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Napster Bans Non-Native Clients
Anonymous Coward was the first one to write with this tidbit: "Napster is now refusing connections to anyone not running its 2.0 beta 10.3 client. Of course, this stops anyone from using a client not published by Napster. The error message that the Napster server gives you is: "::: server / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com
::: error / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com " The Napster website says: "Beta 10.3 incorporates new file identification technology", and nothing else regarding the matter that I can find. I know most people are using OpenNap and other file sharing services now, but I still like to connect to Napster to get lesser-known (and not banned yet) songs."
The RIAA's attempts to stop online music trading via (as a start) r00ting Napster, are futile. Just move to another file sharing applications. Great eh? OpenNap iMesh Gnutella etc. etc.. Haven't bought a mainstream CD in 3 years - no big loss considering it's all teeniebopper 'label' bullshit. However, I do regularly buy CD's (online) from lesser known bands (which usually produce the best music), which didn't make it with the big guys (companys), because they don't a) Have tits or b) Look 15.
I really need to memorize my password so I can log in at work; maybe someone is still paying attention to this thread and will agree with me enough to give me a Score: 1.
I am starting to think that we would have been better off without Napster to begin with.
I think mp3s--well, I prefer Ogg now--are wonderful, even when restricted to unarguably legal and ethical uses. I love being able put all the songs from my CDs on my hard drive and listen to them without the annoyance of skipping (which even brand new CDs seem to do sometimes, no matter how careful I am with them), or having to change CDs when I have ten CDs that each have maybe two or three songs that I really want to listen to.
And, though probably not legal, I don't think it was necessarily bad when people would get a couple mp3s here and there from their friends, and expose themselves to music they weren't familiar with. I have a few CDs (from people who are now some of my favorite artists) that are a direct result of my first hearing some mp3s given to me by a friend. If it wasn't for the mp3s, I wouldn't have been exposed to those artists, and I don't have enough money to go around buying CDs without knowing ahead of time that I like the music.
Trading mp3 music on this scale benefited people overall. Nobody got hurt; it probably caused more CD sales than it stopped, and it happened on a small enough scale for the record companies to not care. Even when you could download mp3s from various places on the net, it wasn't so bad because it was a pain in the ass like any other form of Warez, so it was restricted to a small subset of the population.
Then Napster came along, and any ditzy wow-AOL-is-so-cool-"I've-got-mail!" 15 year old could download hundreds of tracks with a few clicks. And while I know many people use Napster very moderately, and even use it as a "try-before-you-buy" service, there still are countless people out there who have several CDs worth of unpaid-for music on their hard drives and don't give a crap about how anyone else is affected by it. There are colleges whose bandwidth got sucked up by Napster users, making it difficult for other students to use their Uni's net connection for serious research. Putting aside the ethicality of it, which has been debated enough, my question is: Is that situation what we really want? Do we want it to be so easy to get hundreds of mp3s freely that the possibility of paying for it might not even enter most peoples' minds? (I'm speaking of music published on CDs, BTW, not music from artists who specifically want to distribute their music as mp3s). It is because of this that we have The Big Evil Corporations trying to change music formats in ways that reduce our freedom.
And, because of all this, we (by "we" I'm speaking of the high percentage of Slashdot users who care about "Free" and/or "Open Source" software) look very guilty by association (i.e. from vociferous support of Napster when they fought the RIAA, and now from the many suggestions of alternatives). To the masses, we end up looking just like the Warez kiddiez. Their attitude is sort of like: "They're just the same bunch of criminals, only difference is the software they steal is technically free anyway." But hey, why should we look any different if, along with getting our free stuff for free, many of us still try to illegally get our non-free stuff (e.g. music) for free too? "Sure it's legal that downloaded Linux for free, but even if it wasn't legal you would have done it anyway."
Maybe you don't care what other people think of you; I normally don't care either. But when the 2600 folks go to court in a desparate attempt to defend their rights, and the judge is predispositioned to look upon them as a bunch of criminals, I start to care. When Microsoft can go around and say we're a threat to American society, and the masses listen, I start to care. I think many of you will care when Microsoft releases their "shared source", claims all our GPL'd software is illegal because we could have stolen source from them, and everyone believes them because they already think "those Linux users are just a bunch of free-loading criminals anyway."
Is the easy trade of copyrighted music between people who don't even know each other worth it? Do we want to be associated with that?
Anyway... I do like the possible legal uses of things like Napster, Gnutella, etc. But maybe it's time we start pushing harder for fair and legal solutions that benefit everyone (like micropayments or whatever), instead of putting so much effort into just circumventing the broken solutions that the companies have come up with on our own.
News that Napster had started banning all non Napster clients was greeted with lacklustre response by readers prompting Slashdot to announce they will in future ignore any story submitions with the word Napster in it.
"We'd been planning on doing this for quite some time" CmdrTaco told Slashdot.
"When theres only 5000 users left on Napster they are obviously going to be people whose IE home page is http://www.napster.com, have a 64 x 64 shortcut to napster on their Windows desktop, and have to phone up AOL technical support every time they need to search for a song in order to get the l33t version of the name to type in. These obviously aren't the sort of people who read Slashdot"
When asked "What about the first posters?" CmdrTaco had no reply.
