Slashdot Mirror

>It's a bit of a cop-out to say that the creators of a network of file sharing systems can't be responsible for its content.

On the flipside of the coin, then I guess they should start lawsuits against people who create ftp, http, ssh clients. Hell, ANY service that can transfer data has the potential to share file content. For example, you could pretty much create your own (decentralized)P2P service by installing an {SSH,FTP,HTTP,SMTP} server and client on each users end, play with the port numbers, and forward your address and open ports to some majordomo@theglobalfilesharing-list-com. Users can check on what files you have by viewing your HTTP site, which they can then download via some u/l-d/l ratio-based FTP/SSH anonymous account. Wasn't this the premise for Hotline? But since these P2P apps are easier to set up (for non-computer-saavy), then thats why it is so widespread and thats where the radars go off in the offices of the content-nazis.

The legitimate uses for FTP, HTTP, SMTP,... carry over to P2P as well, its just a matter of where the users with their sharing needs go. If you shut off Kazaa, either another P2P app will become popular or people will start getting clever with FTP, HTTP, SMTP as they did before napster. Blame the users who are pirating, not the application that already uses the file sharing techniques of old.

actually, they're all on Hotline and Carracho weeks before they hit store shelves . . .

I know that Hotline Servers use ports 5500 - 5504 for their serving activities. As this virus is targeted at Linux-servers mainly, I don't know what this can cause to HXD- or other servers that use the Hotline-protocol.

AFAIK you can change the range of ports used in the Windows-/ Mac-versions of Hotline. If the possibility is given, I'd suggest to change that in HXD too. But don't forget to inform your registered clients first : )

I find it amusing that no-one ever goes after hotline while trying to abolish P2P software. This one single network has been around far longer than any other P2P software. In case you don't know already, it is an unregulated jungle where you can find just about any piece of software, movie, or mp3 you would ever want. Well, I probably just screwed the whole network by mentioning it here, but I am a karma whore after all ;-)

So you think Apple won't mind me copying my OS-X CD for my own "private use" then? :-)

I'm sure Apple would not really care. All the big money is in their hardware. If they sell one premium G4 installation at $20,000 they make more than 200 copies of OSX would. OSX is to the Apple what Solaris is to Sun -- a better tool to leverage their hardware.

Not only that, but I'm sure Apple would rather people pirate OSX to increase distribution and development. Not a lot of Mac users have made the jump to OSX yet, so they really need OSX to become very mainstream. On many Hotline servers there are always copies of the MacOS circulating around, inlcluding unreleased and development builds. These get leaked for a reason.

Apple really doesn't care about the client. A lot more money will come in from Mac OS X Server and WebObjects, which require keys and actual user registration

Maskirovka

I bought my english papers from him all through school, wich is why I cant spell 8)

Napster is dead already. For those of you that didn't get the memo, "Dogs Barking. Can't fly without umbrella!". Sound of Dieing Giraffe

There are many alternatives currently available or under construction. Hotline, Direct Connect, Gnutella, Espra, Google. :)

Behold the next wave.

They skipped gnutella because, as far as peer to peer systems go, it sucks. Research papers such as Free Riding on Gnutella and Why Gnutella Can't Scale, No, Really articulate this much better than I can. The success rate of pirating music via Gnutella is much less than those of napster, aimster, and community-based hotline servers.

The RIAA admitted this, if you remember :)

bigredg.com has their "own" press release on how it all went down. not even a mention of adam...

Poetic justice? Hotline (which is client/server, NOT P2P, btw) has degraded into a banner revenue machine...perhaps their slew of advertisers will realize that focusing ads to pr0n hounds and war3z leechers is not such a brilliant idea (as it is, most of these types use nobanner hacked versions of HL anyway...)

Here's their typically self-serving slant on the court ruling.

If you have about 3 hours to kill, read the judgement in its entirety and marvel and the byzantine particulars of this case.

