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My advice: stay away from retail at all costs. Try something secretarial, in hospitality, or even manual labor. Anything is better than being told all day why your reservations about hard-selling extended warranties are invalid, and that if a product is carried by the company, there can't ever be anything wrong with it, etc. Keep your dignity at all costs.

Oh, and find a job with consistent shifts, if it's hourly. Nothing sucks more than noon one day, 8am the next, 3pm the next. Especially when instead of giving you the schedule the Wednesday before, like you were promised, they decide that Sunday morning is a better time.

I'm optimistic, personally... 23:00-07:00 5 nights a week, with a 2-day break, and no micromanaging bosses.

FYI... if you use Ad-Aware to remove the spyware components of Kazaa, it kills the program.

IIRC, Kazaa needs Cydoor to run. Fortunately, there's a dummy Cydoor DLL available. (Can't say that I've used Kazaa or Kazaa Lite in a while, though...I started running Shareaza recently, which is spyware-free, ad-free, and works with a true decentralized network.)

Nice try, Ian. We all know that any network that randomly loses data will never take off. Maybe these people can teach you a thing or two about making scaleable networks.

bbbbeeeeaaaabbbblllleeee!

Great!

This means I'll be able to download the shows real soon now on Morpheus, Gnutella or EDonky2000!

If you think it should not be legal, what remedies should the law consider, since these systems can have significant non-infringing uses as well?

Not at all!!! It is about loosing control to state and corporate entities. Once you start to loose options, you start to loose your ability to choose, which in turn means you begin to loose your freedom.

Hey, in my day we used mp3 search engines and FTP,like Oth.net

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.

Like someone else previously said on this article, corporation is part of democracy. Ouch. He's probably right, but we shouldn't forget that corporations are currently (and for a few years) unable to manage, filter or even consider the huge amount of information transiting via the internet.

And how do we know that corporation tweak research results ? Because research on a particular topic is not unique, i.e., someone, somewhere, is trying to accomplish the same thing as you, whatever that thing is (except, maybe, for archiving 100% of the slashdot poll votes on your local harddrive, or knowing by heart all fortunes found on a slackware 7.1 linux system). Now that the internet nearly covers the whole Known Universe, we have a way to excange info about what we want, including scientific research ; and corporations, because they're a part of democracy, are to follow democracy rules and not to bother us.

Of course, this idealistic point of view can't stand against reality. Fortunately, we still have paranoid solutions, such as Freenet or Gnutella...

The whole point of this post is this : fight, don't cry. Fight also with your brains, not only with your strength, and remember we've still to see a corporate manager "managing" to install a *NIX server... All their base are belong to us (sorry, couldn't resist :] )

Hey, RIAA heard of Gnutella?!

Who's king now, chump?

Sure, I pay my dues to the EFF, I've downloaded the FreeNet source with the intention of working towards its development, and I try to tell non-geeks what's going on wherever I go. But it all seems woefully insuffucient in the face of such an army of over-funded lawyers and lobbyists.

I feel like it's a war that needs to be fought on several fronts at once: in Congress, in the courts, and on the ground with guerrilla-style apps like Gnutella et al. Most of those require better organization than the geek community has been able to muster so far; what's the key to moving forward?

This is completely bass-ackwards. The content that becomes more popular becomes harder to get, even though many, many more copies are made available. If said server sends out these 1000 copies of a file, why can't some of the clients share those 1000 copies?

Potential solutions to this problem can be derrived from systems that have already found a way around it, such as Gnutella and any MCAST implementation.

Gnutella, although its network model has other problems, allieviates the previously mentioned problem by forcing (or suggesting that) all clients cache and share for redistribution any content they download, thus increasing the number of available copies. MCAST, and other streaming technologies, handle the problem by allowing the server to send one copy of the content that can be shared by many clients... this is why we don't have to wait for TV/Radio shows to download.