Yes, it stops GNapster, Knapster, nap, webnap...
Hetz (Heunique)
IMHO they are doing a Xerox PARC, snatching defeat from the hands of victory. They had millions of people on their servers, downloading songs, and due to their (and the RIAAs) stupidity and incompetance, now they have a few thousand, and very few songs. Bands in China LOVE napster, and encouraging pirating of songs, except over there they call it "sharing". See, they make money off of concerts, and the more people who listen to your music, the more people will like you. If I'm forced to pay $20 for something I may or may not like, chances are I'm not going to put out the money.
I think you misread his statement. By "them" he was referring not to the company, but to the users. Other than that, I agree with your poste.
fialar
[I've never used Napster, so apply the appropriate amount of salt.]
Assuming anyone gives enough of a damn, how could Napster effectively enforce this? If online-game cheaters can reverse engineer the protocol, despite the best efforts of the games' originators, how is the Napster protocol any different?
The worst that might be called for would be to download the officially-blessed code, root around in it for the key to its digital signature, or perhaps send a hash of a bit of the original binary, and mimic it in your favorite flavor of deprecated client. Napster can't win, they can only get momentary advantages.
I can see how many would consider this more effort than it's worth, but there must be a number of hackers for whom this is just an interesting challenge.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
Yep, AudioGalaxy sure rocks. The featured artists section is good, and has introduced me to a few bands I had never heard of.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
Yes it does. Say hello to OpenNap....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Poorly-thought-out-analogy:
"These radio staions broadcast by airmusic inc. are only avaiilable in a Ford (tm) car, truck, minivan, or suv with a Ford (tm) factory-installed stereo. Want to listen to them? Go buy a Ford."
Seems wrong, somehow...but yes, it's well within their rights to do so.
Hrmm...how long till those of us on a linux/BSD OS can connect up to this? Someone's got to be reverse-engineering ithe protocol...
OTOH, Gnutella is alive and well, despite it's quirks - and Freenet is starting to get usable. =)
I'd definitely agree with this... I've been using it for a couple months now and I can't think of anything I haven't been able to find on there. Even better, it has video and image search just like Scour did plus a couple other categories (documents and software i think).
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Who's to say the filtering isn't being done client-side? It would make sense if the filtering component was small/simple enough to include with each client. Puts all the load of fingerprinting and filtering all the songs on the client, not only reducing the workload of the server but also the bandwidth used between the client and server. I have no idea how exactly they're doing the filtering. But it would certainly make sense to me to do it at the client level...
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
I think someone did... thats why Napster has perpetually been in beta (Beta 10.3? geeezus). at least they've recognized all this time that their software was barely beta quality and honestly kept calling it that, instead of rushing that sub-par quality software out as a "release" version...
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Some people think Shawn Fanning's greatest masterwork was creating Napster; in fact it was getting the hell out of there before it came to this.
what? shawn hasn't left.
Since Napster is taking the big leap, shedding a huge number of users by forcing all of them to download a new client, I'd hope for their sake that they made this the last download its users ever need.
Does this new version have a self-updating feature like Windows RealPlayer and AIM do? As it is, by not putting in such functionality much sooner, they've diminished the value of their one real asset: the size of their user base. If they don't have it this time, they're just pathetic.
Audio galaxy is spyware!!!
--
Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness.
What I'd still like to see is more meta-searching capabilities in clients. Kazaa and MusicCity both seem to be the same software, but different communites (Kazaa found 12 "New Christy Minstrels" songs, Morpheus found 58). Why can't they search one another? What about plugging into OpenNap servers? And what about searching multiple OpenNap servers at once? It's frustrating to have to choose between one or another system, and I'm not about to run a search on Morpheus, then Aimster, then Kazaa, then two or three different OpenNap servers...to say nothing about connecting into one of the many gnutella nets...
Any solutions out there for that?
Yes, Napster can do what it likes with their servers, up to and including actions like this which make the service vastly less useful to their customers, and unusable by anyone using a real OS.[1]
... kind of like, no, exactly what is happening here.
What you imply in your statement (however inadvertantly) is that, because Napster may do what they like with their own servers, their customers should not speak up when they do something those customers don't like. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the key ingredients to a healthy and successful free market is customer awareness, and the ability of consumers, and groups of consumers, to share their experiences and complaints with one another and to find a competing product when the service they are getting is of poor quality, overpriced, or has other drawbacks (environmentally unfriendly, invades ones privacy, whatever).
Consumers informing one another that a particular product or service sucks, and letting each other know about better alternatives
[1](Gratuitious anti-MS Jab as counterpoint to the recent plethora of gratuitious pro-MS Jabs at Free Software): Real Os defined to be one not written or sold by Microsoft.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
According to this story at news.com, this is to comply with RIAA-imposed filtering criteria. They aren't even going to allow older versions of their Napster client, so you know other peoples' are out the door.
Favorite quote: " This means songs that aren't on the record companies' list will have to trickle back into circulation a little at a time as Napster ascertains that they are or aren't on the must-block list." So essentially the RIAA has won the real war here - everything not from the RIAA has been removed and presumed guilty until proven innocent. Maybe Napster was a great exposure space for indie musicians before (personally, I doubt it) but it sure isn't now.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
This will only make fewer people use it.
