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Open Source Napster: Gnutella
Luminescent writes "Nullsoft, in their new company, "Gnullsoft", just released an open source Napster clone. It does mp3s, movies, and any other format you could want. " More details: Gnutella is currently at version .48. Presently, they are finishing the version on-hand and will be doing a release at 1, along with the source, which is *not* currently availible. In addition to releasing the source at version 1, they will be releasing the client for other OSes. Presently, it's a Windows-only thing. Despite all of these drawbacks, this is an interesting move from WinAmp->Netscape->AOL->Time-Warner. Or whatever they are today.
but is the time-warner/aol merger completed?
I'm running Win2k (don't stone me because I'm not running Linux) and I found out about this during my study hall! The only problem is that the computers were diskless workstations that didn't allow any downloading! And when I went to download Gnutella during my Cisco Networking Class, they denied me because they were /.ed! So, please out of the compassion of your hearts, could someone post the beta version to a kid that found out too late!
Fuck you, fuckhead! Fucking dillhole.
More information, including a potential 1.0 release date, can be found at this site
Probably because there are more incompetent admins :p
Oh, and it doesn't only do MP3's. Looking forward to see where this baby goes.
Hot Grits!
I don't know about you, but Im not so crazy about my IP getting shot all over the place in plain sight. Makes it that much easier for losers to screw with you.
You can download it at www.fileforum.com
nathan
Charge? You nuts? They overcharge to begin with.and the network's been slow (even before Napster), though we have a OC3 back. ('cuz of all the quakers....hehehe...though I'm a Counter) They should find over ways to get the needed funds. Ads, paid ISP for ppl who don't live on campus (but cheaper than most ISPs), hosting for student organizations, etc., or whatever non-profit organizations do. Charge more for students who live on campus is a jack-move.....we paid too much to begin with. (for close to 7000 for 8 months [they're jacking the price up another 200 next semester], it's too much for me) G.
Isn't Napster prior art, just like IRC is prior art for Napster?
It seems lots of people think this is some corporate move by AOL.
Gnullsoft is the open source, freeware extension of all the cool crap Justin and Tom want to do. Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and SHOUTcast. See? AOL *CAN* bring you good things!
Yeah, they mention AOL, but this is more just a couple of guys, not AOL.
Napster doesn't present such a moral quandry.
Does this mean that it doesn't bother you to steal something a ton of music, a plain and obvious crime. Yet you have do a doubletake when another criminal is chased down and made to face his actions.
I was in agreement with my admins at first on this whole issue. What with Napster not really closing when you hit "X", and several students in the dorms using a hefty portion of the bandwitdh until their DHCP connections were cut. However, when the employees were told they would face instant termination for using napster (one of our employees was given the "Mr. Anderson..." talk-normally our sysadmins are very nice, and very well respected, this just seemed over the top to me), and being told that *any* non-acedemic use of the network was _illegal_ I began to feel much the same way you do.
It really feels that there is more involved here than simple bandwitdh concerns. In fact I would say that the network has been down more and much slower to boot ever since they blocked napster, which leads me to believe that there wasn't really that much of a problem with that one piece of S/W to begin with. At this point I think that anything that forces the Admins to pay a little more attention to the stability and speed of their network is a good thing, and I can't wait for it to catch on with the students. Meantime, I'll just go about it at home on my private ISP until such time as this silliness and aggressiveness toward the end-users ends.
Posted anonymously because I definately don't speak for my employers or the state, and otherwise I consider myself to have a dream-job.
If you have tried sharing mp3s from a network drive you will notice that Napster scans the whole file to check its content and frequency.
Really smart.... Blaming user interest on killing a software product... Do you really believe that AOL killed the project because too many people were interested in it? Heaven forbid slashdot users actually check out a cool new open source project. Why don't you think a little bit next time before making such general statements.
That's the same thing I had thought! Mmmmm... Nutella is some good stuff. Who cares what country it comes from? :) -Anonymous Coward (Actually, you can just call me a lazy bastard. I don't feel like taking the time to set up an account.)
You talk as if the students were making a unanamous decision to use bandwidth for Napster, instead of, say doing homework or research. But your argument is even weaker than that. Universities don't run on tuition alone. They receive grants as well, and tuition is often paid by parents. Finally, the univerity doesn't exist merely to give students just what they want. Or maybe they should be giving students straigt As, they paid for it, right.
Actually it was one of the lab's at Northern Arizona University. The high school's 'network' was 8-15 computers, which he helped to run... Minor details.. :)
Fucking dumbass. Fuck you, fuckhead.
It would certainly be offensive if they kept it closed for a significant length of time while using "Gnu" in the name.
Now that it's been censored by AOL because it might be a threat to Warner and EMI...all you people who got a copy do your duty. Since it's gnu and all, maybe somebody will decide to maintain it....
Think about this. Maybe the people at Nullsoft coded this baby without consulting AOL first? Ya think? After all, who is to say that a Microsoft employee can't go code for an opensource project when he gets home from work. Maybe the new name Gnullsoft was in order to show they are doing that project on their own. New company. No AOL. All Gnulllike.
Nutella is an italian chocolate & nuts cream;a really cult stuff since the '50. You also can see "Bianca", by Nanni Moretti, a cult movie about -by others- the Nutella.
Dissing Nullsoft? Hell, Slashdot's more startup wannabe than the mighty llamatronsters... Oh, sorry, did I say that out loud?
Gee yer smart. Perhaps you could also realize that I made that comment knowing that the guy who started this thread is the author (probably the only guy ever put in jail for writing a N64 game!) of PONG for N64! Oman The O Man Himself! PONG for N64! it's what's for dinner!
No more need for those annoying ratio ftp sites. Now I can get my perfectly legal shareware with ease.
see subject
Moderate this sideways!
School networks are not a fucking ISP, you doamned pimply-faced peckerwood.
They allready have enough beta testers. Anybody got a mirror for this one?
hmm.... can't you go around this simply by choosing an opennap server instead of napsters own? For windows something like napvigator can be used to pick the correct server.
Why danish ! Nutella is Italian, made by Ferrero !
70 million - does seem rpetty ridiculous, huh? And i actually registered winamp a couple of years ago...
Yes, it's a good thing to provide more than only MP3 format capability. At last, I might be able to find a ROM of PONG for N64!
shut up
ever since napster is taking all .edu bandwidth my 0day ISO are transferring at only 600kbyte/sec instead of 1200. go sysadmins .. block the studends and use chmod 777 more often. thanks.
This post is redundant, but the moderators, (like myself) started moderating and then read used the posted links to find that it's just a copy of some lines of the pointed to site.
I go to UC Berkeley. Sure, Napster is great and all, and yeah, I used it....but GODDAMN I'd rather have fast ethernet access back than Napster. Unfortunately, right now the dorms have their bandwidth capped so in the evenings and afternoons when idiots are busy downloading their N'Sync and Backdoor Boys mp3s, the rest of us trying to do something useful (like installing Debian) find our connections crawling around at about 1-3 k/s. About as fast as my old 14.4 modem.
I think banning Napster is a decision administrators have no choice in. There's no way they can afford more bandwidth, and with everyone downloading 10 mp3s at once, there's not much they can do.
It might also help to get a good caching proxy. My ISP has a proxy, but it actually slows down browsing, so a lot of people (like me) turn it off. The proxy should make browsing faster. Maybe it should load /. every 5 minutes and cache the links before they get Slashdotted :)
Why would anyone use this? It's from AOL. So it's based in Virginia. Virginia just passed UCITA. Time to boycott all software/computer products based in Virginia. If they stay in that state than they are directly supporting the beuracracy that enforces UCITA with their tax revenue.
What does this mean for all the l33t WaReZ sites out there??? Things that make you go Hmmm.....
"actual work"... "waste of bandwidth"... "frivolous"...
So now _Tridus_ is the one who should decide how bandwidth is used? I'm glad you don't work at my ISP!
It is pretty much useless to try to dictate "legitimate" uses of a school's bandwidth, because there is really no way to effectively distinguish between the good and bad applications' packets.
Any sysadmin worth his salt can cap users bandwidth off at a certain reasonable amount, like based on the upstream pipe and the number of users expected to need to use it simultaneously.
Unfortunately most sysadmins are either lazy or incompetant, hence mass bans of Napster.
I say, cheers to people writing programs to get around the bans.
________________________________
Moderate this up.