The problem with universally applying an MCAST-type solution to the internet is that the internet is not like TV and radio: the internet is supposed to be content-on-demand. If you turn on your TV five minutes before a show, you can't start watching it early; simlarily, if you tune in five minutes late you can't start back at the beginning (TVIO users aside). I think many /. readers would go into shock if they could only read slashdot on the hour, every hour. (Sidenote: one potential workaround for really busy sites is to broadcast the data every x number of seconds continuously, that way the data restarts often enough. The problem with this is that users with slower connections won't be able to keep up, and users with faster connections will be limited to whatever the server's streaming at. Also, the server will keep broadcasting regardless of what sort of traffic it gets, clogging up its bandwith).

Gnutella is a much better solution. I'm not going to try to work out the details, but stick with me for the big picture. When a user hits a webpage, even with the current model, all of the content is cached on the local hard drive, or sometimes somewhere in between the user and the server. What if everyone's browser was capable of serving requests for that cached data? This would not be efficient for sites with only a little traffic, but for /.ted sites or CNN and the like, it would work very well. The problem is finding another client that has the data you want cached, this might be resolveable using either peering groups (like routers and gnutella), or using a central server to track it all (like napster). This however gives bad users a chance to replace CNN's banner with their own ads etc, but this could perhaps be worked around with some sort of trust metric system?

Well, there's my two cents, sorry if it's incoherent.

First, both must overcome a lack of a central server. While Napster has a server for the clients to connect to and cell phones communicate with a radio tower in that the geographic area, a "cell", P2P and Army's new system do not.

Second, both must be adaptive to their environment. Army's system must be able to use almost any frequency within a broad range and provide a means of concealment, and P2P must able to use almost any port within TCP or UDP and vary packets enough not to be snagged by a firewall.

Third, and most challenging, both must be able to deal with that pesky bandwidth problem as the number of users increase. I will be amazed if almost the same code used by the Army, if released, would not make it into a P2P client, or vise-versa. Virtually the same problem.

• 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

I think this idea is very good. I think that most of the comments agree on one thing though : Stallman's article doesn't give enough details on the practical side to make it seem real. He (as usualy) defends the ethical side of the problem, and rightly enough describes the way the content should be free (speech) but he leaves a huge blank area in the field of the practical (and technical) implementation of GNUpedia.

I think that Internet and the Open Source community is somehow ready to start such a project (and I don't think it was the case anytime before).

What we need to make it real is a deep deep thinking on the technical/practical side of it. And while we are here, why not talk about how you would technically do it ? I mean, /. readers are probably the most qualified to talk/think about this if not to implement it themselves...

Here is how I would see it : I think that what we realy need in terms of encyclopedia is something that would sit between Shaslcode and QuestionExchange. Something where anyone could post comments, articles, pictures and all the shit, but where every willing people could also judge the pertinence of the content. Say for example that this article is a troll, this other one is "insightfull" and so on. People could also say "this article was usefull to my knowledge". So we would have two level of moderation : one on the "editorial scale" (troll/interesting), and one on the content quality/usefullness.

Why ? Because I think that Stallman is right on one point at least : it needs to be completly free (speech) to be interesting. Doing else would be doing something that has already be done (say britanica for example) and that perhaps doesn't need to be done again.

Making GNUpedia an "open to any post" system is a nice idea, but it also implies that we will have to face A LOT of content submissions. Even if we wanted to create an "editorial board" to decide what would be included and what would not (which we cannot if we want to remain free as in speech) it would be too much work for (volunteers) individuals to "separate the good from the evil".

So what we need is a system that allows anybody to feed it with his/her particular bit of knowledge, and them let the individual reader make the content "worth reading" by moderating it up or down.

Then, after a while, we might (might) have something interesting for anyone. In that case I'm sure it would be the greatest success of Open Source movment (aren't we talking about free knowledge, free information since the very beginning of Open Source ?)

Another thought I have too : why make it web (http) based ? Any rational reason for it ? I think we have now in our hands a better technical way to do it : why not build it as a peer-to-peer network (based on this or that) with a client/server program using Gecko to render the documents ? What do you think ? That was my 2 cents worth thoughts...

