Brillian Digital has quietly attached its software to Kazaa and plans to remotely "turn on" people’s PCs, welding them into a new network. CEO sez a pop-up box will give people a chance to turn it off. Users who've accept "terms of service" already distributed with Brilliant’s and Kazaa’s software are already agreeing to let their computers be used without any payment at all.
posted by ao4047
on Apr 2, 2002 -
27 comments
Witness the scalability of Gnutella in realtime. We've all read the technical papers and masters thesises (thesi?) about the theoretical growth of the Gnutella network and if/how it will work. Today with the release of Morpheus Preview Edition, now connected to the Gnutella network, you can witness its 345 trillion users put the Gnutella network to the test. In a little over a couple hours it has grown to roughly 3 times the size it was last week, and still going strong.. how much bigger can it get?
posted by afx114
on Mar 2, 2002 -
40 comments
Morpheus is broken. The Netherlands-based provider of the technology used by Kazaa and Grokster upgrades their system, but leaves out Streamcast Networks' (formerly Music City) Morpheus network, and suddenly, everyone is locked out. Kinda punches a giant hole in their EFF-backed battle with the RIAA, which hinges on the assertion that their network is 'decentralized' and impossible to stop.
posted by pzarquon
on Feb 28, 2002 -
12 comments
Did you hear Michael Greene's speech at the Grammys? At first it seemed like it was going to be just yet another recording industry weasel with an obligatory goatee congratulating himself on stage. But it quickly turned into a lesson on the harms of the illegal Internet downloads. "This illegal file-sharing and ripping of music files is pervasive, out of control and oh so criminal. Many of the nominees here tonight, especially the new, less-established artists, are in immediate danger of being marginalized out of our business. Ripping is stealing their livelihood one digital file at a time, leaving their musical dreams haplessly snared in this World Wide Web of theft and indifference," says Greene. Was this appeal-cum-address effective or appropriate? Were you more sympathetic to the RIAA or artists afterwards?
posted by emptyage
on Feb 27, 2002 -
78 comments
Fear as the latest anti file-sharing campaign MSNBC has a whopper of an article intending to scare the poop out of users of file-sharing programs with names like Gnotella, BearShare, Morpheus etc. They can't shut the system down 'honestly', smirk, so they're beginning the fear campaign. The article is titled "Is your computer inviting voyeurs? Embarrassing, private text files find their way onto the Net". It details some frightening examples of acidentally sharing sensitive information, a lot of which seem farfetched; FBI documents, Korean military files, bank account numbers with pins.. If the courts can't stop file sharing, maybe fear will.
posted by giantkicks
on Jan 19, 2002 -
11 comments
StreamCast Networks (Morpheus, MusicCity) chooses REBOL Technologies. This could be the big break for
REBOL (sounds like
rebel), one of the thousands of little languages out there that wants to be a contender.
Granted, it's
not open-sourced, and is
ridiculed and
mocked by Slashdot. On the other hand it's got some interesting features:
Scheme like capabilities,
urls and
email as datatypes,
cheapness and smallness (350k) and
availability on 11 different operating systems
The REBOL community is tiny but they like to write things like
blog/wiki things,
network protocol handlers,
control functions, and their
own mini-languages
posted by otherchaz
on Oct 29, 2001 -
9 comments
The War Against MP3? Hilary Rosen, everyone's favourite defender of record company hegemony, outlines her new strategy ("Help me help you.") in an email leaked to
FuckedCompany. Interestingly, it's aimed at beating the dastardly hackers at their own game, with tactics such as "Spoofing and/or interdiction methods for existing peer to peers". Signs of desparation on the part of the RIAA, or should people be making the most of the second-generation Napster clones while they have a chance?
posted by holgate
on Oct 3, 2001 -
34 comments
Clip2 are closing their doors. They provided usage statistics for Gnutella, OpenNap, and JXTA, helped firm up the Gnutella protocol, and created the Clip2 Reflector which provides a proxy and index service for the Gnutella network - which doesn't work anymore, as I found out when I tried to use
Gnucleus and it didn't find any hosts. Did they just run out of money, or did something more sinister happen? (I'm betting they just ran out of money.) Are any other organizations going to step up and take over the services they provided? Um... and how do I make Gnucleus work again?
posted by RylandDotNet
on Sep 5, 2001 -
3 comments
Napster refuses to die, promises viable business model which you can now download for free. Someone tell these people that the dot-com "I've got no way of paying you anything other than stock options" boom is over. If I have to pay for the service of downloading software from a central server, the P2P model is useless. Morons.
posted by rev-
on Aug 22, 2001 -
3 comments
Goose-killers suddenly notice absence of golden eggs? With Napster neutralised, the distributed alternatives thriving, and their commercial schemes mired in technological and political difficulties, many record industry execs are quietly wishing they'd done things differently. Should we regret the lost opportunity, or celebrate it as a self-inflicted step towards breaking the stranglehold of the major labels?
posted by holgate
on Jul 23, 2001 -
19 comments
Heard an interesting MP3 the other day (4.6m). With about 8 gigs of MP3s in random rotation at home, there are some songs that I have never even heard before. A live Radiohead song I got off of Napster started off innocently enough, but then broke into a sparsely instrumented and gravelly voiced song by someone who professes to love a part of the female anatomy that rhymes with mulva. I was struck by peer to peer's potential for art-thug type abuse, and wondered why I hadn't run into it before. Anyone else find some gems buried within their tunes?
posted by machaus
on May 25, 2001 -
11 comments
Kazaa is the most robust peer-to-peer application I've ever seen, and I've seen plenty. Among its innovations are multi-sourced downloads, automatic resume, searching by genre (and other metadata), and "
supernodes." And it's getting big
fast. 54,214 users online as I type this, sharing 22,250GB of files. (Sorry, Windows only.)
posted by waxpancake
on May 12, 2001 -
25 comments
Best RIAA-vs-mp3 quote so far? Here's my candidate. I think it'll take five aces to beat it but don't hesitate to try!
As Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, puts it, "Is the RIAA and its friends doing some kind of technology surveillance? Yes. Is it going to work? No. It's really dumb. It's another serious mistake by an industry going out of business in the stupidest way, bumping its head on the steps on the way down, because the record industry was always a bunch of thugs and that's what they still are."
posted by jfuller
on Mar 28, 2001 -
24 comments
While I'm not a huge Hole fan, Courtney Love's
letter to other recording artists makes me look at her a bit differently. The letter is a pretty strong plea for them to organize a union representing their interests. With all of the press that has been genereated over the RIAA/
Napster battle, do you think the timing is right?
Garage Bands of the world, Unite! Move over Rick Trumka
(link via SVN).
posted by trox
on Mar 21, 2001 -
30 comments
Disney's Michael Eisner on what to do about all those kids who use Napster:
Arrest and prosecute the little SOBs. I know I'd sleep better at night knowing that those devious conspiratorial 11-year-olds were behind bars. [second item]
posted by aaron
on Mar 16, 2001 -
15 comments
DivX +
filenavigator = headaches for
MPAA. Of course the
SPA and
RIAA can't be too pleased about filenavigator either. I've checked and the DivX of Castaway is on the net already.
posted by john
on Jan 17, 2001 -
3 comments
Gnutella not really distributed, de facto "servers" more vulnerable to lawsuits
How's that for a grab-ya headline? It's only part of the speculated dangers to Gnutella users postulated by Eytan Apter et al. in this Parc Xerox Department of Information Ecologies paper.
Gnutella purports to be a legal alternative to Napster, since it's a distributed, anonymous, peer-to-peer network, as opposed to a central clearinghouse owned by a group of managers. The authors of this paper have measured soem download and usage patterns and conclude that some de facto servers have sprung up by virtue of the fact that most Gnutella users take out more than they put it, many don't make any files available to the network, and the typical user is more likely to download than upload. Those few people who make large collections available to all end up serving practically all the queries. (And, since they already have a big collection, are less likely to download as well.)
The authors also conclude that the imbalance of "free-riders" (or, users who download more than the upload) threatens to make the network more sluggish, more vulnerable to crashes.
posted by rschram
on Aug 21, 2000 -
6 comments
If you haven't already read "The Heavenly Jukebox", you should really check it out. The Atlantic Monthly recently posted this great article subtitled "Rampant music piracy may hurt musicians less than they fear. The real threat -- to listeners and, conceivably, democracy itself -- is the music industry's reaction to it". While somewhat long, it's a very interesting read, going into the original copyright lawsuits in England over a hundred years ago to today's ordeal pitting the RIAA against the millions of people downloading Metallica mp3s off of Napster. Well worth reading.
posted by ookamaka
on Aug 18, 2000 -
1 comment
Perhaps
Lance was right. No maybe
Peter was right. Regardless, the wheels of progress continue to turn, this time it's
a p-to-p app that allows the swapping of console video games napster/gnutella-style, with the 17 year-old creator saying this about the possibility of getting shut down: "Sure, it is a concern that they may try to shut us down, despite the fact that we don't permit piracy, but I am confident in the law and believe we will prevail."
Riiiiiight.
posted by mathowie
on Aug 2, 2000 -
12 comments
AngryCoffee.com An interesting web interface for searching and downloading mp3s floating around on the
MyNapster and
OpenNap networks (Napster has currently shut them out of their network). But if everyone starts using a browser interface like this (and aren't logged into a Napster-like client) who's going to be serving the files in the first place?
posted by hit-or-miss
on Jul 30, 2000 -
2 comments
This just in: Napster's injunction to shut down tonight at midnight has been stayed (I'll add a url to a story when CNN writes it - BTW, how crazy is it that the napster news gets top level precedence as breaking news on a site as big as CNN?
screenshot)
posted by mathowie
on Jul 28, 2000 -
19 comments
So called Gnutella-worm.... So, I'm sure one or two of you have seen press coverage of the supposed spread of a set of vbs-worms, through the Gnutella community (Napster without a centralized server for those who don't know what it is). I have to agree with the Gnutella-folks statement, that this is more an exploit of windows and user-foolishness, than anything technically skilled. What's interesting to note is that it seems to be having a chilling effect...usually there's somewhere around 5,000 hosts, and 10 Terabytes of data online...today, there's barely 1100 hosts. I would have thought the average gnut-er was smarter than to fall for a vbs-worm.
posted by nomisxid
on Jun 5, 2000 -
1 comment
Motley disses Metallica Mister Sixx and pals give their response to Lars' crew, on the whole mp3/napster issue. Sounds like 2 groups of people are benefitting from all these lawsuits, lawyers and flash-cartoonists...
posted by nomisxid
on May 31, 2000 -
4 comments