Isn't Gnutella more closely related to the Danish(?) hazelnut chocolate spread Nutella than with Mozilla? Why not use generic MP3 icon instead?
If the issue is bandwidth, then limit bandwidth. It doesn't really matter if someone is running Napter or clones, hosting a port site, doing broadcast-quality videoconferencing or anything else. If an individual user is using too much bandwidth, then either throttle them or charge them, on a content-neutral basis. Why is this so hard to understand?
if it's an open server then this is great.
If it's just a client, then ho-hum.
more choice in clients is great, but i hate it when people don't release the code "early and often"
The unfunny way: all colleges need to do is to make the use of napstar like services a condition of expulsion. Then they don't need to frantically monitor a technical non-solution, they just sit back and expel those students that just naturally come to their attention. In short, the technical solution is so impossible as to be funny, the legal solution is so simple as to be scary.
they closed the open beta program because they where slashdotted
I like CuteMX myself. It not only shares all files, but has streaming video/audio and a built in web browser. They have a ton of cool features that these other apps lack. I would trust the makers of CuteFTP to come develop something awsome, rather than some of these other startup wannabes. Slashdot Rules!!!!
Take a look at: http://www.aolserver.com It's one of the best damn web servers out there! Most people don't give it the time of day because it has "AOL" in its name, but it really is a very solid server! Of course, there is always: http://www.mozilla.org
http://homepages.skylink.net./~warlo rd//gnu.html
the program looks pretty nice btw.... nice and simple UI, but I'm sure that gnullsoft will fix that pretty soon :)
I think a lot of hysteria is going around here... paranoia and what not. The idea behind napster is a very powerfull one, but it hasn't been implemented properly - limit only on MP3s, and obviously the majority will be illegal MP3s. That's not the issue. Gnutella - a chocolate spread - proper name! The list of hosts spreads kinda like chocolate on bread does, so it's a very proper name. This aside, just imagine for a moment what it's power TRULLY IS - if the kiddies could move aside. Imagine the HR department of a company selecting Gnutella do search for Resumes of all those who know Perl and Apache and live in a certain area? Yeah? Think deeper? Scientists looking for scientific papers can now use Gnutella within their "neighbourhood" to search.... Doctors...... heck.... why not a US-Wide Police Gnutella group? The *PROPER* usage of software is mostly overused. I mean, an Intranet is great and all, but why not bypass it. Why not use gnutella as a "search engine" for the entire WEB itself, instead of basing yourself and limiting to yahoo or another little dinky engine? Imagine if every website knew about every other website. Can you use Web-BGP? :o)....This folks, this is really something the Gnutella folks are working on, and if properly used, could potentially save all of us a lot of otherwise wasted time.
There is a cooler project called Yo!nk where you download movies, music, software, etc. This is new and works over the IRC networks, with clients communicating in XML. I just downloaded The Matrix in DVD (VOB) format. Download it - http://www.downloadcommunity.com
This has some really interesting ramifications over the lawsuit against Napster, no?
Gnullsoft->Nullsoft->AOL->Time-Warner->Music Co.
Aren't there some music companies owned by Time-Warner that are involved in the lawsuit against Napster? What does this mean? Doesn't that make it illegal (or whatever) to sue Napster?
You have to wonder..
The last fifteen years have produced no Brian Wilsons, John Lennons, Luc Bressons or Orson Welles.
*sigh* The nostalgic fallacy lies in forgetting the crap of the past, so that it looks like times were better.
In any era, it's possible to point to the good stuff of a previous one and say that things have gone to hell.
When I lived in Austin, it was a truism that the city's golden age had ended just moments before you got there.
In twenty years, people will complain that that era is crap, since it has produced no Becks, John Zorns, Quentin Tarantinos or Tim Robbins.
And look at it this way: the past fifteen have produced no Paper Lace, Bay City Rollers, Roger Cormans, or William Shatners, either.
You can do that now: Pong for N64
The 'Dead allow copies of their live performances to be freely made and distributed.
I don't think the Time-Warner end of that empire has heard about this... I doubt they'd approve of widespread profanity and blatantly encouraging folks to pirate MP3s :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
On crunchy toast or crepe with sliced bananas. That's good eatin'
Is it just me, or do most free software projects have much cooler names than commercial products?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
problem with just using SMB is that it's Windows-specific. A cross-platform solution is preferable.
/.ed by time I got to it).
(Yes, I know about SAMBA...but then you've still got the Mac users out in the cold, and anyone who doesn't have SAMBA on their Unix boxen)
And this way you have the flexibility to go off-campus for those times where the local network doesn't have what you're looking for (details of this I'm not sure on since the site was
I got about the same lack of response. I'm guessing it might be, because I'm behind a Firewall here. If anyone knows any troubleshooting tips on the program, I'd guess that this is as good a venue as anywhere, since the official pages, are a bit sparse (and understandably tho. This is the "bleeding edge", using a .x release.)
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
There you go. Block the primary host and you shut the whole thing out: It's what Northwestern University did: they blocked *.napster.com from resolving, meaning that you couldn't connect to get the 'optimal server'. The downloads would've gone through if they were to ever begin, because they're not blocking ports, just name resolution. The same thing, methinks, could be done with this program too.
So in other words, sign up now before they get blocked, eh?
Sounds quite similar to iMesh. I guess if enough of these things start up (Audiogalaxy Satellite, CuteMX, Abes, etc.) organizations will have too much trouble shutting them down and it will all be open again.
(Or, in Napster, IMHO, an easier solution would be to use IP addresses, or a list of different hosts that could issue optimal servers?)
coj
And who says gopher is vital anymore? Not to say I have anything against it, but I can't think of anybody on the campus who uses it, student-wise. I can't speak for the instructors.
Then again, what university is in business for the students?
hoowah. alright, it's been awhile since i've woken up to find the webservers on fire from a slashdotting. as a result, i've had to close the beta group.
It's a shame that the typical denizen around here can't(or won't) read the slashboxes, they would have seen this. As a result, it gets posted to slashdot, and ruins it for the rest of us. I can only hope the same ignorance prevails when it is ready to rock.
See, that's the kind of thing you don't see on most commercial product's pages.
"Logic . . . merely enables one to be wrong with authority"
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
You're absolutely wrong. I don't know about theory, but at the college I go to (UC Berkeley) our bandwidth was capped because of, well, too much bandwidth usage, and this bandwidth usage was by Napster. From late Fall semester 99 to Early February 2000, the number of new ethernet accounts went up a small percentage. However, the dorms were overloading the entire university's bandwidth by February, so the cause is something other than "normal internet usage." Firewalling/banning Napster has to do with extreme bandwidth usage, not copyrights.
there's no technical reason for Napster to distribute mp3's only. reading the first few bytes of any binary would tell you the magic "cookie" necessary for determining the file type.
as for useability... well, many people use Napster regardless of whether it has some quality control system. i agree that it would be cool, though, to have that functionality. by performing some simple crc, the Napster server could probe different user databases for identical files. This way they could implement some necessary load balancing.
as for poor quality data... well, that should be a parameter of the particular data file. mpg is encoded with its dimensions, frame rate, etc in its frame header which is easy to extract. they already have similar mechanisms in place for mp3's, the bitrate, frequency, etc. that's all straightforward stuff that i'm sure they know about.
...my MP3 player for $20 million or whatever, I'll write free software all day too :)
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
There's another one of those nice IDs in the gnutella.ini that we've come to love from Microsoft etc. This one's called clientid128. I just hope that they left out my MAC address this time. Anyone from Gnullsoft want to clear this up ?
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
Napster should be pretty annoying to Nullsoft/Winamp/AOL... many people now use it for listening the stuff they downloaded with it. I think this may have scared AOL, and what could be a better way than killing the Official Napster than making a better Open-Sourced clone?
Is that an example of Open Source used as a commercial weapon??
The stopped the availability of downloads due to the /. effect
This is not my sig
One student who sees fit to use napster will consume the bandwidth of ten web surfers/telnet users/email users. But the consequences of this network use are felt equally by all users. We have a classic tragedy of the commons. Users overuse a shared resource because there is no feedback mechanism.
Admins have to do something because otherwise napster users will cripple their networks. Blocking napster seems like a good way to go to me.
Heavy network use for piracy has always been against acceptable use at universities and this is just a very consistent and logical continuation of that correct policy. University networks are a shared and scarce resource. I like pirated mp3s as much as the next person but a university network is the wrong place for it.
