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Scour is Dead
jathos writes "The Scour Exchange is dead -- see the announcement here. Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?" Scour actually was a reasonably useful tool for finding wierd images. I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects. Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid.
I only have one tray icon, and that's the volume control.
So you need to right-click, properties, settings, slidethingy-apply to change you resolution? You can also go to far, you know...some of those icons are actually useful.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
They ran out of funding at an accelerated pace due to the file-sharing lawsuits.
In the particular case of Scour, they didn't die because of "The Man". They died because of poor management, lack of direction, inflated egos, lack of preparation for the lawsuits, lack of money sense and because they treated their engineers like shit. They had 5 good programmers and completely squandered their talents. They hired dozens of people with questionable titles doing a dubious about of work rather than pay some good money for more engineers. I got to see all of this first hand (and get underpaid in the mean time.)
The Scour client was written in Dephi. The original was written in C++, but was shelved inexplicably after months of work in favor of the president's Delphi client.
They have made a series of bad business decisions and a series of bad technological decisions and they are now paying for them.
lunaslide
"I'm not really interested in product. I just want to know what's going on." -Misha Mahowald
Damnit! Now how am I gonna get my pr0n?
One alternative client that was just released is Leechnet.
Leechnet focuses on making it easy to trade PORN... (it even has a global rating system for porn-pictures!) ... and thats pretty much all Scour was used for anyway.
Check it out at:
http://www.leechnet.comWell, at least they published the STP/1.0 spec, rather than making us reverse engineer it like we had to do with Napster.
And actually, I'd been thinking of starting a Scour server daemon... Maybe I'll actually start doing it now.
> Gnutella is unusable. Have you considered why its unusable?
> I would say it's unusable because the leeches outnumber the altruists.
It also has something to do with the fact that in order to share files with Gnutella, you have to manually configure it. Napster etc have that nifty setup wizard that asks you where your files are, and even offers to scan your disk for you. Sharing still isn't required, but more people do it because it's easy. Others (was it CuteMX?) won't let you download files unless you're sharing something.
While I absolutely despise ratio systems on FTP servers (I never have anything they need, they're not reliable, etc), I think a ratio system might work on something like Napster. Start every new account off with 5 credits to get them started. Have the server track the balance between connections. A ratio as low as 3 to 1 would probably be generous enough. That's the basic idea... once you have that, all sorts of other possibilities start emerging. You could make things easier on people whose accounts are running low by ranking them higher in the search results. You could adjust the ratio based on any number of things. And so on...
I used to work at ditto.com, and while it's no Scour, it's a great tool for finding images from the net. I personally worked on the crawler code with another guy who wrote most of the initial system and got ditto started. It's pretty cool and works well. Use it while you can since it's about to go the way of Scour as well.
=I am Jack's general protection fault=
you could rip it for him, but sigh... where oh WHERE to find a copy of deCSS?
Its seems as the only alternative os going to be warez sites, MIRC, and Hotline. Once those start being attacked then I will fear the worst. Even though I never used scour but once, I cant say I was at all impressed. So it came and it went, there are others and there will be more. Long live freedom
But they can seek to stop commercial organizations from attempting to do so. It's one thing when it's just hundreds of thousands of faceless users copying files from one to another. It's a whole other thing when a company tries to stand in the middle with hopes of making a dime off of them. Filesharing won't stop, but copyright holders will (and IMHO should) stop others from profiteering off of their works.
So what? The file-sharing genie has already been let out. If Napster goes commercial or of Scour goes tits-up, the sighs of relief on the part of record companies will last only as long as it takes someone to write another file-sharing program and post it on the net. The only reason Scour and Napster got a big as they did is that they got alot of press which only increased their popularity, much to the dismay of the record company execs. that shithead Lars Ulrich didn't help their cause any, he just pissed people off and made them want to download more music. Anyway, now the publishers of anything that can be digitized and shared will be forced to play the gopher-game. You know,the one where you whack one on the head and others pop up...
You're using her as bait, Master!
Microplanet's Gravity (http:/www.microplanet.com/) makes a far superior newsgroup reader to either version of Agent. Better rules, mass decoding, and very stable. I snagged about 700 megs of miscellaneous binaries in a test of my cablemodem one night with but a few clicks.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Burris
Could someone mirror that announcement page? my school has completely blocked scour.net and scour.com so I can't even read that announcement.
-Stype
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
Dammit, meant RIAA/MPAA instead of just RIAA. Never post unless the coffeepot is empty...
Well, yes, if I ever did, but I don't, so no. I'm quite content with 1024x768x32bpp@75Hz. As for control panels, there's devmgmt.msc, control.exe, compmgmt.msc, and so on.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
May I ask how it is "off topic"? CuteMX is a distrubited filesharing app. Until the ideal one comes, it's good to have one that, to my knowledge, is still up.
