Things I’ve done are often interpreted as anti-record-industry,” he says, “but it’s really about empowering people.”

Back in 1996, when a seventeen-year-old Frankel downloaded his first song — “Pepper,” by the Butthole Surfers — no one really cared about such things. Napster didn’t exist. The Recording Industry Association of America hadn’t sued a twelve-year-old girl in the projects for downloading, among other things, the theme song to the TV show Full House, and America Online hadn’t started hemorrhaging 2 million subscribers a year.

The son of a lawyer and a postal worker, Frankel grew up in a mobile home in the hippie nexus of Sedona, Arizona, where he spent his afternoons taking apart old radios or constructing elaborate model airplanes. “Once Justin gets an idea for something,” his father, Charles, says, “he finds a way to create it.”

Unchallenged by classes, Frankel took control of his own education, largely directing his own home schooling. Around then, he also started messing with his brother’s Atari 8-bit computer. By the time he started high school, he was a self-taught whiz. He ran the school’s computer network and racked up a better than 4.0 GPA. In addition to writing an e-mail program for the school, Frankel coded software he called Happy Bug, which would log the keystrokes of teachers at their machines. “It would show you everything they typed,” he recalls. But he didn’t create the program to steal tests or eavesdrop, he says. “It was more like, ‘Cool, look what I can do.’”

After graduating from high school in 1996, he enrolled at the University of Utah, but he clashed with his more traditional computer-science professors and dropped out after two semesters. A few months later, he uploaded Winamp (the name is short for Windows Amplifier). With its equalizer, playlist features and trippy visuals, Winamp trumped every MP3 player out there. In a year and a half, 15 million people downloaded the program. A sizable portion even sent in the voluntary ten-dollar shareware fee that Frankel had requested, reluctantly, on his parents’ advice. With tens of thousands of dollars coming in every month, his dad all but abandoned his law practice to help field calls from companies that wanted to cash in on the outfit Justin nihilistically called Nullsoft, a play on Microsoft.

But Justin, despite buying himself a used turbo Audi, was in no rush to sell out. Early on, he had included the tag line “Winamp whips the llama’s ass” (riffed from a line in a song by the late schizophrenic Chicago street singer Wesley Willis) on every player. When a pharmaceutical company offered big money to adapt Winamp for use in sales presentations — on the condition that he remove the tag line — Frankel balked, and the deal fell apart.

Soon, Frankel coded another program, Shoutcast, do-it-yourself broadcasting software that let people “stream” their own audio over the Net. By 1999, Winamp and Shoutcast put digital music — and its young creator — on the map. And America Online wanted in, to the tune of $100 million. Frankel responded with two words: “Holy crap!”

In addition to acquiring Nullsoft in the summer of 1999, the company paid $300 million for Spinner, the leading online-radio service at the time. These were the boom years, and the message was loud and clear: The future of music was on the “information superhighway,” and Justin Frankel, hired to further develop Winamp as the standard MP3 player, was going to drive it. And AOL was going to own it. In a statement, AOL’s chief operating officer, Bob Pittman, the guy who had previously created MTV, trumpeted, “Combining these leading Internet music brands with the audience reach of our brands will lift music online to the next level of popularity.” He had no idea.

“All right, Radiohead!” says frankel, shuffling to a row of CDs inside Amoeba Music, a sprawlingly hip record store in Haight-Ashbury. He’s wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He has the patchy Chia-like beard of a dude who doesn’t give a shit about patchy Chia-like beards.

“When Hail to the Thief leaked on the Internet,” Frankel says, “I was like, ‘Right on!’ But I still bought the CD. I think it’s wrong to download music and never give anything to the artist. But if you download something and you’re like, ‘This sucks,’ and you never listen to it again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” A true child of Sedona, Frankel maintains a heartfelt sense of morality and karma. It’s this passion to do right by music fans that inspired him to create the very thing that so many people consider to be wrong: Gnutella.

Gnutella’s birth came at the end of what Frankel now calls his “very short honeymoon” with America Online. At first, it seemed like the ultimate setup: good money, a nice office and the freedom to work on the next version of Winamp. But it didn’t take long for things to sour. Almost immediately after the deal was struck, persnickety hackers online cried “sellout.” Frankel’s girlfriend broke up with him because, he says, “she got freaked out by the money.” And the big, open office Nullsoft and Spinner shared in San Francisco got Dilbertized by AOL. “Three months after we arrived,” Frankel says, “they built all these cubicles, and it sucked.”

It was inside his cubicle one day that Frankel first saw Napster. File-trading wasn’t new. But Shawn Fanning, Napster’s nineteen-year-old creator, had coded a clever piece of software that made this geekish pastime user-friendly. “When I first saw Napster, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool,’ ” Frankel says, ” ‘but how will they keep from getting sued?’”

Napster had a fatal flaw. Fanning was using a bank of his company’s own computers to facilitate all those Metallica songs flying back and forth online, and Fanning was setting himself up to profit from copyright infringement. “Napster was a company built on people doing things that are illegal,” Frankel says. “That’s wrong.” Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft’s team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster.

Frankel decided to “take the wind out of Napster’s sails.” His solution: an online network that could let people trade all kinds of files — songs, videos, whatever — in a decentralized environment. By connecting people’s computers directly with one another, they could trade data without having to go through some company’s rack of servers. Best of all, Frankel thought, such technology would be good karma, too. “I would not be getting any money from it,” he says. “I’d be giving power to people, and what can be wrong with that?”