ABOUT GNULLSOFT --
Gnullsoft is the open source, freeware extension of all the cool crap Justin and Tom want to do.
Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and SHOUTcast. See? AOL *CAN* bring you good things!
If you like abuse, you can email tom: tom@winamp.com
--
We'll see how Gerald Levin likes this when he starts to see all his precious IP float free on the Net, using a program a couple of his employees built and GPLed!
--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
+&x
Yes, I too got a good chuckle over that. Then I started formulating ways in which college sysadmins would restrict access anyway. Granted, I'm not a sysadmin, I know nothing about sysadmining, but I got into college, right?
Okay, AFAICT with this you can escape the dangers of having specific IPs blocked, specific ports blocked, specific hosts blocked, etc. So much so that sysadmins would pretty much have to block access to the entire freakin' net to stop it all.
Why do people assume they won't do this? Bad publicity for the college? News flash: all publicity is good publicity in the long run. Even horrible, life-ending publicity will be good for the institution five, ten years down the line. People will forget the cause and nature of the bad publicity and only remember that there was publicity at all. It's hard for people to remain upset for long periods of time. Even if a college eliminated network access to the internet, within a few years everyone would forget about it. Especially if they were not the only college that did it. Trust me on this one.
Oh, boo hoo, they've taken my access to the internet away. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just double their modem pool and make everyone dial in. Maybe, like was the case not so long ago, you would have to specifically request network access, and then would be strictly monitored for so-called abuses.
Or maybe they don't take away network access at all. Maybe they just put insane restrictions on it. Here at USC, the solution was to place restrictions on bandwidth. But those restrictions are still fairly liberal. Who is to say that a college couldn't place a restriciton of, say 10 MB total network traffic per ethernet port ber 24 hour period? Exceed it, and your ethernet port is automatically shut down for, say, 72 hours as punishment. Light web browsing, checking your email, etc., wouldn't be impeded, but it sure would make trading files (any type of file, be it mp3s, warez, whatever) extraordinarily difficult.
Just some thoughts. People who post challenges like gnullsoft has done should be prepared for people to take them up on it.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
You are absolutely right. (moderate it up). It's funny to realise that 'music/files/warez' are subsidized by the universities. What i don't understand, though, is that you can live on 512 MiB per month ;-)
Sendy
GNU guru and mainframe hacker
...organizations will have too much trouble shutting them down and it will all be open again.
Instead they stop trying to quietly save their bandwidth and prevent people from breaking the law (which is the prototypical use of these types of services) and instead just send the police to their doors. Let's get real here, the universities and businesses aren't here to hide your actions or to cover your back or to support your decision to break the law. I guess some people really want to weed themselves out of the gene pool.
A good network administrator (one that actually works for the people who pay his salary as opposed to people who abuse the network he's supposed to administrate) will attempt a simple technological solution. If that fails he won't go nicely ask them to stop, he'll send the police over to haul the asshole away, take his computers, etc.
In one of the previous "stories" about slashdot someone posted a link to their network graphs. If everybody used all the bandwidth they could all the time (which is what you are effectively saying) then there would be no way to tell when napster was banned. Yet that fellows traffic graphs had a real difference showing.
Specifying appropriate use of bandwidth have absolutely nothing to do with identifying packets. Bandwidth capping is not so reasonable in a lot of cases. Sometimes a valid use would require 75% of the bandwidth, othertimes it's certainly pointless to reserve that bandwidth and force others who also have valid uses to modem speeds. It's most definitely not wrong or stupid or anything else to prevent abuses and track down violators. I cheer the universities that have sent students up the river for violations.
If university students want to only use the local network, why wouldn't regular window shares work? I mean, we have a WINS server on campus that keeps track of all the computer names. And we can search for files in everyone's computers.
I would think a better client for search smb shares would be better for our situation. Workgroups are broken down to residence halls and many people share their files that way, with and w/o passwords.
Lots of bands allow live performances to be copied freely. Widespread Panic and String Cheese Incident come to mind... and most tapers new to the field dont use analog media anymore, they us DAT tapes and drives.
I wonder if they're going to get sued by a European chocolate hazelnut spread manufacturer over this for copyright infringement (over the name)?
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
In particular, executable files and similar things, like shell scripts and Word documents could be used to disseminate viruses. The 'instant mirror' ability sharing community software creates does present one solution to the slashdot effect, though.
Also, is there anything like ID3 tags for image files?
That's right. Unless Napster is grossly inefficient, there's no reason why it would take up any more than an irc client and an ftp server. Why don't they ban other obvious web hogs? Graphical web browsers? AllAdvantage-type software? Remote X sessions? MUDs and MMORPGs? Everquest isn't 'real work'.
A better reason for net admins to ban Napster is simply that they can't handle it all and need to cut something, anything, but at that point there should be enough tuition money to buy more gear.
So maybe there's a group of people out there trading zips with an extra mp3 header, using strange filenames so people can't find them as easily. But I haven't run across them.
How do your college know when you are using it. It is not visible on most networks.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Amen about the network admin part...
Any of you ever got creative enough to try filling a "0" in for the only allow X connections option? It turns off file serving completely.
It does bug you on startup, granted, but it's not hard to tell it to continue disabling the file server...
-Paul
Definitely. I used to run a BBS, and was forced to shut it down when everyone kept asking why we didn't have Internet access (I wasn't bringing in enough money to justify a T1 at the time). The Net became a necessity, and we all scattered, to IRC, message boards, and the like. AOL tried to emulate a BBS, but it has grown too large - there is no real sense of community on AOL, except within message boards and chat rooms, which can be found on the Net anyways. Having a Napster-like client with builtin chat and file transfers sounds like a highspeed new-school BBS to me!
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
Agreed. Tried it to my localhost, and finally got two gnutellaNet entries (myself , and myself serving). Still, when I did a search for what I knew was out there on my little network, didn't quite get what I wanted to get... instead, got ZERO.
Well, looks like you actually have to build a database... have to have at least one person, then build off what they have, maybe?
The documentation is very poor... Says "Clicking ping will auto-list other members in the GnutellaNet network." Well, I don't see no Ping button... closest I see is Update, and it doesn't do what it should.
Dunno. Guess this is what I get for being an alpha tester.
this is strange that gnullsoft is owned by nullsoft, and nullsoft is owned by time warner.
time warner is represented by the RIAA who is sueing napster.
it doesnt make any sense???
"The importance of using technology in the right way has never been more clear."
A distributed search engine? .mp3 or .txt etc and I have to wait 5 minutes for it to finish before I can see that I goofed. Some would charge that that's what I get for being an idiot, but in many cases you can overwhelm the user with power if you don't plan and think through your gui and program right beforehand.
Still, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Part of the "problem" with the net is the depth of the information. How do you restrict and focus your search? One nice thing about napster being MP3 only is that it's more foolproof (You can make anything foolproof, just not damned fool proof). If I do a search and forget to type the extension I don't have to wait for it to finish the first search before starting a second. What happens if I do a search for "sex" in Gnutella and forget to type
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Is there any way these clients/protocols can have the capacity to browse for video added to them? What about the artist/naming conventions used on mp3, will that transfer well to a video search?
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Your right, there does have to be a middle ground. If your paying for the access, then you should be able to use it as you wish. Maybe throttling is the answer, I don't know.
It is a real problem though when people start sucking up rediculous amounts of bandwidth for something like Napster though... although I'm sure the mass bans were helped along by our good old friends at the RIAA.
Here's the problem though... many ftp sites went to throttling connections as a way to avoid people using up all the bandwidth... and then people went and wrote programs to just open up 10 connections to the server to get around it. So are we going to start to see people putting napster onto 10 computer instead of 1 just to get around the throttling?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
All you can limit is the number of connections per user, you can't limit the number of users or the amount of bandwidth they use.
Its really stupid. I requested that feature be added back in beta3, and was ignored. Why they're missing it is beyond me... have you ever seen what happens when 5 people all try to download off my 56k modem at the same time? I can't do anything. *they* can't get anything. It sucks. If it was only one person at a time,then the data still flows along happily.