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
I haven't downloaded the second part of Tron yet!!!! I'm going to cry now.
:(
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I wear pants.
well..if scour did come out before napster, why was scour in beta? Napster was stable, thats all I can say.
Whatever happened to Mojo Nation? Aciel aciel@speakeasy.net
Another insane lawsuit by giant corporations that not only deprives us of our rights might destroys another internet company that is doing nothing more than move humanity out of the dark ages of information monopolies.
The eff has a article pleading for reform to the archaic copyright laws that are being twisted to destroy your internet freedoms.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
One alternative client that was just released: Leechnet.
It just focuses on porn
stop teasing us and release it! *sighs*
Speaking of dubious titles, the last company I worked for (which I assume has gone under I can't see them on the internet at all any more) had a great title.
'VP of Strategic X'
.
I'll tell you why, because you're a big fucknut.
-TimmyC, Tech Guru
--
The shareholder is always right.
The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.
I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.
A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said, then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.
The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.
An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.
(I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)
And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.
While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.
Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen
Anyone putting any faith in mojonation? I was surprised to see noone had mentioned it here. I personally haven't used it, but it looks like a good concept (*cough* *cough* so did gnutella), because it _should_ help cut down on leeching.
May scour rest in peace. The capitialists just chalked up a kill. Odds are more will follow before they get shut down, if they ever do. Free file sharing is at stake here, and the freedom side doesnt have the backing to do anything about it at the moment.
I am !amused.
Gnutella, FreeNet, and others need to learn one thing, User Base is good..The only way you get a large user base now days, is to make the program user friendly. That's why napster has done so well, and why scour did so well. IMHO, Scour was much better than napster, Though napster had the larger user base, and scour exchange had a few bugs in it (ok, more than just a few).
CuteMX, by the makers of CuteFTP
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Comet - it makes you vomit. So buy Comet and vomit today!
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Yea, me too. I used it to find mp3s, long before that "Nappy" thing came around. The Net was much nicer place back in the good ol' days.
--
Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Read this previous article on /. about the Sealand data haven.
They have their own laws and hosting music on Sealand will undoubtably be cheaper than paying off the record labels
The big question is would they be prepared to do it ?
Scour, from the little that I used it, had a much wider amount of material than Napster (Go OpenNap) to include of course the "clipart" (for purposes of this post clipart==pron) It also had a bunch of pictures of people you don't know and most likely don't want to know mpegs that where both legal, semi-legal, and not so legal (My copy of the Crazy video very clearly falls into the last, trailers that I think the studios would rather you have to go to their site to get would be in the second, and the various bits of clipart featuring Kobe Tai are clearly in the first. As I understand it from a article that I read yesterday they mostly went down because the VC would not give them money because of the suits pending due to the not legal content but there was a *lot* of stuff. The only downside was it always seemed slower then napster. Oh well at least we still have opennap now they just need to expand so they can have clipart also.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
i figure that makes up for quite a large number of leeches. you see, it doesn't take that many users to give a sh*t in order for it to work. look at Napster or Gnutella (putting aside it's current almost-unusable state). on Napster, you *CAN* find virtually any recorded music. leeches like you do detract from the system, but there are more than enough non-cynics like me to make up for it.
i don't understand the purpose for your blatantly destructive opinion, and why it persists despite its incongruity with simple reality.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
Go get it. $20 at a brick-and-mortar store. It's the highest quality rendering of Tron (short of getting the source files for the 3D rendering and overlaying the humans).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Hasn't some other country thought of hosting their own peer to peer file sharing service? In some place like China or Cuba where us copyright laws don't really have too much meaning. Scour exchange was the best source of downloadable simpsons episodes imaginable and I am extremely butthurt over this.
It's not that it's difficult to prosecute someone with the user information IRC can give you, but that it simply can't be done on a large scale.
The case you point out seems like an attempt by the BSA to make examples of a few people. Needless to say, it hasn't been a very effective deterrent; mp3 trading is alive and well on IRC. No organization has pockets deep enough to go after thousands of people trading or serving mp3's, all they can do is make pathetic attempts to scare them.
Nix absolutably seriousness.
It's close to impossible to forma a legitimate community of file swappers if you make it public. Don't ask me how the Linux community turned out to be so cool :)
May scour rest in peace. The capitialists just chalked up a kill. Odds are more will follow before they get shut down, if they ever do. Free file sharing is at stake here, and the freedom side doesnt have the backing to do anything about it at the moment.
What about the freedom of people to charge for what they spend time and money and sweat to produce? Ever consider THAT freedom?