Frankel got to work on what became Gnutella, named after the chocolate-hazelnut spread and, more tellingly, the “GNU” free-software project. He coded fast and on the sly. “I didn’t want AOL to find out,” he says, “because they’d prevent it from happening.”

On March 14th, 2000, Frankel and Tom Pepper, a Nullsoft cohort, uploaded an early version of Gnutella, with a note: “Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL can bring you good things!” The next day, Frankel was with his parents touring Alcatraz, appropriately enough, when his cell phone rang. It was Pepper. “Dude,” Pepper said, “you better get back to the office.”

By the time Frankel returned, he says, “the shit had hit the fan.” The timing of Gnutella couldn’t have been worse from the company’s point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement.

AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an “unauthorized freelance project.” But Gnutella, unlike Napster, couldn’t be stopped. More than 10,000 people had downloaded the beta software that first day, and intrepid hackers had gone to work to reverse-engineer it and throw it into the hands of the open-source community, laying the foundation for BearShare, Morpheus, LimeWire and other file-trading wares.

With Gnutella, Napster became almost irrelevant. There was no company to sue, no computers to shut down. AOL had paid Frankel $100 million for a slice of the future, but Frankel decided he’d rather give the future away.

After that, Frankel says, AOL kept him on “a very short leash,” steering him away from interviewers and encouraging him to focus on Winamp, the program they paid him 100 million friggin’ dollars to work on in the first place. Not surprisingly, he acted out. In August 2000, he uploaded an MP3 search engine. AOL took it down. The next month, he uploaded to a secret section of the Nullsoft site a program called AIMazing, which would replace the banner ads in AOL’s Instant Messenger with an image of a musical heartbeat. Frankel called it nothing more than “a cute innovation.” The Wall Street Journal called Frankel “AOL’s loose cannon.”

AOL cracked down, again — this time requiring Frankel to seek approval before blogging online. “We fought off the AOL bullshit as much as possible,” he says. When the company tried to insist that an AOL icon instantly appear on a user’s desktop during a Winamp installation, Frankel hit the roof. “I’d be like, ‘Look, our users don’t want to use AOL!’ ” he says. ” ‘They think AOL sucks!’”

But Winamp was having problems of its own, losing ground to Windows Media and RealPlayer, both of which incorporated video streaming. Nullsoft attempted to re-establish the brand with Winamp 3.0. But the new version was bloated, if not somewhat embarrassing — particularly for Frankel, who prided himself on lean, simple wares. On Frankel’s urging, Nullsoft trimmed back the next version of the player, calling it Winamp 2.9.

Around that time, Frankel began tinkering with a new kind of software. Taking the name from an underground postal system in the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49, Frankel created Waste: a “private workspace,” as he calls it, that allows small groups of friends to trade files without being as conspicuous as those on the larger peer-to-peer networks.

Sometimes called a “darknet,” it’s a kind of mini-Gnutella, a small, password-protected file-trading network. Because you can’t get in unless you’re invited, even the most intrepid hackers — or recording-industry lawyers — would have trouble figuring out when or where a Waste system is running.

This time around, Frankel took the high road. He tried pitching Waste to AOL, but after the company dragged its feet for months, he got fed up. On May 28th, 2003, four years to the date that he was acquired, Frankel rebelled again — uploading Waste as a way to force AOL to deal with it, and him, once and for all. “AOL as a company should not just sit on their asses and try to keep from losing as many subscribers as it can,” he says. “I mean, I’m a stockholder of the company. I want them innovating. I want them doing things that are good for the world and being socially conscious.”

AOL responded by taking the program down. (AOL had no comment about Waste for this story.) Days later, Frankel took it to the people one last time. “For me, coding is a form of self-expression,” he wrote online late one night. “The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav [sic]. . . . ”

Shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! Raise your hand if you need to take a piss!”

Night is falling on Frankel’s warehouse, and we’re midway through an impromptu jam onstage. Frankel’s half brother Brennan, another Nullsoft staffer, is belting out these lyrics for a song about obedience and oppression. When I joke that it sounds like it’s inspired by real life, no one argues. “America Online as a company is all right,” Frankel says diplomatically, “but big companies have limitations about what they can or can’t do.”

A few weeks after I visit, AOL proved his point once again. On December 9th, the company shut down the San Francisco office that once housed Nullsoft and Spinner, and laid off 450 employees, including Frankel’s half brother. The next week, Frankel uploaded what could be his swan song as an AOL employee: Winamp, version 5.0. In the near future, he says, he’s going to have a sit-down with his boss and enthusiastically return to a riskier way of life. This could include some new programs such as a free and open solution for mobile text messaging — a kind of Gnutella spin on BlackBerry — or some other stuff that he won’t reveal. “Those are the really good ideas,” he says.

In many ways, Frankel’s future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control? For Frankel, subversion is in the eye of the beholder. “The question is,” he says, “do you think people are ultimately good or bad? Do they want to do the right thing, or do they want to do what’s good for them and fuck everyone else? I hope it’s not the latter.”

With our song done, Frankel and Brennan tweak the mix into shape. “I’ll put this online,” Frankel tells me, cracking a grin, “with your permission, of course.”

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