PS : Please forgive the english, it's not my mother tongue.

I suggest that we boycott UUNet immediately.

Simple, there's Gnutella and check out The Music lover

--Never trust a guy who \has his IP address tattoed on his arm, especially if it's DHCP.

Hmm.

The IOC bans websites from using or showing video clips, the story hits Slashdot and now free-speach advocates are getting crazy shouting that it's an infrigment of their Nature-given right to watch an event which is, by the way, international.

You know what happens next - kids with video capture cards start recording every bit of Olympic activity they can, "DivX ;-)" it and send it out on Napster and Gnutella. Oh, and don't forget those that will create hexadecimal dumps of the movies' content in text and print those on t-shirt with "The IOC can suck my dI0Ck" on the back.

C'mon, it' s pretty obvious that the IOC has learned a less on from the De-CSS episode and is seeking to improve the rating for a pretty much dying event.

I can see it already: thousands of kiddies all watching Curling just to see what the fuss is all about.

Not bad, IOC. Not bad.

[Check out this other Jesus-powered IOC]

Greg

Hmmm... Combine the hax0red TiVo with one of the lovely storage devices from mondays' slashdot article and you could store some serious TV time... Commercial free and what you want when you want it. I'm sounding like a commercial for TiVo/Network Engines, I know... Anyways, this could make for some interesting TiVo applications. It could also make for more pirating controversy because people will have an easy way of recording _all_ of their movies/shows/etc and freely/easily distributing them via scour or gnutella. The lawyers would have a field day! Anyways, just my $.02

i remember reading a bit back on slashdot about a group called gpulp. it's some kind of consortium to solve p2p problems using the classic open-source method. check it out here.

For example, I'll focus on pornography because it's everywhere and has been a hot issue. Porn has always been around. When the camera was invented, people whined about porn there. When the VCR was invented, people whined about people having or buying porn tapes. (Ironically, porn is one of the reasons that VCRs got so much market penetration so fast...pardon the pun.) When the camcorder was invented, there was complaining that people were using it to tape their sex romps.

For some reason when it gets to computers, people freak out more than usual. When BBSes became popular, people were being jailed (e.g. Amateur Action BBS). When the Internet became popular, the news media, public, and political scum went nuts, passed laws like the Communications Decency Act, made hit-and-run attacks on the Internet such as the "computer pedophile" episode of NBC's "Crusaders" back around 1995.

But look at the change in culture between, say, the mid-80s and the year 2000 in America. Sex is nowhere near as taboo as it was. "Alternative sexualities" (sexual orientiations as well as things like bondage) are tolerated and practiced far more mainstream. It's discussed more openly. It's more prevalent in movies and on TV. This is a pretty massive change. (As a side note, you can tell how tolerated sex has become by observing how readily people like Dr. Laura freak out.

Of course, banning pornography was hard already. Banning it in the future will be nearly impossible with file sharing networks like Freenet. For better or worse, I expect that technology will have some of these effects over the next few years:

Restricting things like child pornography will rapidly become very difficult, if not impossible. (The legality and ethics of this is a completely separate issue, which is more complicated than most people think, involving things like different ages of consent in different countries.)

Intellectual property, in the form of software, music, and video, will rapidly become obsolete. New market models will have to be developed.

Strong cryptography will become more commonplace.

Many "undernets" will spring up across the Internet which use strong cryptography, tunnelling, and have their own email, news, and other systems. I know for a fact that this has already happened, and they have restricted access and fairly complex entrance systems. An infinitely more mainstream but very watered-down version of this is Gnutella.

In these cases, the law could try, but they can't readily enforce, just like they can't readily enforce laws against having sex in positions other than the missionary position. They can't regulate what they can't see. In the latter case, it's your house, curtains, or whatever. In the case of the Internet and technology, it's cryptography, systems like Freenet, and plain old practicality.