I'm a partner in a film company. We're just getting started. I'd like to have the opportunity to recoup some of my investment at some point in the future -- cameras, lighting, actors pay, film stock, script writing, editing rooms, post production, audio dubbing, getting permission for music and/or scoring music, special effects, props, locations, film licenses (try filming on a street without it), etc etc etc cost MUCHO money. So if I'm willing to put the cash that I spend months, even years building up into making a movie, why should you get it for free whether I want you to or not?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
The digital tokens used are the internet equivalent of the old upload/download ratios of BBS days applied to a distributed, decentralized P2P system. This isn't a "sharing" system, so it doesn't walk through your disk looking for things to give away; instead other users publish data to the system and it gets broken up into pieces, these pieces get RAID-like error correction and then they are sent out to other peers in the system. Downloads can use a swarm approach to pulling in data, taking a small piece from lots of peers (including those who might be on slow connections) rather than trying to shove the whole file down someone's (already overloaded) narrow upstream link.
Previous releases were a bit unstable, but the new 0.920 release that is available for download has a much better installer and significantly faster publishing and downloads. Check it out!
you could rip it for him, but sigh... where oh WHERE to find a copy of deCSS?
And why would he want to do something illegal like that?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
From a technical point of view, a moral point of view or what?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Scour may be dead but their backend indexing technology may not be. The companies assets are being bid on by several companies including listen.com. One asset a company has is it's "intellectual property" which includes it's source code, so if another company buys it (listen?), maybe we'll see something yet. :)
Not that I'm a big fan of file sharing, but just as an excercise I was working on a Qt client for Scour. Oh well, maybe I'll find something else to do...
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
(sob sob sob) (uncontrolable crying)
b-b-b-but.... i can't afford all the porn i consume.... what am I to do? (BOOOHOOOO)
:(
Umm. You got it backwards. Napster is in beta. Scour was out of beta a long time ago. Scour used to be web based where you'd download a file through their little program. It was too annoying so they developed scour exchange.
Yeah, that's right. Never. Never, never, never. For my MP3s, I find an FTP site with an operator generous enough to give leech. If that's impossible, then I find a good ratio and start transferring. I've dabbled around with Gnutella, but I've only used it for downloading. I can't stand the interface, and all I ever see is junk, junk, junk (and that's after filtering out flatplanet.net, all the porn, metallica, nelson, warrant, et cetera).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
WTF do capitalists have to do with this? The victims were capitalists too. The problem is specifically with assholes, some of which happen to be capitalists.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
> ... I'm a leech. That's human nature ...
That must mean that non-leeches aren't human. What are they? My theory is ALIENS!
Gnutella is a dead end. The brute-force method it employs of connecting people up is simply too expensive. It takes too long to connect and too long to do a search. The only viable future for peer-ro-peer file sharing is a more intelligent approach such as freenet, Publius, or something like that. Perhaps the death of Scour and the probable near-future death of Napster (at least in the form we know it) will spur on the development of these or other good solutions to the file-sharing problem.
I'll forecast it before it comes out
I love my PS2.
-d9
I don't think true altruism ever exists. Even when you are giving, you are receiving too.
You put up files on the net so that your name will be credited, so that your "reputation" will be built up. This is your payment. There are enough people with low self-esteem to carry the weight of running the servers. These people value the time and work setting up a server less than they value a little respect.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Reminds me of a certain web browser. Why is it that scour sucked because it was buggy and in beta form, but mozilla is great because it's buggy and in beta form?
The same goes for Transmeta CPUs. Their chips are outperformed by lower clocked Pentiums and they're actually pretty average energywise - but wait.. Linus works for them so they must be great no?
Don't you just hate double standards...
I miss my SX so much. I've downloaded so many GB of stuff (mp3,mpegs)... I can't believe it has been shutted down.
File sharing is good as long as everyone is connected to the same server so everyone can see all the files shared. Using unofficial servers (such as those listed in MyNapster) is a bad experience because only a handful of ppl is using that particular server.
I think someone should hack the server code and make all servers connected together and share the user list.
- [insert signature here]
I think the next generation file sharing protocol should use decentralized servers similar to IRC networks. Everyone should be able to run their own server. Each server has its own list of online users and servers will update their user list every few minutes to all other servers, therefore all clients are able to see every online user. Server has to report to a directory server (similar to GameSpy) and obtain updated server list from it.
- [insert signature here]
Save yourself the headache and set up an IPSec VPN. PPTP is considered by many to be insecure. Fortunately even Microsoft is moving to IPSec.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
Wow, that sucks. I expected as much though. The service and login replies have been slowing to almost zero over the past two months. This certainly does show that a closed-source, corporately ownd and controlled, peer-to-peer file sharing service cannot last. Regardless of whether it is technically legal or not, peer-to-peer file sharing will always lose in the courts. The Reason(tm)? Money talks. But where do I go to get my porn now?
Whoa, I've been able to completely recreate my brother's stolen 65 cd collection in 5 days, solely with Scour Exchange. I've found it to be just as easy and effective as Napster, if not more. Now I hate flashy, worthless web pages as much as the next guy, but this article is about Scour Exchange, not the company itself, and I can say from personal experience that Scour Exchange is an acceptable program for file sharing.