The three other people who still use Macs are pissed, too.
The company has to ensure it's following the court rulings, and letting any client connect exposes it to the very abuse it's been charged with encouraging.
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
I still use Beta 6 and cannot get on Napster now, but I start up Napigator and choose a server from there, double click and I'm connected. Not being able to get on the Napster network is no great loss, it has been useless for months.
I do all the work. I supply all the bandwidth. And then I pay Napster a fee so that others can download my files? And, for some odd reason... they think we are going to go along with this plan!
Hello and welcome to last week!
I thought we already came to a consensus that Napster was irrelevant?
Blar.
______________________________
rooooar
It's napster's servers.. they can do whatever they want.
I'm not at all sympathetic with Napster Inc., or its client base. They filter my own original non-RIAA music. I use the Ogg Vorbis OpenNap server at 64.71.163.205 to distribute my own music, search for Rick Dicaire.
Someone should remind Napster of the difference between "Beta" and "Production" quality.
The best place I have discovered so far, to download MP3; is audiogalaxy.com. It's web based, You can resume stoped download too. Very easy to use. You can can easily discover new artists too.
If they were going for straightforawrd comparison, your correct.
However, consider this: You can recognise a song, from, say, 10-20 seconds of it?
How?
If the way that _you_ recognise the song (which is indepentant of encoding, bit rate etc), is implemented in a computer, then provided that a human can ID the song, no matter what it is, so can a computer.
The way to do this would be to use some extremely harsh psycho acoustics - like those used in MP3 or Vorbis, but throw away a lot. Given Naptsar is MP3 only, I'd extract the key parts of the song that exist at really low bitrates, and assume that they must be present at all bit rates. Then look for those.
It's difficult, yes. Artifacts are a big issue too, but I beleive it's perfectly possible.
Note that this approach does not inherently use a neural net, but instead attempt to mimic the pathway between the ears and the cereral cortex. This reduces the problem to one asking if two files, of known representation, are similar, a difficult, but known to be soluble, problem.
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Now if i use openNap, do I still need a working napster login? how does this work? thanks LL
31337songtitle.gz.mp3 After download, it will be necessary to transpose the .gz and .mp3 extenders then gunzip the resulting 31337songtitle.mp3.gz. Let's see how the acoustic fingerprint thingy likes that.
First off, you have to get the accounts.txt file right, and that was rather tricky to do for me (for some reason). Probably had to do with failure to read the text file which says how to do it
Secondly, you have to know that their servers are perpetually overloaded, it seems. The end result is that, even though I'm downloading (and can see the file size change), the server will consistently report that my satellite is offline at almost any time I try and use it.
That having been said, it's a great service, and I recommend it. Just pay close attention to the docs, as it's easy to get tripped up.
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Whoop-de-do. Has the demise of napster made a dent in file sharing? Nope. People just use ICQ/AIM or any number of other alternatives. (www.musiccity.com). Rather than have the problem in one, great big centralized location where the record industry could reap a fortune from it, they've thrown water in the oil fire and now it's everywhere. Great long-range thinking, guys.
The fight wasn't about file sharing, anyhow. The music industry makes their money of prepackaged crap that the kiddies buy and the marketting therefrom. They were worried napster could spawn a indy revolution with the illegal file trading as the catalyst, and they brought the smackdown.
What do I care, anyway - I'm CANADIAN, and I can copy music for MY OWN USE, LEGALLY. Hahaha. Go CDR levy. There's one fact the RIAA and napster aren't spreading around.. but they got their little levy.
..don't panic
I stopped using Napster when the most popular song online(and the only one was) was by some band called "No", with their hit single "Matching Files Found!"
This is shameful. Napster should shut itself down while it still has a shred of dignity, before it becomes a free marketing tool for the RIAA.
Some people think Shawn Fanning's greatest masterwork was creating Napster; in fact it was getting the hell out of there before it came to this.
If they really wanted to be careful, they could require periodic cryptographic-based challenges. For instance, the server could require an RSA-computed signature of a random set of bytes (perhaps the concatenation of two contiguous sections of the binary), where the binary contains the encryption key in some obfuscated form, and the server retains the decryption key for verification.
Bypassing that sort of system can be done, but it'd be a bear requiring disassembly of the binary to find out the key, and would require embedding the binary with any workaround -- or, finding some odd proxy-based solution to use the official client to answer, without letting the server know that there are actually *two* clients running.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Even I agree that this is overrated.
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
The error message that the Napster server gives you is: "::: server / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com ::: error / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com"
Actually, this is not true. I just tried it, and the actual error message is:
::: server / Why are you still using this service? Napster officially sucks.
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python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Now wait a minute ...
> Download from multiple sources- not only makes
> things faster, but if one guy you are
> downloading a 600MB divx from loses his
> connection right before you finish, you can just
> get the last 5MB from someone else
This assumes both versions of the downloaded file are identical TO THE BYTE. I don't know about you, but I tend to change the idv1/idv2 tags of mp3s, and rename images / movies when I download them (including CD / DVD / DIVX rips).