Thats actually why I prefer CuteMX, it has some actual throttling ability. You can set the number of users as well as the number of connections per user, and there is the ability to slow down connections (more like how you can slow down an icq file transfer rather then an absolute cutoff point for bandwidth usage).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
iMesh (imesh.com) and CuteMX (cutemx.com) both allow you to search for other types of files as well. I believe iMesh only allows media files (audio, video, images) but CuteMX allows any time of file. iMesh is still a bit shaky much like Napster, but CuteMX is comming along quite well (except they are doing a closed beta now which kindof sucks).
We seem to have different definitions of a Good Network Administrator, especially at the school level.
:).
A good network administrator is one the students respect. He's the one that sends off the email saying "You're using the same amount of bandwidth as all of Buildings A and E combined. Could you turn off Napster?" before cutting off the port. If you just cut off the port without warning, you will piss off the students the network is for.
You have to remember that people are creative, especially when they feel slighted. Sending off a warning usually lessens the sting, especially when you are respected.
Always give the benefit of the doubt the first time. If the student really doesn't listen (and it will only be a few), then you can ramp up straight to the cops and leave the port open for those that don't abuse the system.
Mind you, in this case, because Napster doesn't have a "only allow X connections" option (it does have a bandwidth throttle option, IIRC), the program itself is an abuse. In this case, I think I just sunk my argument
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
NOTE: My source for this inofrmation is an issue of Time Digital I read in the summer while visiting the America.
I mean, he brought his high school's network to its knees. During a computer programming contest. Because he was finished it early and was bored. Reminds me of me, except I am not that good a programmer (although, with the system security at my HS, I didn't have to be *grin*).
I really don't think he has a high opinion of network administrators. Especially the incompetent variety, which this will hurt the most. After all, the good ones will simply knock on the door of the worst offender and nicely tell him to stop. That works a lot better IMHO than simply blocking off ports without warning; that's just inviting a bandwidth revolt.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
Of course they will want to ban it. From what I can see in the specs list, the bandwidth shaping feature isn't an administrator control, but a user control. Something like this is very simple. A number of file transfer clients have them.
All of this anti-administrator rhetoric is only going to hurt the product and the whole mp3 situation more than it will help it. What can the authors hope to gain by alienating those holding reins? I'm certainly all for the proliferation of net media, and the death of the RIAA and DMCA. But folks, isn't this a misstep? That is, this is drawing the line against the wrong set of people. We want to be hurting the RIAA not network admins. This is only going to result in huge negative reprecussions for dorm network users like myself.
Look what just happened at UC Berkeley, for example. One of the admins yanked ethernet access down to modem speeds. Is this what we want to happen everywhere?
You know something else that doesn't seem to have been touched on yet? I don't understand the "holier than thou" attitude of college sysadmins who try to dictate what should be done with the available bandwidth.
The fact is, the bandwidth and Inet connection itself is provided for the use of the students. If they see fit to run Napster (or anything else) using it, who are you to complain? It seems to me, your job is to maintain the network that the students paid for with their tuition money. That means, ensure that things are functional and allow them to run *any* software they wish to run.
If 58% of your bandwidth is taken up by people running Napster - so what? That means the people who pay your salary, ultimately, wish it be used in that manner.
Even if you *believe* they are all using Napster to pirate commercial music, you certainly can't prove that just by noting that the software is using up X percentage of your bandwidth! It's not your place to try to prove it either. You weren't hired to police the students. You were hired to care for the computers and network.
Off my soapbox.....
Good, that's a start.
Now, do you have any advice on how to enable Firewall support and HTTP Tunneling?
I think the point he's trying to make is that with QoS, it WOULDN'T cost any more.
Basically, you would grow your network based on the demand for the required serious stuff, and then anything after that would be gravy for those playing games, sharing files, running napster...
They are doing QoS for Napster already.
Napster gets assigned quality 0: drop entirely.
No. The bandwidth is provided for the use of the University. Students are a PART of that. So are Administrators, Professors, and Technicians. If students running Napster are burning up bandwidth that could be used instead by a class with a streaming lecture, then the school certainly has a Right (and probably has a Responsibility) to control usage.
The next step is probably not to shut down Napster and its ilk; the next step is probably to start charging students for the amount of bandwidth they use.
The true problem, after all, is that the university only has a limited budget set aside for bandwidth. Like any ISP, the university is overselling its service, on the hopes that the number of students who are light/casual users will balance out the number who are heavy users. Unfortunately, Napster is turning many light bandwidth users into heavy users.
The solution to the problem, then, is to keep the current charges for internet access in the student's bill, and to start penalizing the heavy users by charging a per MB fee over a basic monthly allotment.
You would see either one of two things happening: internet usage would drop dramatically, or the influx of cash would allow the university to keep upgrading its bandwidth.
There's another option which is probably less desirable, and that's to give a student an allotment of data transfer, and shut them down for the rest of the month after they reach it. I believe some schools are already doing something along these lines.
Yes, but isn't that because he's doing a version which he'll be charging for?
So you are saying you'd rather have a cap on a per system than sharing the bandwidth when available? That seems even more draconian, if I've got bandwidth that is available, I can't use it I've peaked my bandwidth.
It is NOT useless to determine good & bad packets, if people would play BY THE RULES and leave things at specified ports, etc. instead of making the total bandwidth down to 56k per box, to making the Napster protocol 56k per box.
Instead of going around the rules, try playing by them sometimes it tends to get better results more of the time. I can tell you this much any users that would try to do an "end-run" around any of the rules on my systems would find their access SEVERLY limited (i.e. they get on the things they can do list instead of the things they can't do these things list, they want access to something not on the list they have to sumbit a change request). If users ask first and give me any reasonable reason for changing a rule, etc. I am more than willing to do it.
Last thing, I know more than a few NETWORK ADMINS who would shoot you for saying sysadmin instead of netadmin, and I know some sys admins who are willing to go on the rampage too, for comparing them to the netadmins, me I'm easy going I'd probably just DDOS you.
Spelling and grammar check off, because I don't care
Check out www.onshare.com. You can create groups with access control, administrators.. etc. + you *don't* need a client to download. You can download directly from a web browser.
Java 1.1 and win32 client available now.
Basically no client needed to download (can d/l via web browser). Has bandwidth shaping, group system, access control for groups, handles any type of file.
If modern BBS packages do exist, are they all written for the web? Are there any that support telnet connections or have their own client software? Any that run on Joe Average User's copy of Micro$oft Windows? I recall a product called NetModem (?) which made incoming telnet connections appear to be incoming telephone calls to allow the old BBS software to work on the 'net. Has anyone had luck with this? Other methods?
Is there a reason why someone (an open source group, say?) should endeavor to write a non-web (or web and some other method) Internet-accessible BBS system?
The Online Slang Dictionary
universities and businesses aren't here to hide your actions or to cover your back or to support your decision to break the law
Yeah! Unless of course it's the policy of the university or business to break the law.
But we all know that never happens.
I quite agree... The only real way (and most annoying) is to drop individual bandwidth. Of course, then many people will collaborate to download something they all want... ;-)
Well, hopefully for us all, it will take a while for this bandwidth-limiting policy to actually come into effect. Although knowing the Nazis that run my university (no offense... actually, screw it! take offense!!!), I will likely be first to lose my bandwidth. And then, no counter-strike!
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Mr. Low Resolution
Quite a few people have been commenting on how AOL/TW higher-ups would consider the development and release of Gnutella not a Good Thing (tm). I beg to differ.
Consider the existance of Napster. Napster appears to be a revolutionary broadband product that is being used by thousands of users worldwide to trade media. (music, in this case, but extensions are already being made) AOL/TW see this as a obvious threat. It continues the release of controlling their product: content. Mainstream adoption of Gnutella would put AOL/TW (and associated companies) in a position to add "extensions" later.
The placement and targetting is also wonderful. The most popular Audio Player is AOL WinAmp. If Gnutella, or a related "mini-"Gnutella was released with WinAmp, than AOL/TW would have instant leverage into the users already running WinAmp. I'm sure quite a few Slashdotters can appreciate product bundling.
Another point is AOL/TW's broadband services. Their cable sections will almost certainly be affected by any broadband product: Gnutella! I can see them adding in further support, "music communities" and other pluses for joining up with AOL/TW.
Those are just a few good points for AOL/TW, and associated companies. I would also note that something like this for AOL/TW also helps every other company in the RIAA/MPAA/and friends. They're all in bed with each other, so there will be obvious routes for collusion.
I hate the thought of unreasonable protectionism denying the common good, however it is the lack of understanding shown by people like yourself which forces the protectionistic attitude.