--Xantho
Well, I don't use Gnutella, but as far as Napster goes, I do allow people to download from me frequently. Why you ask? Well, I have some rare stuff that is hard to find. I guess I have always been of the mind that if I had a big problem searching and trying to find this music, then it is good for me to help people by allowing them to get it from me.
A lot of the music I get would be in the more international or obscure categories, everything from Molotov to Plastilina Mosh to Tarkan to the Minibosses. I have been unable to find some of the music I like in stores anywhere (my Plastilina Mosh CD's were purchased in Mexico) so I figure I might as well help expose someone else to the music I like so it can become more popular. Maybe then I can hear other rare music that I like that I can't find in the stores.
So yes, there are the majority of people that are leeching, and that's fine. But, there are some of us that actually like to share and do good deeds for other people.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
I think that peer to peer music will be dead until someone can come up with a stable interface/protocol, and not get into trouble with the law. So far, the other P2P music programs has succumbed to one of these two requirements.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I loved, scour, it got me soo many things... Anyway, we could just sit aorund here and bemoan it's loss, or we could move on and "show the man he can't keep us down." Cutmx is back, it's in beta testing right now, but you can download it free, and works great. Like anything P2P though, it needs people to know about it and to start using it. you can get it here:t ml
http://www.cuteftp.com/products/cutemx/index.sh
Let's do it!
(Sorry don't know how to do URLs)
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
If it takes 55 accountants to keep up with your 5 programmers, then you really need to revoke those company credit cards.
:) )
(quite amusing though, BTW
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
How is peer to peer any different than client-server? Non-commercial web sites also rely on altruism on the part of the person paying for the server. Do you think they're dead too? No, because some people have things that they want to say. Whether they build upon peer-to-peer or not, is completely irrelevant.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Peer to Peer outfits that work like scour will work because of an even GREATER forces than human greed, human LAZINESS and IGNORANCE. Sure you can shut off the file sharing and refuse to upload, but why bother? Most people don't care, and will leave their drives open for the pickings. And I'm sure there are more than a few users out there who had it set up by a friend of theirs, and know the basics but nothing beyond that. They may be few, but they still share...
Mr.P
"So which is it son, ignorance or apathy?"
"I don't know coach, and I don't care..."
Scour = Napster - quality control?
What percentage of the songs available from Napster
1) have the correct artist name and song title
2) contain the complete song
3) sound good enough to play loudly in your car
Maybe 50 - 60%.
That's pretty good for a free service, but nothing outstanding. I think Scour was great.
-B
Pour some beer on the sidewalk for Scour.
Disagree. Scour Exchange had features not offered by Napster (eg. after a partial DL search for a file with the same MD5 and resume safely) and didn't have the music-only focus. If your files were incomplete, you could search for someone else with a longer version of the file with the same MD5 -- coolness!
Also, I dunno about the BSODs -- the *nix-based client I used, GSX, has been acceptably stable for quite some time.
Hmmm, you touched on something that I've always hated about napster: that damn client software! =) Granted, I haven't used napster in a while (5-6 months or so), but I think what I'm going to say probably still holds.
While napster may not be as buggy as scour (although I've never had _any_ problems with scour's client), the GUI to napster is/was absolutely atrocious. Window pane traversing that should have been implemented with tabs was done with buttons. Double click on a person's name and, for some reason, you get the context menu. "Close" it, and, without warning, it runs in the background with only an icon in the systray left. That last "feature" hacked me off when I first saw it because it seemed like the client was trying to intentionally trick me into believing that it had closed so it could serve up my files behind my back. When I first used it, you couldn't even change the settings on the fly; you had to restart the application (and that wasn't in the alpha stage either). Not to mention that the interface was/is just plain ugly, but that's just aesthetics.
Of course, this may have changed recently, but I think the winner for bad software development ethics, at least historically, goes to napster. I honestly think they should have looked at the client and said "Ok, that's a good prototype, now scrap it 'cause we need to write the _real_ client". Granted, the developers, at least originally, were young, so I can let it slide. I'd be interested to hear what you, or anyone else, thinks.
This was not a rant, just a comment.
Apache is for HTTP .. for FTP you need some sort of FTP daemon. wu-ftpd is around .. but is also one of the largest security holes known to man (or woman).
ProFTPD might be better.. can't say yet for sure as I don't really do any FTP serving.
--
Delphis
The idea of groups of people sharing files is the one used behind Paranoia (link in my sig). Use it for groups of friends, or groups of people sharing a common interest, who can then talk and exchange files over Paranoia.
Major updates (generic access lists and distributed karma/trust calculations) coming next week...
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
Wow, never thought I'd see a Muggeridge quote on Slashdot...