Downloading from multiple sources is a good idea in Theory, but unless there's a hash-checksum associated with each file, I think it's just wasted effort.
My preferred Napster substitute is now AudioGalaxy. Works pretty well..have found lots of good tunes I did not find in the last spasmodic months of Napster as a matter of fact...
How well does audiogalaxy's Linux client work. I have had problems getting it to work in the past.
I admit I haven't tried it myself, but it seems it's a P2P with a Windoze AND Linux client. Anyone has tried it?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
AussiePenguin
Melbourne, Australia
ICQ 19255837
Jeremy
Melbourne, Australia
Jabber Australia
A boycott of napster is pretty much redundant at this point. They've managed to drive off most of their customers without any outside help.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Are there any good opennap networks up now? Is anything being done?
Yeah, that annoyed me too... however, there IS help available. I personally use gnapfetch to download OpenNap network lists in formats both Gnapster and TekNap could understand. Of those, I personally prefer the OggVorbis and NecessaryEvil networks... while they are frequently full and take a couple of minutes to get in, actually getting a connection to the servers is usually not a problem (as opposed to other networks) and the selection is fairly decent.
Just my $.02...
Actually, I just read at maccentral that there's a new 1.0b2 client out.
it apparently works. I dumped napster quite some time ago and don't have any desire to try it again.
Are there any good opennap networks up now? Is anything being done?
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
You miss read it. I was meaning to imply Napster was doomed. A clearer sentance would have been, "When getting stuff off Gnutella became easier then getting the same stuff off Napster, you know Napster is a doomed service." Sorry for any confusion.
____________________________
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Let's just face it, your grandaddy's Napster is long gone. Even though most of you refuse to acknowledge it or worse even try to justify it, we all know that most of what we downloaded off of Napster was stuff that we hadn't bought and didn't own the rights to. Now I know some of you went out and bought whatever your downloaded, or were meerly "sampling" the music (whatever the hell that means), but personally I gave up any hope of finding anything once I started having to type in "1337" phrases like "|24d10h34d", "J1/\/\/\/\y h3ndr1X" and "0utk4$t" to get past the filtering software. It was a good while it lasted but I think we can finally declare Napster dead! Actually we could have done when the report about it only having 5000 users sharing 18 gigs of music came out, but the prophecy of Napster being the sacrificial lamb that many of us secretly new it would has come true. I say just cut your losses, and move on to programs like AudioGalaxy, Morpheus, whatever soots your needs. When getting stuff off of the Gnuetella is easier then getting the same stuff off of Napster, you know the program is doomed.
Just my 2 cents, sorry for the cyncism, but we need to face the truth here.
___________________________
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
Of course, this stops anyone from using a client not published by Napster.
Uhm, does this stop GNapster as well? Gotta try this at home...
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Bizar technology?
The reason they're going with the new version and the new way to identify songs is so they can offer more songs on the service again.
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Free Mac Mini
Also, I'm not sure if this is a problem with just this program, but the same has happened with other.. When using bear share and I search for say "Pi Soundtrack" I get results for anything with either of those words rather then the google type of results matching that exactly.
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Free Mac Mini
I'm sure is the RIAA asked Napster to create a "spying client" for them it would be done. It shouldn't be too hard for them to add another client to the "approved" list that the server will accept.= \=\=\=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
Certainly, Napster CAN do this. I haven't seen anyone saying that they can't do this, that it should be illegal, that they should be sued, etc. But just as Napster can do what they want, we can do what we want too. And that includes sitting around bitching about Napster's poor decision making or even organizing a boycott of Napster. No one is questioning their right to make the decision; we're discussing the intelligence (or lack thereof) of the choice.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
If I had moderator points, I'd drop your post just because it's incorrect. On my system I have nothing but Japanese pop music, and songs by my unsigned friend's band. If I log on to Napster, I am allowed to share *0* files.
These new filters don't worth a damn, unless their sole purpose was to filter out *all* music. There is currently 21 gigs being shared right now, and when I went on last night, it was at 12. I think I have more music than that by myself.
Napster's dead, don't even bother. The next time you'll hear anything about them is on fuckedcompany.com.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
This is NOT the same free trading Napster I knwe.
R.I.P. Napster. Have fun RIIA.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Surely there's more to say about this than "oh, just use [insert name of file-sharing program here] to get pirated music." (Yes, Slashdot Language Academy, I know it's not like piracy on the high seas, but lots of words have dissimilar definitions in different contexts.)
That said, I haven't used Napster in a while, but I hope they take an approach that lets artists easily opt to have their works shared. It would be a shame if Napster stopped being a distribution mechanism for artists not signed with a major recording company. Though it wasn't very good for finding artists you'd never heard of, it was good for finding the ones who didn't show up in record stores.