It really doesn't matter whether SDMI is hacked before or after music starts being released with either the Phase 1 or Phase 2 watermark. However, all the watermark can do is identify a track, and give some sort of guidelines of the rights the 'licensee' has. ** The whole plan hinges on software that pays attention to the watermark. ** SDMI's plan is simple: Divide and conquer. The 'big' software companies pay attention to the watermark because they are rich targets for lawsuits, plus they want to use popular (i.e. big five label) content. After the big software companies have signed up, SDMI can start going after the small players. Having a link to Gnutella on your site might make you a target! Let's get anonymous, reliable transfer and hosting for open source audio software going! Chris Owens San Carlos, CA

Free beats $5/month everytime and any day of the week.

-B
benjones@superutility.net

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

There is a way to start resolving this problem, and it is currently in development.

The gPulp project is currently working on all of these issues. Check proposals and ideas at: http://gnutellang.we go.com/go/wego.pages.page?groupId=133015&view=page &folderId=136401&pageId=177268&JServSess ionId=3fe61b505308701b.415222.969643886549

There is also a server oriented gnutella application which aims to start resolving some of these issues in the near term. Features such as:

1) Provide a server for broadband / dedicated network users to provide content with a true server oriented gnutella node. This will be similar to a modified apache for singular installations, or a federated distributed server architecture for routing and caching fun.

2) Remove broadcast push requests (in all future clients)

3) Proxy and cache support for slow users. This will allow beafy servers to take over some of the load which dialup / slower clients experience. This will be somewhat ala freenet, as popular data will propagate through caches in various nodes. Also, this can provide a level of anonymity which is not present.

4) Adaptive servers which configure their network connections for optimal efficiency. Not too busy, not too slow, and with the widest distance topologically from their peers (if linked) and fuzzy / reactive propogation algorithms so that TTL's and routes can be dynamically modified as load increases or other factors require.

There is nothing fundamentally flawed with the gnutella architecture, and it is far from a 'dead' horse'. However, there are significant innefficiencies and complications which are causing problems right now. Rest assured these will be fixed.

Note that I am not disputing what this article says; i am an avid Gnutella user and it has certainly slowed down and become harder to get stuff.

but, Look at what the article says:

Unfortunately, we have found that Gnutella is not as scalable as the centralized Napster network.

Thanks, a lot, for telling us how this works. The problem is that, because connections to search for files travel through a gigantic web, finding what you want can take quite a while. And cancelling your search is a pretty flaky concept with this system, too.

I figure, seeing as how there are open-source client, and the article explains some client-side problems, the other clients could be updated to fix this. The other clients are probably better already anyways, so gnutella.wego.com could just reccommend the other client.

Then again, it doesn't really matter, becuase all anyone uses Gnutella for is to search for pr0n mpegs and asf's, right?

right?

In the article they point out that the load could be cut in half by fixing some bad code.
They further mention that proposals for redesigned version have already been made.
link from article
Not only that, it says support and resources for this project are being sought out - it's active, it's open source, what more do we want?
Given the interest in Gnutella, I don't see any problem finding people to fix known bugs.
Rather then seeing this as the death of Gnutella, I saw it more as a positive article pointing out known bugs that are being fixed, and announcing a the planning of a new and even more powerful version.

After that, I skipped my senior year, got my GED, and now have a great job at a California startup. Now I just shake my head sadly as I hear about each "new study" or whatever.

There are some very interesting proposals for the next version listed on the gPulp site.

When I first saw it was ''talk before code'' my heart sank, but some of the proposals are actually very good.

Also, I noticed at the Gnotella page that the author is pointing out that Gnutella has being going downhill - no wonder, I find it much harder to get anything useful from it than with Napster.

From the article, you can find gPulp at http://gnutellang.wego.com/.

Just use Gnutella. I'd be really interested to see how the establishment and the entertainment industry is going to stop it. You can't legislate this. You can't monopolize it out of existance. You can try and fight it but you cannot stop it. We're dealing with technology that the world really doesn't understand or know how to deal with. The old establishment will need to learn to coexist with it. If people want to share information, music, naked pictures of men having sex with sheep, or warez you're just going to have to accept it. The old walls are crumbling and you missed the bus. Welcome to the 21st century old media. You're obsolete.