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
Exactly what I noticed. You can't 'share' files on Mojo since you have to pay to have them hosted and available to others (and you can't host your own content). While MN is an interesting project, it is not really suited to file sharing in the sense Napster or Gnutella are.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
"Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid."
I'm quite surprised I've seen no mention of Freenet in this dicussion. Freenet uses intelligent routing to find and remember the most efficient routes. Freenet also boasts intelligent file sharing (the most accessed files are mirrored all over). Couple that with the inability of one hostile group or person to remove files from the network and you have a kickass file sharing mechanism IMO. Very cool project... -Pato
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Anyone heard of groove? You guys/gals who like peer-to peer should try it. It does more than just file sharing also. Try it out at www.groove.net
I like news groups, they are probably the ones that will always survive... So instead of having a damn Server in some company hosting the IP numbers, and filenames, that will eventually be sued... can't someone use the (ok really slow) newsgroup servers to have scour-like clients "Post" Encrypted info on current users IP, addresses and file lists, that these clients then can upload, unencrypt and do file searches on? ok, so it would be slow because the headers can hold only so much info... but it's a thought. Mabidex
So, perhaps the issue is that the implementation isn't quite right from a useability point of view. The issue seems to be that people will be altruistic as long as it doesn't inconvenience them (which is contradictory, based on the definition of altruism).
Perhaps a p2p implementation needs to be developed which operates on a sort of seti@home style of cpu usage, and which only shares files after an extended period of idle time...
I don't know, just a thought.
- Jonathan
I would like, however, to see you find me making this double standard. Yesterday I d/led mozilla and oracle to see how they were. I was pleasently surprised to find oracle outperform IE in terms of raw speed. Mozilla, however felt slow, and that was just in terms of the interface, not the surfing. anyway, the double standard you point out in terms of mozilla is not realy a double standard. The reason scour was bad is cause it crashed rediculously. I am not making this up. My roomates comp was BSOD every time I looked over and he refused to stop using scour. Mozilla may be in beta, but I feel people like it not because it out performs ie or whatever. Its because its open source, and some people just havethose kinda priorities.
Point is don't be too quick to judge. All I know is that, whichever one came first, napster somehow managed to be more stable. End of story.
All the universities must ecstatic now that scour exchange is dead. We just spent a crapload of money on a traffic shaper that does layer 7 (content) analysis and packet caching to prevent all the kids from leeching and using up all the bandwidth (scour/napster traffic contributed 85% of the total bandwidth usage). Primarily because many college kids are clueless and don't know that if napster/scour ends up in the system tray and is not manually disconnected, it is still uploading stuff.
I guess it was pretty ironic that right after this happened our traffic on the T3 dropped 50% because no one was using scour anymore.
With all of these peer to peer file sharing services going under, where is the evolution going to go from here? This is something i've though about lately, and not really done much research on just yet...
The problem that i see with these companies like Napster and Scour, is the fact that they have their own client-end software that each user must use to connect to their central "network" in order to share their files. What we need is a way to share files without connecting to a central netowrk (similar to gnutella), and also take it one step further, and eliminate the need for for a client-end application as well.
example : Virtual Private Networking. It's built into the operating systems that are installed on the majority of home PCs out there. (sorry for not providing a better example, because i doubt windows in the OS of the majority of people who are reading this)... I don't think it would be too difficult for someone to set up a similar (BETTER!) protocol, or work with VPN to make some improvements here and there.
Then again, i could just be talking out of my ass, since i don't know much about VPN... A friend of mine set up a VPN server, which i've connected into, and it works just peachy...
it was just one of those thoughts that come to you in the middle of the night...
Shameless Self Promotion : Webhosting at Blender Networks.
i also do not think most people are altruistic, and i did not imply that most are. quite the opposite in fact. my point was that it only takes a small minority to actually give back to the system for the system to still have value.
secondly, is gnutella's worthlessness directly attributable to people NOT hosting files, or is it simply because there are too many users / searches running? i am not an expert, so i don't know, but i've never heard it said that gnutella would be more usable if more people hosted data.
pezpunk
Internet killed the video star,
i could live a little longer in this prison
Due to the fact that there is no unified authority which holds jurisdiction over the direction of Gnutella, it will probably never improve. Linux has kernel updates because Linus is tweaking them. However, Frankel gave up and left Gnutella at the mercy of the open-source vultures.
When I say that Gnutella will never improve, I am challenging someone to prove me wrong. Go ahead, prove me wrong, make Gnutella better. Either way, I win.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
So it is.. How hard would it be to tack on file searching extensions to something that's already out there, like IRC? True, it'd still be a central-server model, but everything else is already in place (DCC file transfers, chat, etc.). It's easy to network IRC servers together, and since all the file sharing mods would be client-side, you wouldn't have to modify the servers at all. In theory you'd even be able to run something like this over a public IRC net. Only problem to overcome is how the clients find each other.