Don't forget 172.16.x.x. Nobody ever seems to use it -- I don't know why
All you'd have to do is record at a different bitrate
Easily thwarted. The algorithm probably only keeps a "telephone/AM quality" (about 24/32 kbps mono) of the audio in question.
or normalize the song differently
Any difference in volume or dynamics processing would be accounted for by the "compress volume" stage of the algorithm. This would be pretty much necessary to account for analog rips.
or change pitches slightly
A large portion of Napster content is rips from vinyl, and the algorithm probably takes slightly varying turntable speeds into account by using a low-pass filter and then autocorrelation to find the bass and beat and then resample based on those frequencies.
Not to mention they'd have to scan the entire song, because of differing file lengths, they couldn't simply grep out a specific "time-slice" of info.
Unless (as with the hash that Napster used to use to find duplicate files) it only scans the first 20 seconds.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Real Os defined to be one not written or sold by Microsoft.
Poor definition:I consider Windows 2000 to be in nearly the same league as the Solaris system on 1- to 4-CPU machines. The biggest thing wrong with it is buggy video drivers (the primary cause for an estimated 50%+ of BSODs), but that applies mainly if you're using it with beta drivers as a game machine, in which case you should be waiting for Super Smash Bros. 2 on Nintendo GAMECUBE instead. "Warning: incoming game!"
Will I retire or break 10K?
The error message that the Napster server gives you is: "::: server / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com ::: error / You must upgrade your client at http://www.napster.com"
you`re saying theres an error in the error?
All the more bandwidth for p0rn! *8-)
http://www.22balmoralroad.net/ http://www.tinynetworks.co.uk/
start using Morpheus or edonkey2000. These networks are a little underpopulated now, but they seem to be gaining userbase. Both support the ability to download one file from many people at the same time, I've seen aggregates of 130k/s downloading from 5 different users. Steal your music just a little bit faster.
Twinkies sure taste good for something that is 68% air.
What I really wonder is if this means that bootlegs will now be resurrected on the napster system, since they are generally not copyrighted by the Record company, but by the artist. Many artists allow bootlegs to be freely distributed. Personally, that's the only reason I used napster in the first place, was for the bootlegs which I couldn't buy in the stores anyway.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Isn't this something like AIM's authentication for the oscar protocol? Many groups (trillian, jabber, gaim) have found ways around that. Is it conceivable to trick the Napster servers in a similar way? Not that anyone who would bother with CVS nightlies hasn't already found a better alternative.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I can confirm that the new client does work, but it only lets me share 5 files. :-/
I might have been willing to pay a subscription fee for unlimited access to legal, high-quality, non-copy-protected downloads from a central server.
But I have absolutely no interest in paying for low-quality copy-protected files. Or in paying for copy-protected DVD-Audio discs, Super Audio CDs, SDMI-watermarked CDs, and CDs into which vendors have introduced defects meant to break CD recorders and computer CD-ROMs.
And I pay for my music. If the proposed service doesn't appeal to me, I can't imagine that it has any appeal to the Napster users whose #1 priority was getting commercial hits for free.
instead of ripping 1 song at a time, rip songs and append them together (2 at a time). 2 isn't too bad from a bandwidth/download perspective; and since the time duration and signature won't match any single song they have on file, I predict it will foil their detection algorithm.
fight fire with fire. if they catch on, then reverse the order of the songs you append as couplets. let them waste their cpu cycles endlessly fingerprinting random couplings of songs.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's Opennap and mIRC for me now.
No more those only search and download clients which don't share anything. Though with napster scaling is not a problem at the moment.
I think he was trying to be funny.. Failed attempt
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Apparently they take random samples of files shared by users. The server requests an acoustic fingerprint for a song shared by a user, your software takes the fingerprint and sends it back (without your control) and the pattern is compared or added to their database.
That means that renaming Metallica songs to "Metalica" wont have any effect since it's using the fingerprint and not the actual file name to ID the song.
As far as I'm concerned Napster has been neutered and it's only good for finding music by non-mainstream bands now. I've actually found a few good songs through their "discover" artists tab, but havent been able to find some songs to sample from a new CD by a band that I actually like.
I'll probably still use Napster to search through occasionally, but it's back to IRC for my normal music downloading. It may not be as pretty but it gets results.
>A routing table does not contain a list of all
:) I keeps the last few thousand search results it forwarded from those addresses in memory, together with a the address where it got the result from. On a push
>the intermediate hops between the address of the
>router and the destination. There is a default
>route and possibly some static routes.
>So unless gnutella creates LOTS of static routes
>in each client, I am not sure how this could
>work.
This is exactly what it does
request it uses that table to look up where to route the push request to. It does not keep the
entire path from the result sender, just the adress of the node that sent us the result. That node has the address of the node it got the result from, etc...
This is why, if you did a search and got 192.x results, you will sometimes get 'push route no longer available', if one of the hosts inbetween gets dropped between the result receiving and your download attempt. This is also why it's often
so difficult to download from them.
Theres a difference between 192.x addresses on internet and on gnutella. On internet they are unroutable (meant for local networks). On gnutella they just mean 'host behind a firewall, don't try to connect'
--
GCP
>The other thing is, with a large number of
>clients (lime wire being the biggest problem)
>will give you results with the sharing IP as a
>10net or 192.168net address.. these are not
>routable on the net, so you can't even get files
>from them.
They are not routable on the net, but they _are_
routable on gnutella via push messages. Those
addresses basically mean that the client is
behind a firewall and cannot accept connections,
but it _can_ send you the file.