Censorship sucks - it's nice to know there's a way to get around it while you're fighting the fight. :-)
Sean

Censorship sucks - it's nice to know there's a way to get around it while you're fighting the fight. :-)
Sean

There would be a whole different debate if AOL had sanctioned an official release of Gnutella (after the fashion of the Napster trial), but considering that Gnutella was allegedly developed and released without their consent, it would seem that there is little ground for them to be held liable. Can you be held liable for something that an employee of yours does without your permission? Seems a little dubious. The last time that I checked, development on the origonal Nullsoft Gnutella client had stopped at the Gnutella site in favor of clonese using the same protocol, meaning that they would be basically sued for the development of a communications protocol. Maybe we ought to go after the authors of The Infinite Monkey Protocol for cruelty to animals. . .

"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"

There are plenty. Visit http://gnutella.wego.com and check out the third party clones. The gnutella 0.56 isn't even supported anymore, so if you are running that, stop, and get something new. Toadnode (win) is a quick up-and-comer.

We *all* need post DeCSS on our severs. Everyone. That means you! The only way we can combat harassment and restriction of legitimate free speech is if there are more of us than their money and time can reasonably assail. I do not think I am the only one who feels strongly about this (but I am one of few who is doing anything). Once you have posted DeCSS, link it as a reply to this message. You can find it on my web server in the clouds. If mine is shut down try gnutella. Resistance is indispensable.

If you really want to confuse people post the other DeCSS too.

Napster
Gnutella

But Freenet has several unique features that distinguish it from Napster and Gnutella. I especially like the fact that content can be uploaded anonymously which is great for banned intellectual assets like DeCSS.
Ultimatly, Freenet will probably be good for the internet if it takes off with success - the idea of unrestricted, free and anonymous content publishing will encourage Web diversity without the fear of lawsuits or just plan technical limitations.

--
Kiro

The original Gnutella client isn't the 'officially recommended' client anymore -- they now ask you to use Gnotella.

With the old client you couldn't restrict bandwidth or number of node connections, so it is a good idea to pick another one if you're connected for more than an hour.

And there is a ton of other clients, some with source.

I disagree; while commercial services may become popular, Napster and other file-sharing services will never go away. Look at opennap or gnutella. I don't think these will go away anytime soon. A quick look at gnapster shows 46 opennap servers available. Gnutella has many thousands of hosts.
Whether or not piracy is legal, it is unstoppable.

Napster, Gnutella, DeCSS, Junkbusters, and almost all the other controversial programs you care to name were developed in the United States. If a U.S. court shuts down the services, then you can't use them no matter where you live.

Wrong, way wrong, actually (DeCSS was not written in the US, I think it was coded in Norway). And neither DeCSS nor Gnutella a 'services' that can be shut down, both are open-source (although the source is not out for the original gnutella, it is an open protocol and easy to implement). No one really needs a new version of DeCSS and there are lots of people writing new versions gnutella.

We don't know how bad things are in north korea, but here are some pictures of hungry children. -- CNN

Gnutella IS a non-profit piece of software that does what you say it doesn't. I invite you to go to the Gnutella site, as well as visit the Gnotella site as well. Perhaps your cluon concentration will increase.

--

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

There are numerous messages over on the chat board at the Gnutella website that indicates that others are having the same problem.

I always thought that something was likely to happen bad to gnutella, seeing how it loaded the network so heavily with only 3000 clients at a time - the most I ever saw was maybe 5000. Napster had a total of 23 million users (not all of whom were logged in at any given time).

Has the gnutellanet gotten broken into islands? Is there a failure in the protocol?

I don't believe there really could only be a few users because there is a message on the Gnutella site that says they had to install a new server and buy more bandwidth to handle all the hits and client downloads they are getting.