When I need an image for my own "devious projects," I usually start with Corbis Images. It has a huge selection and the samples are frequently good enough for my purposes. I use Photoshop to remove the Corbis mark and have what I need. Of course, this is only good for purposes where violating copyright isn't an issue, such as making a joke image to email to a friend, creating a mockup web page to show to a client, etc. I wouldn't recommend doing this for something that would get noticed.
"Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?"
;-)
What it illustrates is that, given intellectual property issues, is that it is very difficult for one company to own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. A company which had the inclination and resources to exert reasonable editorial controls over the content - say an AOL or a distributed version of Geocities or some similar notion - could certainly operate a PTP network in a similar manner to how non PTP communities with regulation of content and checks against IP infringement are operated.
In terms of open PTP networks, what one company, or a consortium, can do is to promote open standards and design recommendations in order to facilitate a global network of file-sharing (and in the case of my company's WebWorld project, also processor-sharing a'la SETI@Home). A modular design to allow to plug-in other protocols is also probably a good idea, since we don't yet know what standards may emerge and survive
The centralized notion leaves a single company vulnerable to control abuses, whereas by providing a technology and not a service one gives the responsibility over to the members of the network. However, it is unclear why services like Napster have not yet succeeded in the argument that like an unedited BBS they are just a repository, not a publishing/editorial board with a responsibility to prevent abuse. (If someone knows the details of this legal area, please post.)
o/~ we are pissed, we are pissed, we have to resist... o/~ - ec8or
Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.
Yea that is a really good idea, I could see it now:
"Hey, what is the deal with this trash can it won't accept any more trash"
"I don't know, lets have a look here, hrm yes, it appears to be full, to it's max capacitcy. Since it is complete full, anything attempted to be placed inside just rolls off the top, that would explain why that used coffee filter just rolled onto the floor"
"Yea, that is a logically explaination of why there is a 2 foot ring of coffee grounds baked into the carpet around this trash can."
"I think it is defective."
"Why So?"
"I had one of these at my last job, a trash can that is. I would fill it with stuff during the day and when I would come back the next day it was COMPLETELY empty and that white liner thing was replaced with a new or assumed to be new one"
"Yes, I remember at my prevoius job, at night I always ponder when I left that the trash was full but in the morning it was emptied. This trash can has been full for 2 weeks, it is obviously broken."
"Oh I also should note, I think there is a problem with the phone system. The phones just keeps RINGING AND RINGING and doesn't stop!"
"Yea, this place sucks, this guy claiming to be some magical "bill collector" keep coming up to me with this yellow peice of paper trying to talk to me. I got confused and huddled into a little ball on the floor, it scared me. This place is creepy"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Oh please. Peer-to-peer file sharing is far from doomed. The grandaddy of all ptp programs has been around for 4 or 5 years now, and is still going strong. I am refering to Hotline of course.
Now I realize that Hotline isn't true peer to peer in the sense of Gnutella, or even Napster. But still, it is set up in essentially the same fashion as the Open Napster networks, with trackers and servers.
The chaff is finally being weeded out.. Scour SUCKED. I hope the whole website tanks, it used to be usable, but as soon as they hooked up with i-drive, it went straight to hell.
BilldaCat
Odd. I never had the program crash on me. My Win98 system is remarkably stable. I glad that I shelled out the extra bucks for premium RAM in my Duron system.
Anyway, another feature that Scour had: it worked way better through firewalls. I have the hardest time downloading songs from Napster -- a lot of the people on fast connections are firewalled. (I too am behind a firewall.) Scour worked around this much like Gnutella's "push" feature, meaning about 90% reliability compared to Napster's sub-50%.
zsazsa
Crummy or not...its the thought that counts!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Easy, slick professional looking file sharing is dead, and it only makes sense. While a few people I'm sure used napster/scour for legal purposes, most of the users did not.
There will always be FTP/Usenet/IRC (and others) to share your files, but did any body really expect that deep down a company would be allowed to facilitate the quick and easy exchange of illegal materials?
The only reason why it lasted so long was because the triditional corporate/legal institutions did not understand the technology (and to a point, still don't) enough to break things up.
The best analogy I can think of is if somebody set up a 'trade your tapes' shop right next door to Sam Goody in the mall with a rack of duel decks installed that you could use for free. It would take a while for people to figure out if it was legal or not, but eventually it would be shut down. That doesn't mean people would'nt still be trading tapes with their freinds, it just means that there would be no central location to do it.
The Internet is generally stupid
One of the best file systems that I've found is VNN at vnn2000.com. Not only can you share and search for any kind of file but you can password protect and retrieve your own files. I find it really useful when I'm away from my computer... I can access my files anywhere.. and really easily too!
How long it will take till something else pops up ??? They cant keep something like that down forever
If we refuse to be flexible, we are in effect opting out of the game of life. The world moves on without us.