Trading audio from live shows is illegal (at least in my part of the world), however as analog foramts showed a depreciation in quality over generations the live acts did not mind the distribution, if someone wanted to hear them properly they had to pay them to enter a concert or buy an album. You are robbing the people whose music you wish to listen to of income by providing these files to anyone who wants them.
Secondly, If you wish to see more music available where you actually are allowed to receive it without payment, you will have to provide an incentive to the artist/distributor. If they cannot "force" you to download them from an official band-site or ..... they have lost another source of income, advertising. What revenue could say Madonna receive by starting www.madonna.com to aquire her music, how many hits would she get and hence how much could she sell a banner for.
Decentralization is good, piracy is bad and copyright is essential. A shared worldwide music pool online containing anything any user cares to place into it will spell the end of the abandonment of record companies. If artists see their work being easily wholesale pirated by the planet they will return to the fold of the conglomerate commercial music empires for an insurance on income rather than cutting the middle-men and recieving more money buy selling more copies of the same products for less directly. If we all lobby for appropriatly priced direct music from the artists we love, and show that not only are we willing to do without a distribution media, but that we are happy to show our appreciation for their work in creating the music we want to listen to by giving them money, we will have cheaper music from better paid artist (who as I said will also be able to exploit the high level of connections their site should be receiving to subsidize the income they have to acquire from us).
If you persist in these legitimate uses, you will find that the battle will never end and the rich will be lawyers and suits...
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
- Napster already exists and is wildly popular, so what can they do about that?
- Well, the RIAA (who represents AOL/TW) is suing Napster, and if they are successful, I would imagine that might spell doom for Napster.
- If Napster is gone, there would be a vacuum in this software space.
- Sinse nature, and OS software, hates a vacuum, it would rapidly be filled by something similar to Napster.
- HOWEVER, if Gnutella exists and prospers before Napster is killed (injured?), then suddenly AOL/TW control this space and is free to castrate Gnutella in any way they see fit.
OK, I know that this argument is really full of holes, especially since Gnutella is open source. BUT, don't forget that we haven't seen any of the source yet, so who's to say that we ever will? I just can't believe that AOL/TW are allowing this when it will certainly lead to even more widespread music/video piracy. I for one will not be using this until I see some source - just so I can be sure that it won't be killed by AOL/TW. Oh, and a *nix version would be nice too.The opensource Napster Project got Slashdoted so they are not allowing anymore downloads of their product until 1.0..... ;\
I agreed with you, until I tried signing on. As soon as I was connected, i saw about 800GB of served files. And this wasn't exactly peak university usage time (around noon, not midnight). Granted, these numbers will be higher per user than Napster's simply because video files and the like take up more storage space than MP3s, but I still think that that's a big enough critical mass for the law of increasing returns to start kicking in. Unless my judgement is way off, Gnutella seems to have hit that point a lot more quickly than ICQ ever did. (I was a late convert to Napster, so I'm not sure about that one...)
-Colbey
Most Usenet admins either pray for the day that a viable substitute for smashing binaries down the Usenet pipe comes, or they don't bother with binaries at all. More power to distributed file-sharing programs like these. This kind of distribution is going to happen whether we like it or not. The only consolation is that it happens in an intelligent and efficient manner.
Oh wait, you said Slashdot backlash, not backslash. My mistake. :)
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We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
...support searching by ID3 tags and do resume and all those other things that Napster is so bad at? Zilch
Whether pirating music is right or wrong is a whole other debate, but if you think that MP3s will allow musicians to be able to release all their music for free and that said musicians will be able to make a living from music under that system, then you have no idea how the music industry really works, especially for independent artists.
Concerts, etc., simply don't make that much money, unless you're constantly on tour. Assuming you don't want to live on the road, it's not really an option to make a living doing gigs. From a business POV, gigs are basically done to promote merchandise (mainly CDs, but also t-shirts and other things). This is especially true in the US, where venues pay a lot less than in Europe. (You're also less likely to get a guarantee than in Europe, especially on the East Coast.)
My husband is a musician and runs a small label. His band is one of the most well known in his genre ("gothic" folk), and he lives off of his music. He's not rich, by any means, but he makes a living. Most of his income comes from royalties on his CD sales, not from gigs, and he plays out more often than other bands in his genre. Even if he toured all the time, he would still make more from the CDs than anything else.
As much as I (as a music fan) would love to have completely free music, I don't see it happening any time soon. If it ever does, there will be a lot less professional musicians, as they won't be able to live off their music.
Napster does support all type of files.....just do this: windows2000.zip.mp3 napster wil think this is an mp3 (of course.....u'd have to split it).... Never seen napster used this way....but i'm sure some warez group will come up with this method and just split the files.....correct me if i'm wrong....but will this work or not? All you win9x users..........BSOD= www.nul.cjb.net : )
Why win9x really sucks
I'm just thinking......gonna try this when i get home...but if I put a file..let's say warez.windows2000.zip.mp3 (or however many dots windows will allow u) will napster take that as an MP3? (I'll split the files into.oh..5MB's each) Haven't seen this used like this before...but i'm sure some warez group is bound to think this up...Now the problem with Gnutella isn't going to be really mp3's but warez. A warez group could say...i'll have this up on monday.....and everyone from college will be download win2k or the like? Just my thoughts
:) br
All ye win9x to see a BSOD visit: www.nul.cjb.net
Why win9x really sucks
I have tried this before and it doesn't work. I don't know why it doesn't, but for some reason Napster must not look at just the .mp3 extension. I tried naming a text file test.mp3 with the message this is a test, but no one could see it in my library of files, even though they could see the mp3's. I even tried rebooting and starting up Napster to no avail. It was a bummer since it would have been a great file trading tool. No matter anyways since Napster was fucking banned from my college, but that's a another rant in itself.
I'm not supporting piracy or copyright enfringement. I'm supporting allowing people to trade tapes of shows which are legal and uncopyrighted. Any Dead show that hasn't been released as an official live album can be traded freely, as long as it is not sold or in some way used for profit.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Don't tell me about the legal uses for napster. That's BS.
'Fraid not. I have plenty of legitimate use for napster, particularly when I use it to search for Dead shows other people have in mp3 format. The system of people sharing the shows and downloading them from each other works the same as tape trading has worked for decades, except that in mp3 format the shows don't degrade with each copy like tapes.
Furthermore, allowing legal mp3s to spread through trading is better than forcing everyone to get them from the official band web site or from mp3.com, like you suggest they do, because one server doesn't store them all and handle all the load. If the internet has taught you anything, it should be that this kind of decentralization is good.
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Ok... Downloaded. Installed. Attempted to use. *BAM* (that was the sound of me falling flat on my face when searching for a song.) So can anyone shoot me some pointers on how the heck to use this uber-cool gnu muzac software?
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
This is an interesting development- The amount of software which van use the Napster protocol has suddenly exploded recently. More importantly a lot of it is open source.
A program called Napigator, combined with the new OpenNap servers (currently in Alpha release...) will allow people who have napster.com blocked access to other non-official napster servers. Add to this the clients available for other OSes not currently covered by the 'official' software and Napster.com looks like it could be starting to lose out. This would be a shame in one sense, but in another it allows all these people who have had napster.com blocked back into the system.
With these releases, it looks like the future is once again rosy in the MP3-world.
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Said it couldn't last, said it wouldn't last... This is the last stand against tomorrow's world.
I don't suppose anyone could email me and send a copy of the program. The dude says it's kosher to give it out, you just can't DL it officially. n_hopper@hushmail.com
No sig is worth reading.
http://zonedefense.dhs.org/gnutel048.exe
No sig is worth reading.
Unfortunately, the world doesn't quite work the way you wish it did. Based on past experience, Gnutella probably is an attempt by the establishment to derail the free sharing of information spawned by services like Napster. On the surface, it appears part of a "divide and conquer" strategy. The red flag is the Gnutella feature that allows users to build their own networks to share files. That sounds to me like a sure way to inhibit the free flow of information (clubs and membership dues). The RIAA and the recording industry, including some of the artists and their agents, have had this coming for a long time. Think of how many consumers have had to buy over and over again the same music when the format they originally bought it on was obsoleted (LP to cassette, to CD, just as an example). Can you imagine the instant rebellion if you had to buy the same (note the same) release of a software product just because the delivery medium was changed? I have never had to do that. The music industry (including many of the big stars) could have killed any Napster-like service before it even got started by simply allowing the online purchase of individual songs (of guaranteed quality since they have the source) for $.25-50 each, and they would make good money at it (by eliminating most of the distribution chain). If this kind of service were available, I, for one, would use it frequently. But, they are sort-sighted, resist change to an extreme and are greedy (just like the rest of us only to a greater degree). Let's not forget that historically, the music industry, just like the publishing and broadcasting industries, has been one of the more repressive and retrograde particularly in the way they treat employees who are not stars. For whatever it's worth.