If such a client generates a hit on a search and
sends it result back all clients on the path
between that client and the originator of the
search keep routing information for the 10.x or
192.x address.
If the searcher requests the file it generates
a push message that is sent along the path the
hit came from.
The reason why the 10.x or 192.x addresses are so
unreliable is that many old clients handle them
wrong. If one of those is along the path you
will never get the file, but if all clients along
the path are ok, 10.x/192.x addresses work just
as fine as any other.
The reason why you percieve limewire as more
prone to this prolem is that it is less picky
in allowing connections from older clients, and
hence theres more chance that a bad client is
inbetween a limewire client and yours. But there
is nothing wrong with the limewire client itself.
--
GCP
As of 6:01 P.M. PST:
3,602 users sharing 7,693 files, totalling 30 gigabytes.
CLEAR! (Pzzt-thump). CLEAR! "I can't get a pulse anymore, doctor..."
I just took a packet-by-packet look at what the new Napster client is doing (included below).
Summary comments:
It looks like they may be doing some low-level authentication in TCP headers, but not clear. Other than that, the client identifies its version number. All of this is simple enough to fake, perhaps by putting a proxy in between your client and the server. No "scan of your hard drive" is necessary to let you download files.
Will follow-up as I try to get an old client to connect.
-- SESSION ANALYSIS ----------
1st - negotition w/server.napster.com (MTU, etc) [new]
2nd - handoff to server
3rd - awk, negotiation with server
(some serious packet exchange here, looks like data maybe being passed in TCP headers, 'other options')
packet 16: data from client, non-human-readable
packet 17: six 00 bytes from server
packet 18: login and client IDentification (will this alone work???)
packet 19: six 00 bytes " "
packet 20: 'anon@napster.com 993776103' from server
packet 21: no data, from client
packet 22: "intro message" from server -- esp. interesting is "we'll soon be disabling future versions"
packet 23: tcp only packet from client
packet 24: first request from client, ie, "...+FILENAME CONTAINS \"doors"..." (standard Napster protocol)
packet 25: tcp-only from server
packet 26: first part of response stream from server (looks to be standard from here on out, except that the client keeps sending tcp-only packets... pings?... not much place for data in what they're using...)
[I then proceeded to download a file without any other monkey business occurring]
I don't think so, all they had to do was do a search an copy and paste the ip address of the people with matalica mp3's to create a list. Matalica can easily afford to pay someone to do it for them.
In fact, there are still lots of file sharing applications that have not been sued by the RIAA (yet)
Try this list of alternatives
Unless both machines have unroutable IP addresses. My work machine uses 10.0.0.3, but gets masqueraded through a Linux box. As such, it generally can only initiate connections, but it can't receive them. (Presumably, the push message tells such a machine to initiate a connection to the client, to get around this limitation.) Now someone else who's in the same situation wouldn't be able to connect with me, since neither of our machines could be the one to receive a new, incoming connection. As such, it'd be nice if the client (I use limewire) were smart enough to let me filter out all the non-routable IP addresses. I know it can recognize them, as it highlights them in red. But I found nothing in the options that would let me auto-ignore what're more-or-less worthless search results.
<high-level position here>
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
The parent post is not off topic. Shawn Fanning is the founder of Napster. That makes the above post either a poor attempt at humour, or flamebait or a troll.
I personally would consider my post the former, as I am not trolling (defined as:"a provocative posting to a newsgroup intended to produce a large volume of frivolous responses"). I see nothing provocative about my posting, beyond the obvious piss-poor quality of my "humor". Thanks for your time
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
One Ferrari GT, slightly used, under 30,000 miles, runs great. Contact Shawn Fanning at
888-555-1212
wonderboy@corpseofnapster.com
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
Audio Galaxy. http://www.audiogalaxy.com
If they're putting even MORE restrictions on Napster, would hex editing the napster.exe to change the version number of older clients work? I feel they've got enough restrictions as it is already.
I've never gotten it to work. The windows version works fine. And as far as I can tell.. I set it up perfectly... It loads.. Says it sees my MP3s but the website says i'm not running the sattillite...
O well... Gnutella and OpenNap work well enough
-Scott
When all freedom is outlawed only the outlaws have freedom
It also means those on Macs can't connect at all. I just downloaded the latest Mac beta and it still tells me to upgrade. Its a pity that they did not make new clients ore widely available before changing the service. This will only make fewer people use it.
There's one workaround audio fingerprinting that I haven't seen mentioned... Why not make a plugin for Winamp (or your mp3 player of choice) that allows you to resave your mp3 at a *different* pitch? Of course, make that plugin so that it can do two operations, restoring the original pitch (and allowing you to create some interesting effects with nonmodified mp3's) during playback?