Wow, I actually saw the entire birth and death of scour.
Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.
That's human nature, and thats why Gnutella does and always will suck
Yes, that's probably why Napster never really caught on, right? Nobody was making their files available for downloading, they only wanted to get them ..
Yeah right. Almost everybody I know loves to share files, using any possible network technology .. LAN/SMB is an extremely popular way to transfer files (especially large ones like movies, or large collections of mp3's)
Anyway, it only takes a small percentage of people to be "altruistic" for files to spread very quickly, since many people will copy a file from one "altruistic" person ..
Actually Gnutella is unusable because of it's architecture.
d th Barriers to Gnutella Network Scalability</a>
<a href=http://dss.clip2.com/dss_barrier.html>Bandwi
Eventually the slow links (modems) get saturated with search requests and stop responding to pings.
Which has nothing to do with how many people are sharing files.
I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding. There are plenty of these stories around right now.
iMesh (http://www.imesh.com) is still up and running... a bit buggy (but much improved since the early days!)
Have fun!
This
jim
No more than half the employees can be programmers. And five is enough to drive even one project manager nuts, fill the inbox of one techwriter, and use up one office assistant, not to forget that single person trying to manage the dozen servers the programmers are abusing (and the workstations of the staff, too). They could easily do with just one financial clerk, but that one director that tried to get money to the company would require the rest of the worktime of said clerk.
That makes it a minimum of 11, of which five were programmers.
Oh yes, did You want quality software? One of those programmers will just keep hitting his head against the wall with massive amount of diagrams about the software, another keeps comforting him and trying to tell the three to keep working while he translates some of those diagrams to APIs written in chosen programming language.
That left three. Sounds like it's total of 2 management (director and financial clerk), 2 office/administrative (office assistant and system administrator), 1 project manager, 1 techwriter, 1 software architect, one senior programmer, and three hackers.
No, I haven't experienced this myself.
This is a sad bit of news, I was very interested in SX because of its ease of use and customizability (sp?) with it's searches... well any other suggestions out there?- ---------------------
-----------------------------------------
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
I'll sure miss that movie trading. Got many music videos that way. oh well. Long Live Napster!
Where am I going to get all my free pr0n now?! It's not like Gnutella is actually usable on anything less than a DS3...
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
...or more precisely, be *used* by a d-net.
Why not use free "anonymous" web-based email services to pass messages and file data?
Imagine: you're running a d-net server, but you listen for connections with a Hotmail or Hushmail account. When you see connection requests from a known-safe peer (confirmed through public-key signatures on messages) you connect directly with the peer through IP. Otherwise, you service requests *slowly* through Hotmail messages.
Also, think about the PR nightmare waiting for an attacker (government or otherwise): they would need to investigate and monitor Hotmail accounts! End-users understand Hotmail, and some would feel violated if it were known that 'authorities' are monitoring their Hotmail accounts for filesharing activity.
--Michael Spencer
blocks@mspencer.net
Maybe my comments here are a little premature, but myself, and a few other developers have been working on a peer-to-peer media sharing application that goes under the name Splooge. (www.splooge.com). We've been working on the project part time for a few months, and we are on the verge of releasing our first beta. We were very discouraged when the rash of file sharing apps hit the market, the last thing we wanted was to be thought of as just jumping on the bandwagon. But, since Napster and Gnu are really the only viable apps out (I know there are many many more), we've decided to quicken the pace and get a product to market. The site is up, and we have a small beta group testing our release, so we should have a working product in the next few weeks. Hopefully a few folks will get to use it before we get sued and shut down :). On the brighter side, if there are any record companies looking to partner with us, we'd love to entertain.
On other note, we've tried to cater to all media and data types, not simply music (mp3), and video mpg. In an attempt to protect ourselves, we've built quite a bit of control into our backend, so we can limit the files users are sharing.
Keep a look out! Sucks about the Scour thing, it really was a killer app.
wtf?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
This is only "interesting" if you buy this particular brand of pessimism. I'm a completely different sort of pessimist. I believe that anything like Scour, Napster, or Usenet is largely doomed because the majority of the leeches and non-leeches are so dang stupid, that any content out there is likely to be 95% worthless because it is so banal. OTOH, altruism is not something about which we need to be concerned. Look at how many binaries are faithfully pumped into the Usenet world. Look at Free Software. Look at the United Way. Listen to those damn Salvation Army bells this holiday season. Even dark-hearted selfish louts like myself are glad to use up spare bandwidth (if we have any, that is) -- especially at times when our connection would otherwise be sitting idle or turned off-- to share files that may be of interest to others. So, human nature equals leech nature? I think not.
I do not have a signature
what are we left with???
Mojo Nation. Less leechable, more balanced. Cool name for a parent company (whois mojonation.net).