In my role as the creator and maintainer of the roguelike game ADOM I'd like to comment this (especially since this posting spawned an ugly thread on rec.games.roguelike.adom):
First of all I'm not taking advantage on the open source community at all. The sources of ADOM have been written from scratch and do not use any parts from other open source roguelike games (like Nethack or Angband). Anybody stating the contrary is lying in a blatant and annoying fashion.
It is also not true, that ADOM *originally* released with the caveat of releasing the sources for ADOM 1.0.0. When ADOM first got released, open source (or not) never was an important topic and initially I released ADOM to see if there was any interest in the game. Whether sources would be released or not became a topic after a year or two.
Now for that part of the story: when the topic of source code releases came up, I initially stated that I probably would do that after version 1.0.0, in order to have a cleaned up source code version of the game. I did not want to get involved in coordinating a multi-programmer project, because ADOM is a spare time leisure and the sources changed often and to a vast extent. The topic was finished with that as far as I was concerned.
Again a few years later (about a year or two ago) there was a sudden influx of folks sporting the following attitude: "You must release the sources or you are amoral, a swine and a bastard. Then we will be allowed to do whatever we want with those sources, no matter wether you agree with us or not." I tried to discuss this with the folks involved but they were extremely unreasonably and continued to insult me (I still have their emails lying around somewhere).
Since I consider ADOM and its background to be my intellectucal property, I didn't want to see my vision tarnished. There are enough roguelike games out there to modify and alter (and with much more readable source code, e.g. Angband) so that I can't see a real need to release the ADOM sources (and especial no moral obligation if the idiots out there are determined to ignore my rights).
It's sad that the nice majority will suffer due to the rants of the brain-dead few out on the 'Net, but I'm really fed up with this topic and the attacks on my person due to my views on the ADOM sources.
Note BTW that the sources for JADE (the successor to ADOM, see http://www.adom.de for details) will be freely available as soon as there is a prototype that at least allows you to start the game and run around on a map. I'm really supportive of the open source idea, I just got burned with ADOM and can be very stubborn.
If you still feel that I'm taking advantage of the open source community I hereby ask you to email me at thomas@biskup.net because I don' t visit slashdot.org regularly.
Any spelling mistakes or other problems in this article should be attributed to my incomplete grasp of the english language (I'm a native German).
AOL killed the project, in large part due to the slashdot effect. Great job. Assholes.
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Just lurking, thanks!
Gnapster supports opennap servers and their multiple media types, and is already available for Linux. Blessed Debian users can just `apt-get install gnapster' to try it out.
I only use it for music, myself. Have never tried the alternate media types nor an opennap server.
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#19845
The point is not QoS.
QoS cant save the fact that the new traffic pattern would have cost this certain higher education instution lots and lots of money and affecting my tuition bills.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
If colleges are losing bandwidth to Napster, it's their own fault. Routers support QoS routing, allowing them to give preference to whatever traffic they like.
Just set up your router to give preference to DNS and mail, then outgoing web traffic, then telnet/ssh, then everything else. That way, you allow the people using the bandwidth for "serious academic pursuits" to do what they're supposed to, but then utilize the rest of the bandwidth for the things that make students into humans.
I'm sick of people complaining about Napster traffic slowing down their Internet traffic, when it doesn't need to be that way.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
IANAL.
I don't think that law should even be applied to Napster (and as far as I know, it never was).
The law only comes into affect, IIRC, when some sort of certain content is eliminated based on some criteria of content itself, not how it is encoded.
Example:
Phone system. They qualify as a common carrier because they don't take any say over what people send over the lines (for the most part, anyway). There are certain things it would be illegal to send over the phone lines: if you are a US citizen, voice data saying you are planning on killing the President, I think, would be illegal, or maybe using a modem to send a stolen data to someone. The legality is determined based on the content itself.
However, they do limit the *format* of what is transmitted. You can only send analog signal over the phone lines (to live in a simple world anyway, ignoring anything but simple analog phones for the sake of argument); you couldn't transmit raw ethernet frames over the phone. You can, however, modulate anything you wish to transmit over this line using a modem. So you could be sending voice data about killing the President, a song by your favorite artist in mp3, fax data containing top secret stolen documents, etc over this line, all eventualy encoded in some manner over the analog carrier.
The same thing here applies to Napster. Napster only limits the format of what is transmitted (ie MP3), but doesn't care what you use mp3 to encode. It could be music--it might not be. You easily come up with a way to encode html content in an mp3, or image data in an mp3, much in the same way that you could encode arbitrary data in a gif file Granted, it isn't the best encoding format, but it would work.
Now if Napster started eliminating stolen music from the stream of transmitions, then I think they would not be a common carrier, because they would be eliminating content based on the content itself, not on the encoding.
I think the confusion here stems from the fact that almost everyone uses mp3 to encode audio, specifically because the scheme is optimized for lossy audio compression. But they are by no means limited to only audio data, it would just probably suck for anything but.
Another example would be an online discussion forum, like Slashdot (which as far as I know, would qualify as a common carrier since no posts are deleted, only ranked). Slashdot limits the form of what can be transmitted to simplistic html. I can't directly post, say, raw image data. But I could uuencode the data, and post it (granted it would be moderated down because it looks like line noise).
But then again, this is all ramblings about the spirit of the law, not the law itself. There could be loopholes. Don't bet money on any of this.
This sig is false.
new company 'gnullsoft'
If there in a new company, does this mean that there no longer owned by AOL? like, that they sold there company, and then jumped ship or somthing? Or did AOL just rename them for some reason (And refocus them on Open source software, It would seem). Does anyone know what's actualy going on?
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
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 thought the FSF had a patent on prepending a 'G' on everything.
Doesn't iMesh already do this?
http://www.imesh.com
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
> Everything is free.
Nothing is ever free. Digital media reduce prices close to the marginal cost of delivery, never free. The only thing supporting napster is that the clients don't have to pay for their internet connection (or don't realize that they do).
Here in NZ, it costs me US$0.17 per megabyte of traffic internationally. Does that mean I don't download anything? Nope, because I have prepaid 512megs/month. Do I use napster? Nope, because I can't afford the traffic charges.
If universities started putting metered internet connections in the dorms, and made students pay for the traffic they are generating, then we might find out what the true values of the music/files/warez are. As it stands we have no idea because the distribution of the music is subsidized.
Jason PollockAh, but the MP3s I found were all things I already owned in another format. (This was 1997 when encoding an MP3 on the fastest machine available to me at the time, a PowerBook 3400, was painfully slow, but I did have lan-speed internet access.) That's still legal.
Yet you have do a doubletake when another criminal is chased down and made to face his actions.
In my mind, Adam and his family are right, and Hotline Communications is wrong. Yes, he was naive, but I still think it's wrong.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Okay, here's what you do:
/dns on someone there (hopefully, they're running gnutella). Then, you add that IP to your list (under the GnutellaNet tab, type in the number, and click add). Then, click on Get More. You're in the Net.
You have to be linked to at least one other person in the Gnutella network. Then, you use their list of other people in the network, and so on. This thing expands exponentially. Thing is, you need to get on first.
How? IRC to Efnet (#gnutella), and do a
(Remember to share your directory(s) as well!)
The system administrators have a valid point about Napster causing large amounts of traffic.
As long as you allow everyone unrestricted bandwidth, you'll run into QoS issues. Whining about Napster hogging bandwidth is like the Department of Transportation complaining about there being so much traffic. You either make more room, or limit the flow of data. The solution is not for sysadmins to become the secret police of the network, closing ports and banning software. For every countermeasure taken, someone will find a new way to circumvent it.
I personally use a cable modem at home, and have noticed that though each download gets limited to between 40 and 60k/sec throughput, I can have multiple downloads totalling at least 500k/sec. In the case of college dorm networks, a per-user connection cap should be implemented. I think the real issue is the same one many start-up ISPs run into: they just didn't plan enough bandwidth for everyone. You can't cut corners and expect to have a decent network. If QoS is really an issue to you, you should spend the money to get the bandwidth you need.
