Slashdot Mirror
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.
AOL killed the project, in large part due to the slashdot effect. Great job. Assholes.
--
--
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.
--
#19845
The thing is. Metering only hampers people doing legitimate work. Plus, it requires hardware that many higher-edu people dont have. (thank god the people here do.)
-- dieman - Scott Dier
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.
the client and server will be open.
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.
"If your paying for the access, then you should be able to use it as you wish. "
Quite wrong... if you're paying for the access, you agreed to pay for the access with restrictions on how you would use it according to the Acceptable Use Policies. If you enter into this agreement with the intent of violating the Acceptable Use Policies, they can cut your connection off. If you try to take them to court (why not? School rules are not laws, LAWS are laws. If a teacher takes your hat, nail them for petty theft. If a student tells you they're going to kick your ass, press assault charges.) they can very easily argue that you made the agreement in bad faith and you'll be left high and dry.
When you buy something, ANYTHING, you do it as an agreement with the seller. The seller sets conditions. If you don't like those conditions, you don't buy it, its as simple as that. I'd LOVE it if AT&T weren't complete moron jerkoff assholes and would unlimit the upstream of cable modems, but I want that bandwidth even with the restriction so I will buy them if they ever come ot this area (I don't know why I believe them every time they tell me it'll be a month or 2, they've been lying about it for over 3 years). I will not attempt to override this limit, I will not bitch about this limit, I will not claim I was FORCED to accept the limit, because I wasn't. I was presented with a choice and I took it. End of story.
Esperandi
Personally I'd like it if our school networks were run into the ground with Napster, you have no idea how absolutely putrid out network is. NOTHING works on it. No reverse DNS so you can't access about half of the FTP sites out there including huge ones like export.andrew.cmu.edu. Through ICQ you can't send messages longer than 450 chars, you can't transfer files, hell until a couple months ago they blocked ICQ completely. Students have done significant research to determine why inTRAnet page grabs of the schools own site from within their network are slower than shit (about 50x slower than going outside to the net), determined the problems, went to the administrators and then were told if they didn't stop looking into how the network worked they would be fired from their campus jobs and all net access would be revoked. Thank gawd I don't live on campus.
"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?
Once the Gnutella protocol is published, it should be possible to build a bridge to the Napster namespace - this would facilitate the expansion of both dataspaces really quickly!
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.
I wouldn't count Napster's days being numbered anytime soon. The biggest hurdle if some other program were to overtake it, is to get the masses using it. More so then any program since ICQ do I have non computer friends using Napster, who have never heard of Linux, or open source. If Napster continues to work the masses will not move over. The windows client market is still the one that has to be broken into before something will explode to levels Napster has.
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!