That way, you can circumvent the fingerprinting, case in point, if Napster is looking for a ersatz renamed Metallica mp3, it'll be looking for a straight playback pitch, ie, the original audio playback... However one octave off on pitch can and will throw it off... Considering there's conceivably anywhere up to 256 steps one can take the pitch on an audio file, it would take considerable time and effort for them to check each possible pitch variation...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
But that is just phase one of Napster's plan. Phase two is the pay service. Napster has licensed MusicNet's new software to allow paying users to share blessed files (those from labels Napster has bought off, like this week's deal with European labels). The catch is that files will be "limited in quality" and users will be "unable to burn downloads to CD". Basically, the new software which they are beta testing right now shares little to no resemblence to Napster's current software.
The plan is that as soon as the pay service is implemented, the free service (aka what you know as Napster) will dissapear completely. Napster is being reborn as yet another ill-concieved .dot com, right up there with pets.com selling 15 pound bags of dogfood over the internet. Napster's idea is that you will use a proprietary client to share only songs Napster has rights to, you will only be able to download poor quality copies, and you won't be able to burn these to CDs. For this priviledge, they want you to PAY them. Basically, it's no longer a file sharing system, but instead a pay music download site that tricks you into supplying the bandwidth.
Blocking other Napster clients is only the first step. Soon, even their free clients won't work. The "new" pay Napster has little relation to the current Napster. It's a completely different thing.
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
Yes, I'm sure that is the case not that the RIAA have Napster over a barrel. But if Napster had done it right from the start the RIAA wouldn't have had any leverage to force them to do it.
Presumably this also means that custom clients written to track who is sharing what and locate copyright violations will also be unable to connect. Just think - if Napster had forced client authentication from the start, it would have been very difficult for eg Metallica to generate a huge list of everyone sharing their songs.
Oh no! They killed Napster! They bastards! :-(
I guess how opensource napster-clients developers feels now
Of course we can still connect to open-nap servers, but I think it's really time for everyone to move. Audiogalaxy is not opensource, kaaza is even not for Linux, but there is Gnutella, and quite good MojoNation (still not so many files - so please join it!).
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
meant to say: Those are better, the "new blood"
songspy.com
freenet.sourceforge.net
winmx.com
gnutella.wego.com/
those
very good. i said about the same thing a little later (click my user #id) and whatever comment of mine is before this one, "Re: Possible Work Around".
~
Despite what you are saying, it does work and it works great. Maybe most people don't edit thier files like you do, or maybe the program is smart enough to ignore the filename when doing compares, but last couple searches have turned up at least 3-7 copies of identicle files. I don't really care how it works, it just works.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Note past tense.
opennap severs "did" that
Morpheus works now. Who cares if there are linux napster clients, napster servers block them out so it's pretty irrelevent.
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
-Download Music, Images, Video, Whatever
-Good search engine, actually tells you the bitrate on mp3s for example
-Download from multiple sources- not only makes things faster, but if one guy you are downloading a 600MB divx from loses his connection right before you finish, you can just get the last 5MB from someone else
-Yeah it's windows only so far, but wasn't the original napster? Give it some time I'm sure someone will come up with a linux client.
l .h tml
http://www.musiccity.com/en/frameset_web_fl_tea
I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
I would like to know why /. editors seem to think its a crime or a similar atrocity for companines to restrict how you connect to their service?
/. editors need to realize that just as much as you don't like it doesn't mean its wrong. It is THEIR right to offer a product as they see fit, and in doing so that means they can control who can use it and how.
Honestly, why is it wrong to do so? Why not complain about how you receive satellite (oops, thats done here to eh?), cable, electricity, or water?
The
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
And now "average joe" (or my parents) who's "computer buddy" (me) installed Napster will see this and also stop using Napster. Think their user base will shrink by 50% again?
-... ---
The Macintosh client connects, displays this error, but proceeds to stay connected. Looks like they goofed something up. :)
Liberty in your lifetime
Would it be possible to fudge it. Everytime the server asks for a watermark, couldn't you just send the same bogus watermark every time? This would let all of your songs show up on the network. All someone needs to do is figure out the protocol, and go for it.
All of this is academic however, cause napster sucks, and its all about the audiogalaxy.
Captain_Frisk
Wroot
The client identifies itself to the gnutella network by ip address. If the client is able to connect at all, it means that it is able to make some path through the firewall. Normally, the address supplied is used for connecting and downloading directly. However, if the ip is in a reserved range, a push request is sent back along the path the response came from, and a connection is initiated from within the private network.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I haven't had any luck.
"I am on a 192.168.*.* address behind my firewall and I am uploading and downloading files to/from people when using LimeWire."
Since 192.168.x.x does _not_ route, I can only assume that your firewall translates the addresses on the internal network to a routable address. I suspect that from the non-secure side of your firewall, outbound requests do not show the source address as being from the 192.168 network otherwise you would never get any packets back in response...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
"If such a client generates a hit on a search and
sends it result back all clients on the path
between that client and the originator of the
search keep routing information for the 10.x or
192.x address."
Perhaps not...
The key point is that the 10.x.x.x and 192.168.x.x networks are non-routable. If I plugged into a backbone network and used a non-routable source IP, I could transmit packets, but I would not get any back, because the intermediate routers would not know where to direct packets with a destination address that does not route.
A routing table does not contain a list of all the intermediate hops between the address of the router and the destination. There is a default route and possibly some static routes.