• Alpine - Adaptive Large-scale Peer2peer Information NEtworking
• ANAP -- Anonymous Napster
• AudioGalaxy Satellite
• Bearshare -- Powerful Gnutella client
• Blocks -- open source distributed sharing client with encryption
• Carracho -- MacOS file sharing program
• CuteMX
• Direct Connect
• DFSI -- Distributed File Sharing over IRC
• Espra
• FileSwap
• Filetopia
• FreeNet
• Gnutmeg -- peered file sharing system
• gnutella -- distributed P2P file sharing tool
• Hotline
• IMesh
• Jungle Monkey -- open source
• KaZaA - Windows Media Desktop
• Konspire -- open source distributed client in java
• OFSI -- Open File Sharing Initiative
• ProjectELF -- anonymoys distributed sharing system
• SongSpy
• Spin Frenzy
• Splooge -- P2P file sharing by file extension
• Swapoo -- Napster like service for sharing video game ROMs
• Swaptor -- Online File Sharing Community
• VNN - secure file sharing app

However, my position is that word of mouth has always been among the most powerful means of advertising and the least compensated, monetarily. Accordingly, the legacy financial models of entertainment distribution seem to violate fundamental principles of economics. Those who are creating value in the form of word of mouth marketing and sales have not ever received their proper cut.

Enter Napster, creating vastly more perfect market information in this regard. I think that it should be incumbent upon the entertainment industry to keep up with the times and create new business models that spur technology rather than defending oligopolies and stifling innovation.

In the meantime, we the community must scatter in a number or random directions now that the feds have effectively shackled Napster.

I feel really bad for Shawn, but the only way to keep the spirit alive is to abaondon Napster altogether and go somewhere else ... and we must keep migrating and scattering like this until the feds get the hint that file sharing is not going away simply because the RIAA pays them to prop up their anachronistic institution.

Here are some starter ideas - LET A MILLION NAPSTERS BLOOM!

Hotline
Gnutella
Fidelio - Hotline for Linux
Gnucleus - Another Gnutella for windoze
BearShare - Another Gnutella for windoze
Aimster
And lots more on ZeroPaid

But honestly, did you really think that Napster had a workable business model?

Have you ever heard of Hotline? Basically, they created a client/server suite for the Mac that ended up being really great for transferring files. So good in fact, that all of the software pirates on the Mac started using it (most say that is what they intended). Instead of curbing the piracy attempts right away, they waited until the distribution of their product became very high among the Mac underground. Then, when it started to look profitable, they told the pirates to stop using their software beacuse they wouldn't tolerate it, and released new versions of their software.

Now, we have a product that is well established because of piracy and is now legal and making money. Not a bad business model...

He starts using the much-acclaimed MSIE for MacOS, and after browsing for awhile the system freezes up again. Reboot

You apparently don't know what the MS in MSIE means

Yeah right. Two hours (and several 3rd party application downloads) later, we've got a flaky connection to my PC using "DAVE." I don't remember the details (this happened a few months ago), but to put it mildly, DAVE was a pain in the ASS.

Again you're blaming the OS for an application failure. Also, blame MS for not supporting AppleTalk. Sure it's crappy, but it was the standard for home networking before MS even knew there was a market for it.

Personally I would have used Hotline or an FTP Server since TCP is the best way to make anything else talk to windows

so the ".mp3" got cut off and the Mac didn't make it too "user friendly" to get them working

Here's where it gets really difficult to tell if you're a troll or just a fool.
Windows is the only OS in the world that gives a shit about the file extension. All other OS's including MacOS look at the file and figure it out for themselves. Change it to .jpg or leave it blank AND IT DON'T MATTER!

The files would be sitting there, but you couldn't drag them onto Quicken to open them

Never heard of that one. I would guess they got transfered as ascii files. Who knows anyhow that's
a one time thing.

---CONFLICT!!---

Hotline has helped me gain many a program. I use these programs all the time and if I would have paid for them all, my bill would be well over $1000. Some software companies charge way too much for software. Why do they think their programs are being pirated? People don't want to pay an arm and a leg to get programs that are very useful. One program I downloaded would have cost me almost $600! I realize that these programs take a multitude of hours and days to complete, but still, why so much?

Every user on the Napster Network connects to the same central server. However, there are other central servers that run the Napster protocol (and allow formats other than MPEG Layer 3 Audio; use it for mirroring the Linux kernel tarballs?), and you can run your own on a nix box or winbox. The lawyers may shut the lawyers shut the Napster Network down, but the success of one big red H shows that the game of whack-a-mole is a surprisingly weak form of resistance. Resistance is futile.

A good lawyer can take down any published set of servers.

The game then becomes whack-a-mole. If the server software is freely available (even beer!), it _will_ be in warez archives, and other servers _will_ pop up. Think Hotline.

From the article's description (given ZDNet is not exactly a bastion of accuracy), this "Groove Transciver" thing sounds an awful lot like Hotline, which has been around for quite a while now.

----

Check out Etree. This is a loose group of people that legitimately trade live concert recordings compressed with Shorten (lossless compression). They use FTP. People setup FTP servers and then announce to a mailing list what they have available.

