Scour is in some trouble

July 14, 2000 11:24 AM

Scour is in some trouble But is it really their fault? The web is loaded with all kinds of junk, they just happen to be bring it all together in one searchable site. none the less, bad news for them.
posted by sikk (5 comments total)

i just wish i could search scour at all. i work at checkout.com, actually in the same building as scour, and because of our recent launch of our web section, scour redirects all our requests on their site, back to checkout.com. what a bitch.
posted by sikk at 11:28 AM on July 14, 2000

ha! that was the whole point of scour.

The original scour client was written by two UCLA students in the dorms, so they could grab any file off other students' win95/8 shared drives. The whole point was to exploit the weak network security in windows for shits and giggles.

When they became a "media company" I wondered how long they'd get to continue before they'd drop the windows networking part of their system. I did a search there about a month ago and I don't remember seeing anyone's hard drive like I used to. I thought they went legit at some point, but this article proves otherwise.
posted by mathowie at 11:31 AM on July 14, 2000

Looks like they're moving toward a more Napster-like file sharing set up with Scour Exchange i.e. people knowingly sharing files...
posted by xiffix at 12:13 PM on July 14, 2000

What can you say about a service that makes Napster look ethical by comparison?

Of course, the users whose computers are getting ransacked ought to be mad at Microsoft for making this such an easy mistake to make.
posted by dhartung at 8:48 PM on July 15, 2000

You know what scared *me*?

The first time I heard about them was in yesterday's paper. Am I unplugged these days, or what?
posted by baylink at 11:56 AM on July 16, 2000