I also have not had the fortune of living in a dorm with built-in network access, but I'm familiar with networking. As long as your software can distinguish between a computer and a network, you can enforce bandwidth caps. Personally I am amazed that this seemingly obvious and less difficult solution has not been attempted (or at least publicized).
I am glad to see the proliferation of software like Napster, and the expansion from mp3 to any binary information. I hope development of such software continues despite the unnecessary adversity that is being encountered.
David Howell
In the real world, most internet users are in one of two environments
- Fast LAN or medium-speed WAN behind a firewall with slower outside connection
- Slow dialup, concentrating large numbers of users to fast internal servers plus an Internet feed that's big but oversubscribed.
Businesses and universities are in the former model; most ISPs are the latter model, though the DSL and Cable Modem ISPs are somewhere in between. In both cases, http caching is available, and is a valuable tool for keeping most requests on the fast inner network instead of the slow connection to outside.Napster was designed so that Napster.com's servers only handle the databases, not the bulk file transfer, which lets them handle a large number of users with manageable load (and avoid copyright blame, shifting it to the users :-) But what it ignores is the transfer of large numbers of users - which is a serious thing to ignore if you want to have zillions of users using your stuff.
University users look like business users - typically fast LANs on campus, slower connection to outside, so Napster would be no problem if most students got their MP3s from other students or a caching server at the same school, and only downloaded from outside when nobody at the school has the song they want. How would you design something like this? Here are a few possible approaches:
- Give the Napster Database more information about where the client and file-sharers are, so it can show you the nearby sharers first, with something more relevant than just ping time. Even a crude measure like "same second-level domain name" helps a lot, because it keeps things in the same university or corporation.
- Design a Napster Proxy/Cache Server you can install locally, and a way to find nearby servers, so you ask the cache if it's got your song instead of getting it from Napster themselves. This was easier for Pointcast to do, because their sales hook is "we're helping your employees get interesting business news, plus the occasional headline and sports score", as opposed to "we're helping your students pirate MP3s and Warez", but it's a start
:-) But it can be minimal modification to the Napster protocols, with the complex work done by the proxy. - Design a "distributed proxy", which lets some random user's machine elect itself database cache in its domain or community; requires a mechanism to tell other users where to find it, but it may not be hard, and there could be interesting ways to generalize "community". It's a bti of work, and Napster needs to be sure their business model still works
:-) - Use HTTP for file transfers, basically making each Napster sharer speak http, maybe on port 80 or 8080 instead of Napster's own protocols as the default. This lets web caches work automagically, though it really benefits if there's a way to get most clients at one university usually use the same few servers for each specific song they download (e.g. sharer-1 shares songs 1,2,3, sharer-2 shares 4,5,6, etc.) to maximize caching.
- Other things the open source community will think up and code.
- More flexible choice of port numbers, so Napster can hog ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth, choosing to be Anonymous Cowards rather than good netizens. (Hiding anonymously is fine, but the system still needs to clean up its bandwidth act as much as possible.)
Remember, only YOU can prevent broadcast stormsBill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Finally someone else realizes this!
Its not sysadmins people.
I don't think you'd be terribly impressed if your trying to get some actual work done and you can't do anything because some loser two rooms over is busy draining all the network resources in the building to listen to Backstreet Boys.
The whole point of things like College Networks is that they're there for some kind of actual use, which trading music doesn't really qualify as.
When something frivolous like Napster is consuming 30% of a connection as big as an OC3, then you know there is a major problem. As an admin, what can you do? Let the network slow to a crawl, buy more bandwidth, or get rid of the single biggest waste of bandwidth on the network?
So, bearing in mind that you probably don't have a budget big enough to just add bigger lines whenever you want to, what would you do?
Hence, mass bans of Napster.
So, now we have people writing programs to try to get around those bans to continue to waste network resources. Don't these people learn, or are they just too selfish to care about anything but how much music they can collect?
What we'll probably see if this kind of abuse keeps up long enough is metered traffic. Just wait and see... if there is no way to block it, they'll just find a way to start charging you for extra bandwidth being used.
And then where are we? All because some people have to basically steal network bandwidth so they can have more music.
Yeah, thats just great.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I suspect that many network administrators will resort to limiting the data rates per student (or host), for ALL protocols to some small level.
:)
There's nothing that the students can really do about that except pay more for more bandwidth.
So, in the end, each student will probably be back to a 9.6kb line
Maybe combine it with that "Freenet" idea that was being posted on Freshmeat.net.
"Tonight on CNN Technology Report, is the safety and integrity of the Internet at stake? A new report suggests that a form of Electronic Terrorism known as a 'Denial of Service' attack could spell the end for the World Wide Web. We'll speak with the president of a small dotcom startup called 'Guh-Null-Soft', who was recently the victim of what is possibly the single most powerful 'Denial of Service' attack on the Internet today - the mysterious 'Slashdot Effect'"
:)
(from the "download" page on gnullsoft..)
DOWNLOAD GNUTELLA --
DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release. Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit.
We're a doggamn menace!
.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -
What shall we call these new client/server combinations? For now, I'll simply call them DFSs: distributed file sharers. What benefits to DFSs have over the web from the user's perspective? A few for your consideration:
- Single user interface to multiple sites
- Ability to interact with users on all sites, not just the currently viewed one
Benefits from the administrator's perspective?What else?
I recall an incredible sense of community on the old BBSs. Though Slashdot can boast a strong community, I don't think most web sites can. Will DFSs change this? Do you foresee DFSs adding BBS-like features like discussion groups and online games? Are they filling a niche that the web doesn't?
The Online Slang Dictionary
The way they're acting is that they never expected to get /.ed..
The thing is, you release an open-source project, that allows transfer of Mp3s, that comes from a huge congomerate, and is part of Nullsoft...
How can it NOT get slashdotted?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Is that the major reason most univeristies are firewalling off Napster has little to do with bandwidth, and almost everything to do with the lawsuits and threats and extortion coming from the RIAA. Bandwidth usage is, of course, a concern, but I don't see where the bandwidth shaping is a bad thing. University SysAdmins would see it as a blessing... Better than without anyway. Besides, many websites are as demanding on bandwidth, if not more so, than a napster connection. Students are going to download and upload and use all the bandwidth they can get, whether they are using Napster or Gnullsoft or just downloading .wav's, .mp3's and warez. At least this way they won't have to waste so much time & bandwidth looking thru web pages for the files they want. I mean, really, it's just a service, and one not much different than FTP. In a college, pretty much all their bandwidth is in use all the time, Napster or no, and if they are falling short of bandwidth, well, thats one of the many things tuition pays for, and plenty of bandwidth is not just a hallmark, but a REQUIREMENT of any good learning institution. Anyway, the reason I started this post is bandwidth relative... the /. effect strikes again! "DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release. Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit."
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
The first thought that came to mind when reading the specs was that college admins will ban this too. By the time I got to the end of the specs, it was pretty obvious I wasn't the first to have thought of this. But here's my quesrtion...Will college sysadmins WANT to ban this? Working off the (dubious) premise that the sysadmins are only worried about bandwidth hogs, will this "bandwidth shaping" feature prevent The Napster Problem? Yeah, I love napster, but it's kind of annoying when web pages can load faster on my 56K modem at home than here at college.
So I guess my question is, is this bandwidth shaping for real? If so, how is that possible?
-Colbey
Everything is free.
I wonder if the copyright crimes napster and it's clones are encouraging is going to have any negative effects on the release of media content.
My guess is it's not. Making movies and music has never been cheaper than it is today. That coupled with the fact that that you don't have to work is the sweat of your face anymore to survive gives people with real creativity the ability to produce god material.
The big media companies have worked against quality content and instead focused on suplying crap for the masses. The last fifteen years have produced no Brian Wilsons, John Lennons, Luc Bressons or Orson Welles.
The free software movement has proven these points for software. The big media companies has a much bigger effect on our lives than companies like microsoft has ever had. For some reason pirating music and movies never felt as bad as pirating software. I'm getting incoherent now, best quit
Hard to believe that a large company (Time Warner) would allow this type of software out in the open. I figured that there would be a napster clone for other file types, but was sure it would be another upstart. I'd guess this will be squashed by Time Warner before it becomes too popular, or if not squashed modified to try to prevent the free flow of information
This has the potential to succeed where Napster has failed. Napster works with only MP3s, which means Napster's designers have applied content discrimination. The law decrees, and IANAL, that as soon as you discriminate against content posted, that you are responsible for all content posted. If this program is much more general-purpose, it shouldn't be dogged by the same laws that Napster was dogged by.