The problem is that all of the public servers are staggering under the load. They limit the number of concurrent connections betwen 2-5 users to prevent complete mayhem on their bandwidth. So many people are trying to get in that the servers have scripts that automatically route ban anyone that attempts to connect more often than once a minute (or even two minutes for the bigger servers). The files are so large (350 megs per CD, 1-3 CD's per show usually) that it takes forever to get in. Standard Operating Procedure for downloading from public Etree servers is to open 12 terminal windows, each with a script trying to login to 12 different sites (once per minute, of course). After a few days you might get into one or two of them.

Hotline is a relatively modern BBS like system (it has integrated file transfer, message bases, and chatting). It's a little more advanced than FTP: it lets anyone connect but downloads are placed in a queue. So instead of redialing over and over and over again you just connect and start your download, and wait for the people in the queue ahead of you to finish. On popular sites that have lots of goodies I have literally had to wait in the queue for well over 24 hours to begin the actual file transfer.

I think the solution to the problem is a market based solution. Create a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to download something from someone and depelete their disk/bandwidth/cpu resources you must provide a comparable amount of resources. Since disk/bandwidth/cpu is a commodity, you can use a digital bearer instrument to represent those resources and create a fungible currency backed by the disk/cpu/bandwidth. Mojo Nation does exactly that, but you probably already knew I was going to say that.

Burris

I disagree. If music companies can sue Napster for providing a service, then what's going to stop anyone from suing a company that makes any kind of client.
For example, lets take Hotline Communications Inc.. Their client/server suit can also used to download MP3's. It is also used to get plenty of other legal media. Does that mean we should shut it down because users of the server are breaking laws?
Perhaps companies should sue Netscape because people browsing the net can ALSO download MP3's. Wait! We could sue people who develop FTP daemons as well! People can use FTP to transfer MP3's!
The whole idea is wrong. Software manufacturers should not get in this much trouble because the end user abuses their product. Even if it was meant to be used that way.

GnutellaNews, Gnotella, Gnutella(.wego.com), Gnutmeg, AudioGnome, MyNapster, FreeNet, Jungle Monkey, Scour Exchange, Spin Frenzy Exchange, ChartBox 0.91, Gnutella MP3 Search, Gnute, Metallicster, CuteMX, IMesh, Hotline, FileSwap, OpenNap

The Hotline network is growing like mad and is 99% MP3s, movies, games and p0rn but nobody seems to care.

Do you like your portals? Do you like the idea that there are some central hubs to which you all are connected and which provide you with the information that you are looking for? Excite, Altavista, Yahoo, Infooseek, Google etc etc etc. Are you going through a central portal to find your content?

There is a better idea. Go directly into all active nodes of the web and use their power to perform your searches. Distributed computing in the most real sense of the word.

Gnutella http://www.surfacelayer.nu/gnuworld /basic.shtml
HotLine http://www.bigredh.com/index2.html
FreeNet project http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

No more relying on your large corporate portals, no more commanders to filter your content, no mishits, no broken links.
This is how the usability of the web will increase in the near future.

Hotline not only supports filesharing (TIP: Search ALL online servers for files at http://www.hotlinehq.com/), but also chat, messaging and news boards (like ICQ Active Lists in fact). If you are into warez, hotline also has it advantages which I won't talk about here ;). I get most of my stuff from Hotline servers nowadays.

The sad news is that Hotline is only for Mac OS and Win32. Haven't tried it with WINE though.

--

I contest the notion that the availability of DVD-ROM drives creates the urge to pirate films. If the proposed changes the the DVD format were enacted, the same Hotline warez kiddies who pipe VCDs out their dormroom ethernet would just hook up a VHS player to their machines.

Multimedia files are no longer beyond the file capacity of home computers. My first CD-ROM drive came with a computer that had a 1 GB drive (Macintosh Quadra 840AV). At that time, although the software for duplication existed, it was hardly logical to make a disk image of Myst.

Although a MS Word file might take up a megabyte instead of 100kB, the 10GB+ drives that come with any new machine reflect the users' desire for media files, be they MP3s, AIFFs, or VCDs. Storing the new NIN or Tori double CDs has become trivial and inexpensive.

It is the state of computing today, of storage and of bandwidth, that allows for personal piracy. Stopping mass duplication and distribution should be the goal of the industries affected. Hampering the technology and the products can only be a shot in the foot.

Thank you, --Max