Maybe decentralized peer-to-peer isn't all that it's cracked up to be - or at least the kinks aren't worked out of it yet.

Ah, I see this message posted on the development board:

Many of you developers have probably noticed that GNet is not working as well as usual today. We think this is may be because there is a ping-flood DOS in progress, or there is a very poorly-behaving new client out there. I thought at first that we may just be suffering from really high usage, but the contents of the packets have changed my mind.

We are seeing many thousands of pings coming in (most of our traffic!) with hops/TTLs that are very large -- often 255. These pings have port numbers that appear to be random, and the IP addresses in the headers are not reachable -- some of them are clearly bogus (like 0.10.23.0), so they're probably random, too.

We all have to do whatever we can do to stop broadcasting these bogus pings, ASAP. Because of Napster being shut down, many newbies are joining Gnutella, and things aren't going so well for them.

Ideas: 1) As suggested elsewhere, anytime the TTL+HOPs count is large (>20?), the packet should be dropped. 2) Multiple pings with the same IP address in the header should be dropped (don't know if this will help). 3) Pings with a hop count of 0 should come from the same IP address as the one in the header -- if not, the packet should be dropped. 4) Change our servents so that the TTL is not configurable. 5) Change our servents so that the ping frequency is much, much lower.

Any other ideas? Anything wrong with these?

> It's not about the record companies screwing the little guys... It never has been, and I've definitely had enough of this bloody topic!

Not correct. This is definately about just what you said it isn't: namely, the record companies screwing the "little guys". But not only them--which I assume you mean the consumers--but the artists as well. The only people in the entire marketplace who are happy with the RIAA, MPAA, et. al., are the RIAA, MPAA, et. al. Both the consumer and the artist have bitch gripes with these entities; Napster is the lighting rod for brining these issues to the foreground.

Which issues? Namely that intellectual property in the digital age is a conept that needs major legal readjustments, especially in the face of the following facts:

1) MP3 and similar audio & video compression technologies allow media to be stored in a compact format.

2) The slow but steady increase in the availability of high-bandwidth services allows for distribution of these.

3) The distributed nature of the Net makes it very difficult to prosecute individual users. Centralized services such as Napster are easy targets; Gnutella & FreeNet are next to impossible to control.

The issue is whether or not these factors lead to the conclusion that the record companies are out of date. The primary purpose of a record company is as a distribution mechanism. Once upon a time it was economically beneficial for artists to work with record companies in order to efficiently distribute their works. This is no longer true. An artist can simply set up a web page with their tunes readily available; the record company as distributor has become unnecessary. With technology being at the state it is now, BMG, Sony, and all the rest are simply unneeded middleman. They are hurting, not helping, the market in this respect by impeding the free-flow of goods. (And by free, I mean free.)

The secondary purpose of a record company is marketing. Bill Hicks once said "If you're in marketing or advertising do me a favor and kill yourself. You serve no rational purpose." Definately not-PC, but there is a kernel of truth to this: namely, that marketing is about lies and deception. The desire to buy is inflated by advertisers not because of intrinsic worth, but because of chicks in bikinis, or making it look uncool, or whatever means are available that mostly do not reflect the truth of the situation. Advertising is about emotive responses; advertisers get scared whenever consumers begin to actually use their brains as a reasoning tool.

I can't speak for everyone, but this really annoys me. I do not believe people should lie unless it is absolutely necessary. That's just wrong. I don't have many scruples, but this is one that seems to be pretty workable. Since advertising is mostly based upon lying, I hold advertisers to be worthless turds as a whole. This is admittedly a crass ad hominem attack, but it is one that I find difficult to escape.

If record companies are removed from the equation, then musicians will rise to the top based upon whatever factors currently resonate with the listeners. There will be no corporate executives deciding what the market does or does not want (which happens, I imagine, quite frequently.) More variety will be available, and I cannot help but believe that this will be a Good Thing(tm). In my fantasy world, banal tripe such as Backstreet Sync and Brittney Aguillera will be delegated to Saturday morning "Say No To Drugs" propaganda.