Time Warner now sells bandwidth with it's Cable Modem services and it's consolidaiton with AOL. Bandwidth is not unlike Gasoline. You sell enough SUVs (aka Napster) and you'll have lots more gas sales.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
I'm not saying that things like Napster should be illegal. I am saying that clogging up a network with Napster when people are trying to do real work is antisocial behavior and should be considered on-par with playing a boom-box at volume ten on the bus, talking loudly on a cell-phone in a supermarket, and otherwise acting like an obnoxious ass.
The cake is a pie
Check this out! (from the download page)
DOWNLOAD GNUTELLA --
DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release.
Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit.
Wow.
Plankeye
Who the hell told Carrot Top he was funny?
You contradict yourself. If free music becomes as popular as pirated music is now, then you will experience the same bandwidth problems, except this time it will all be legal.
I remember when I did not autoload images because of bandwidth problems on the internet. Well now the internet has grown up a little and graphics are a small load on the network.
Sooner or later, music will be chump change compared to movie streaming or whatever comes next. We should hope that the consequence of the extreme bandwidth usage is more bandwidth, rather than the despise of new technology.
Napster was an interesting proof of concept, in that it allowed for a large peer-to-peer MP3 fileshare.
Regardless of the outcome of the RIAA lawsuit against Napster, developments such as Gnullsoft's illustrate the "Whack-a-Mole" problem the government and industry face.
Call it gestalt critical mass. Viral software memes. Slashdot backlash. Whatever.
Simply stated, you can't keep a good idea down.
After first hearing of Napster I was quite impressed with the idea but a little confused as to why its mp3 only. If the gnullsoft version allows other types of files we are going to need some kind of quality control system in order for it to be useable. You could have groups that catalog certain archives.. provide crc's and such. so that you can look up what files you are looking for in a database and search other users machines for them.. and not have to worry about getting poor quality data.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
Actually good sir, I believe you're mistaken. Gnutella appears to use a peer-to-peer-to-peer network to form its lists. That means all you have to do is link to a friend outside of the university firewall on whatever port you would decide, and all of a sudden you have access to all the hosts that he has, and all the hosts that the people he is linked to has, etc. This expands exponetially, and the only thing colleges could do is block EVERY port except vital ones. (HTTP, FTP, GOPHER, etc.) Heh, I'd like to see them try to pull that off.. They'd have a geek riot on their hands. ;-)
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It's great to see a big, AOL subsidiary, that as far as I know has never shown a big interest in producing GPLed software now jumping in and producing something like this.
But! The concern I have is that the analysis I've seen of the Napster protocol shows that it's a very poorly designed protocol. I wonder if there's any chance gnutella will be able to either support different protocols -- the old Napster protocol and a new better designed one, or help redesign the current protocol.
Anybody know a good alternative protocol that could be used instead? Anybody care to design one? Does someone want to let these guys know this is a priority?
Background info is available from this Salon article (the second of two parts; the first part gives an overview of Hotline). For the latest news in the case, try here or here.
Hotline is what got me much of my MP3 collection, but the company's actions caused me to think twice. Napster doesn't present such a moral quandry.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Oh, that's just f***ing wonderful. I can't wait to have 58% of my university's bandwidth used up by piracy, AGAIN. I just can't wait to be sitting here, wishing I had a modem connection to AOL rather than having the dedicated ethernet connection I have now.
Look, I listen to mp3's, I own a Rio, I think the RIAA is evil, etc. etc., but I want Napster and everything like it gone!
Don't tell me about the legal uses for napster. That's BS. If you own a CD, you can make your own mp3's from it, and if you want legally free music, you can go to the band's web site and download the music from them. Or, go to mp3.com, or traxinspace.com, or one of the many other free music sites. That's what I do, and all the music I listen to is legally free. And it is damn good, too.
Furthermore, I really think we should be encouraging the artists who have been so generous as to give us free music. The should be compared to the coders that have givin us free (open source) software. If people realize that there is a lot of really good music on mp3.com, and start downloading it, then there will only be more in the future. As it is, the incredible amount of pirating going on right now only encourages the RIAA and the government to make more laws to prevent it--laws which we hate. The DMCA, for example. If there wasn't so much damn pirating going on, mabey we would not have it.
If everyone starts downloading legally free music, the RIAA won't be able to anything about it but say "oh shit", and fade away. The artists will all head towards giving away their music for free. (they can make money in so many other ways--endorsements, concerts, etc.) So, then all our music will be free, just the way we like it. There is no need for Napster clones.
------
-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes
... with the author's desire to completely circumvent the administrator's control over their own network. There are technolgies in this software to specifically prevent it from being throttled.
Yes I'm all for free speech and the freedom of information but at what cost? I can see the entire QoS of dorms and "open" labs to be turned way way way down over this. It would have been much better to have some kind of control app which the network admins could say "300kbps tops during peak times" or something to that effect.
Mind you I can now also see work being put into firewall software which monitors for large bandwidth useage on an connection basis and, if it exceeds xkbps for y seconds, throttle that IP down or turn them off completely.
Maybe this isn't such a bad thing after all.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
The issue is not the free flow of information.
The issue is economies of limited data transfer bandwidth in a shared network environment.
Where I go to school, we have full ATM switched core (or at least thats my understanding). Theres an OC3c to the net, along with a vbns connect (with another oc-12 to vbns coming soon).
Thing was... napster traffic was using 30% of the bandwidth available. To support this new traffic would have cost millions more on the OC3c connect to the internet. Probally eating out of state and federal funds, alongside higher tuition costs. Just so some bastard can get his/her britney spears music and porn.
Why should I fund their abusive network saturating connectivity? Why do you turn sysadmins into the enemy when the real enemy is the economics of scarce bandwidth?
In any case. There will allways be a method to block these products from saturating internet and vbns lines. Why tell people otherwise? If anything, you make it even more of a priority to start blocking SYN traffic unless someone has specifically asked to run services on their machines.
"Am I making myself painfully clear? I thought so."
-- dieman - Scott Dier
ADOM was originally released with the caveat that version 1.0 would have source. We're now (after several years) at 0.99gamma16
Needless to say, the author of that software package felt that he had written himself a loophole, and could take advantage of the good will of the open source community. I don't know about these people, but if the mindset isn't release early, release often, then they don't get it to begin with.
gnap -- gnome napster client
gnome-napster -- gnome napster client
jnap -- java napster client
jnapster -- java napster client
java napster -- java napster client
crapster -- BeOS napster client
gnapster -- gnome napster client
BitchX -- IRC chat client with napster plugin
Knapster -- KDE napster client
BeNapster -- BeOS napster client
Napster for BeOS
Napster for MacOSX
gtk napster -- gtk napster client
amster -- amiga napster client
iNapster -- WWW interface to napster
BWap -- standalone console unix client based on bx-nap plugin for BitchX
These are all open source and free, and will work with Opennap servers (although most right now probably aren't coded to take advantage of the Pr0n search extensions, yet. Give it some time though.
hoowah. alright, it's been awhile since i've woken up to find the webservers on fire from a slashdotting. as a result, i've had to close the beta group. there were over 10,000 downloads this morning so far, and we're just not ready to have you all connect to the group pool yet. sorry. i wanted to respond to a few concerns i've seen here with some answers to things that are being misrepresented. first off, gnutella is not a napster clone. there are several major differences, the most important difference that the search hierarchy is not centralized, but instead shared across the network of hosts you end up connecting to. additionally, gnutella does not use the napster network protocol, which seems to be brought up a few times here. lots of folks have mentioned the fact that they're having problems getting on this morning. I've shut down the redirector as well so you can't join the network at the moment, since the beta is closed. You're more than welcome, should you find the app, to join your own private sharing groups (which is, indeed, more the design of the product than this morning's 5,000 host marathon) we want to promote group sharing *within* campuses as well as global sharing. The hope is that local bandwidth will be used and encouraged instead of piping down brittney porn through your poor dorm's overcramped asante 10BT hubs and crisco 2501s. more to come later. thanks for the interest so far!