Napster Server Protocol Has Been Published

C|Net is publishing a story about a Stanford University Senior who reversed-engineered the Napster server protocol. The story also mentions a Web page in SourceForge which gives links to various Napster clients for different OS's. I wonder how many new Napster servers clones we'll have soon.

Comments

Re:Napster rocks

[AugstWest]

Your argument is a bit naive, and I think you're fully aware of that.

There have always been studio bands that tour extremely rarely. Touring is an extremely grueling process, which can totally tear up the lives of musicians and their families. A lot of bands do not tour, and rely on studio album sales to keep their efforts going. They shouldn't be forced out on the road just so that you can save your $10-15 and listen to the tunes for free.

2. However, what they are really afraid is that artist can get big and earn big bucks without going through a record label. They are scared shit because once artists realize this, the industry will go in for a major overhaul.

I don't see how free, illegal distribution of music gets the artists money without the record companies taking a cut. Artists realize the power of internet distribution, and are trying to capitalize on it. Napster is most definitely not a way for them to do so. Napster is a way for their hard work to proliferate to a million ears without a single penny of income.

Really, the main reason the RIAA and the industry in general is scared of napster, MP3 and digital music in general is that the vast majority of their income comes from your purchase of actual physical media, which becomes obsolete every 4-8 years.

The main reason I worry about it is the artists loss of income. There are a lot of smaller record companies, especially now that pretty much anyone could start one for under $10k, that are getting screwed in the process. A lot of electronic bands are getting ripped off unimaginably, especially since a lot of them rarely, if ever, play live. They're on smaller labels, just getting started, and are losing a lot of income due to things like napster.

At some point, you're taking food out of a musician's mouth. Rationalize that with as much rhetoric as much as you like, it's the basic fact beneath all this.

Re:Already Known?

[dew]

That's my site.

Yes, the protocol is already very well documented by other people. No, this is not a publicity stunt of mine. Yes, my documentation is pretty poor. No, it's not very revolutionary. It's me learning how to reverse-engineer a network application. Please don't get pissed off at me; I'm not really trying to prove much of anything with this release other than I have the very beginnings of how the protocol works.

David E. Weekly (dew, Think)

Re:Universities are killing Napster.

[Robin Hood]

I work for the Resnet group (RESidence hall NETwork -- Ethernet in the dorms) at my college, and let me tell you, Napster looks very different from the "other side", when you're the admin trying to run around making sure everyone has enough bandwidth. Before we introduced Resnet, our bandwidth (two T1's) was almost never more than 50% full. Bandwidth usage graphs for the second T1 showed long periods of inactivity with the occasion spike of 3% or 5% usage. Now, two years later, we've got 100% usage on both T1's during the middle of the day, and I wouldn't be surprised if that expanded until both our T1's are completely filled all the time.

Napster and Hotline are two of the many reasons our bandwidth is filling up (streaming media and games are other reasons, but we've found that games aren't sucking up too much bandwidth -- yet). When the first Hotline server showed up on our network, we noticed it right away: bandwidth usage on our Internet connection was suddenly 100%, all the time. A little research showed that all this bandwidth usage was coming from JUST ONE USER! We immediately blocked the Hotline ports (and explained to that user why Hotline's use of bandwidth wasn't acceptable -- he hadn't realized what a bandwidth hog Hotline was and had been acting ignorance, not malice). Now Napster is doing the same thing, sucking up bandwidth that has nothing to do with the primary goal of this institution (it is, after all, an academic institution and academic Internet use gets first priority over everything else). Furthermore, a little packet-sniffing shows that most (I estimate 90%, though I don't have hard figures at the moment) of the traffic is OUTGOING -- people outside of the college downloading MP3s from Napster servers within out network. There is no way that this can be construed as being the function of our Internet connection.

The legality or otherwise of Napster's primary use (sharing MP3s) had nothing to do with the decision to block it except to make the decision process marginally shorter. If folks had been passing around Linux .iso images, we might have argued it for another five minutes or so, but we still would have reached the same conclusion: we have limited bandwidth, and we need that bandwidth to remain accessible to everybody. A small number of users cannot be allowed to continually suck up all the available bandwidth.

Of course, in a few months another bandwidth-hogging program will appear, and we'll have to block yet another set of ports / IP addresses / whatever. And the game of bandwidth whack-a-mole continues...
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