By impeding the way for MP3 distribution channels to function unmolested, the record companies are serving their bottom line only, not artists, not consumers, not the music industry as a whole, not the market as a whole. They are an unneeded barrier towards a smoothly functioning economy. They act as a pseudo-governmental entity, using the power of their attorneys to coerce both listener and artist to do their bidding. Their lobbying of Congress is famous, their rhetoric almost religious in its tone.

The facts being what they are, there are two obvious remedies available:

1) Do not change IP laws. Step up enforcement of existing copyright laws. This will entail more law enforcement officers, perhaps even necessitating a new UN enforcement agency or something under the Department of Justice in the US.

2) Change IP laws. Allow artists control of their works to distribute as they wish. Encourage a "common carrier" interpretation of the laws insofar as Napster-ish companies are concerned. Don't panic! The world will not end EVEN IF 95% of the population downloads their songs, movies, or books of of the internet.

There are only two absolutely necessary components to music: a performer, and an audience. Technology has frequently been a means to streamline business processes. This can lead to short-term losses such as when robots replace factory workers, cow-milking machines replace udder-pullers, or spreadsheet programs make bookkeepers unnecessary. Similary, the recording industry is an antiquated business schema that only serves to hinder the relationships between artists and their afficiandos. Radical changes to IP law are unlikly, considering the fact that so much precedent exists. But changes on the edges can (and should) be made, lest we have rapant wiretapping and further swells in our prison population.

As I understand it, the orignal Gnutella project at Nullsoft is dead; AOL presumably didn't approve, particularly considering their impending merger with Time/Warner. There are now a number of independent Gnutella clones, most of them fully compatible with the Nullsoft Gnutella protocol, and I think they're all open-source. Consult the Gnutella site (not hosted by Nullsoft/AOL, nor operated by Nullsoft employees AFAIK) for details.

Now, if you really want to do this sort of thing right, you don't start a company and advertise what you're doing. That's dumb. You also don't have a centralized server whose operators can be sued. Instead, you set up a decentralized system where everyone is a client and a server. Gnutella is one possibility, but it still allows you to identify where the pirated files are located (on various servers, identifiable by their IP addresses, which may be dynamic but do have a specific meaning at any given moment). Freenet is better still; the files are distributed in such a way that you can't tell where they are, and in fact a given file may not be in any one place in its entirety. Now that's tricky to sue.

So I think it's pretty stupid for people to be talking about setting up new Napster servers. You want to get sued? Fine, go ahead. Your pockets are probably a lot less deep than Napster's, but the RIAA will be happy to take whatever you've got. In the meantime, those of us with clues will be working with Gnutella and Freenet, doing essentially the same thing you are, but not getting sued. Take your pick.

First, Orrin Hatch seemed disgusted with the way that the record companies were trying to eliminate fair use in the Senate hearings on the matter a few weeks ago. You may recall that he was a primary architect of the DMCA.

Second, it appears as if Judge Kaplan may rule that DeCSS is protected under the first amendment- and he was just as rude to the alleged "pirates" at first as Judge Patel has been to Napster's attorneys so far. The fact that she didn't even know that Gnutella was a free service shows that she's not necessarily evil, just ignorant.

Let's win this case in the court of public opinion so that we can shift the focus of the debate from "piracy" to fair use and consumer rights!

ARRGHH! AHOY, MATEYS! Sausage King of Chicago

As bad as this sounds, perhaps this is what is needed to push along technically superior solutions.
Unisys is pushing PNGs with their licensing, Fraunhofer is pushing Ogg Vorbis with theirs, and now, the RIAA is pushing Freenet and Gnutella.
In all three cases, the Free Software world has overcome litigation be creating open, free, superior alternatives.

I think this is good. Shutting down Napster is going to make the MP3 trading community much stronger. People are now going to move to better technologies, such as Gnutella. For those of you that want to get your feet wet with Gnutella, there are a few web front-ends to it out there, my favorite being TellaFind.com.