So unless gnutella creates LOTS of static routes in each client, I am not sure how this could work.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
My friend and i tried to start bookster to make people smart but we got shut down. Plus it was hard scanning all those pages without mechanization. Also, once we converted the scans to txt, we couldn't find a decent(like james earl jones) txt to speech app to make a mp3 of the book. But it was fun listening to The Lord of the Flies in my car.
You know the Microsoft destroys the night, Linux devides the day...
I mean, IMHO Napster was a company that struck it dead on quite by chance. They never had a clear strategy, never a business plan, never cared a whiff for their "clients". When faced with a lawsuit, they declined to make an issue of "fair use" and fight on those terms. They chose the lame avenue of procrastinating, feet shuffling and finger-pointing that could do nobody no good. They were never champions of anything, really.
Now they see the boat sinking, and resort to the AOL-games of "change-my-client". That's, of course, not for complying with the court order, as has been suggested here. The filtering is all server-side. Well, it's their servers, but they would be better off, IMHO, trying to develop a better client themselves and adding some value to the service, before it's too late and they are sunk for good.
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
the reason they want you to update is because they are now only blocking files they have been told to block with the new client. so actually there are more files online now than there were
of course, no one really uses napster anymore, so its sort of moot and definately overdue.
-
sean
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
www.kazaa.com is a great place to find your illegal mp3's. Disable your cookies and you don't even need to download their software (Win only sucks). :)
Here's the secret to immortality:
Gnutella is way better, AND has a native linux browser. its file sharing, not just music sharing.
http://www.gnutelliums.com
-==-
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
2 login [CLIENT] Format: "" [ ] and 4 version check [CLIENT] Format: I'd imagine those commands could be sent with the same client version info as that of 10.3. Unless of course they drop you if you don't send fingerprint info. Silly Napster.
...isn't there a way to make the client's version response be what the server wants sit to be if you're running an open source client?
---
------
Sig
"but I still like to connect to Napster to get lesser-known (and not banned yet) songs."
Is it really that good that obvious criminals are the ones that posts stories?
no you dont... audio galaxy yes just another temp. solution but it works..
FIND ZEEE MONKEY MANGO BEFORE HE TAKES OVER THE WORLD
I think what we need now that all the different MP3-searching (and other files like video) systems are booming, why not make something like a portal to all of them (like jabber is a portal to all the IM servers)? It should be modular so it was easy to add more server-protocols.
The all do approximately the same thing anyway... why not make them all accessible at once!?
Find nice cocktail recipes @ www.spitzy.net
Well, it's finally happened. They will be restricting Napster soo severly that it will hearald in the slow painful death of an old friend. All you whiny, purest, morality pushers have been complaining that file sharing was taking the food out of the mouths of music artists everywhere. Well, I hope you're happy now. It is obvious that Napster is now in it's death throws. With so many other file sharing progs on the market, no one with half a brain will ever wish to use Napster again. And what did all that whining accomplish? Did it make musicians more money? Will it promote new music in a very competitive bussiness? Will it enchourage aspiring poets to join the music industry? NO!! In reality, it just helped to supress further revenue by eliminating another source of music promotion. We tried to tell you. ?You didn't want to listen. File sharing has worked for years to promote software and computer related products. It only makes sence, it would do the same for digital music. But has it stopped the exchange of free music? No again. It only pushed us to find other ~~~ non-regulated sources of free music. So Metallica, sorry 'bout your luck. But you'll be recieving no more exposure from Nappy. I hear they are hiring at McDonalds. And by the way. For those who still believe in file sharing ~~~ www.imesh.com and www.bearshare.com are two excelent file sharing progs if you can convince your conscience to use them. Download safely and download often. Happy listening. Dean
Hey guys, paraphrased from frequent posts: "I am only interested in artists that are into the mp3 thing" We work with many artists to capture very high recordings of their performances and then share resulting revenues with them. Much is given away as free samples, but the simple fact is that these artists need to make money in some form. There career is to write and perform their music. What are some thoughts on the best way to spread their music, but still pay the bills and be able to put aside some money for their family/kids/future.. Are people willing to pay some money if a large percentage of the proceeds goes to the Artist? If so how much would you pay for a high-quality (24-32 Tracks, 24-bit done with great mic-pre's) recording. As everything is recorded direct to hard-drive, we can release it in any format desired, CD-R, CD-ROM, mp3, shn, even individual waves of each instrument for mixing at home! However, there has to be some money flowing back to pay for the recordings. What a paid Napster-like solution does is provide one flow of money, if they come up with an Artist Fair deal. Another alternative would be "Sierra Nevada Pale Ale brings you Leftover Salmon" embedded into the file. So that it's up for free trade, but at time of download/first playback needs to be exposed to some ad, at least 1 time. Definitely not my first choice, either. There is a sh*tload of very cool stuff that can happen, but the view of "Music should be free" will lead to a world of SuperStars, Commercial bands and then a lot of struggling, very talented artists who have to take dayjobs and sink into depression. So I feel the best scenario for all would be a band allows trading of their music, but that they have some say in what is free and what is "premium" that they get paid for. By the way, we are thinking $6 for a full 2 1/2 hour show in CD quality (or better!). Any other thoughts? MusicBadger