As far as I can tell, you are in the interesting position (potentially) of not even knowing what is on your system, let alone whether it is illegal or not. Of course, I haven't actually managed to get it working yet, either.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
"clipart", you could just be looking for say, a specific kink, and find it?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Ummm, what about IRC? Just about all the mp3's I've gotten have come from there.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
VPN sounds interesting.
Is there a PPTP implementation for BSD? (er- Mac OS X)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects
"Clipart", eh? Is that what you call it?
Oh yeh, and it didn't help that scour was a complete rip-off of Napster.
I guess that sums it up; it was really buggy and a rip-off of something that was working in most cases anyway.
ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)
It was bound to happen and we were all waiting for it. Napster is going commerical, Scour is dead, CuteMX has folded long time ago, Gnutella is a victim of its own popularity (doesn't scale) and what are we left with??? Online music is going back to it's roots; to various warez ftp sites. Unless something else (Freedom maybe) comes along.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Posted anonymously because otherwise everyone will think I am Karma-whoring/Trolling/whatever. Just an honest opinion.
Putting aside the MPAA, RIAA, and the right or wrong of copyrights, what was the real use of this software? Was there very much "legal" material on it? Or was it mostly a Napster work-alike for downloading MP3s ripped from CD?
I'd never heard of Scour Exchange until now so I'm just wondering.
http://www.cutemx.com/ :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Some time ago, when they first started, being indexed by them turned into a DOS attack on my website for all intents and purposes. Despite running on a T1 even!
People weren't reading the reviews, but everyone was downloading mpegs. It took a look at the referrer logs to figure out what the heck was going on.
To make matters worse, they didn't have the name of their robot posted (it's SCOUR, duh - smacking of forehead, but so many robots are named different) to put in the robots.txt file.
We need good search engines, but ones only looking for certain files are a bane to webmasters.
Andrew Borntreger
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Napster + ability to share any file - quality control + heavily Flash-rendered home website - proper software development ethics (get it out of the alpha stage!) = Scour.
Totally. Look, just because Scour sucked, doesn't mean the base concept of peer-to-peer graphics sharing does. The use of Flash is one of my pet peeves - I have no need for it, and I'll stick to Quicktime.
What needs to happen is those complaining about the demise of Scour should take the lessons from its debacle and reengineer an open source replacement. Critical needs would be the use of repeater stations/nodes, some kind of level authentication (based on file offerings - someone with no sharing gets rated as level one, someone who has shared 1 file per 100 received is level two, someone who shares files and is a repeater station/node with 95 percent uptime is level three, a level three with 99.9 percent uptime and good bandwidth upload is level four. And no flash. None.
If you're at level one, you get to see banner ads (no popups or you're dropped) from someone at level three or four. If you're at level two, you can turn off banner ads. If you're at level three or four, you can offer banner ads - picked from the source through the repeaters to requestor (source gets 1/4 ads if also level 3 or four, repeaters share 3/4 ads along the chain, with closest repeater first in queue. This allows for a viable business model - it costs to serve up large graphics, but it's totally free if you just submit some every so often. Repeaters (level 3 or 4) get to vote (polling method) to blacklist someone from level 2 back down to level 1 if faked images (e.g. ads, pr0n, mislabelled/categorized) for 90 days. This keeps the spamsters/adsters out of the system. Blacklist applies to either entire domain or IP or IP gateway - again, repeaters need a 90 percent vote of all voting repeaters to do this.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
infoAnarchy reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.
In our Resources section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:
But again, please come visit us at iA to find out about the best new tools. We know our stuff.
File sharing will never die.
--
Damnit, this means it's back to playing whack-a-mole for an hour while trying to find some decent free porn.
Scour lived a modest life, operating under the shadow of greater services like Napster, but it fully embodied the character of open file-sharing, and will be missed by all parties.
Tried to publish, tried their insane proxy, everything. It's was complete junk. I will however try it again, seeing a Nov 14 date for the new version. Hopefully it's a little more useful.
Does this mean that Scour is bankrupt and the search engine is dead, or is it somehow "partially bankrupt" and able to continue with the search engine?
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.
Burris
Newsgroups. Download Forte Free Agent if you're running Windows (If you're in Linux the software you'll need is already there) and set it up to use your ISP's news server.
Not that I do any of that sort of thing. I only use Newsgroups to keep up to date on Quake mods and the latest info on getting my USB Orb drive to run under Linux...
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
MyNapster uses the Napster protocol but also allows you to search for pictures, videos, etc...
--
DigitalContent PAC
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Where am I supposed to get my porn clips and movies now??!
Napster + ability to share any file - quality control + heavily Flash-rendered home website - proper software development ethics (get it out of the alpha stage!) = Scour.
There. I finally said it. I'm happy.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Now where am I going to be able to go to get all my gay/xxx/teen/wet/hard/anal needs?