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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."
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, 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
It's napster's servers.. they can do whatever they want.
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!"
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.
---
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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...
Last time I logged in:
231,995 users online, sharing 20,357,000 files (91,722.0 GB).
I've been using it for a few weeks now, and while it has problems and little annoyances, it's by far the best P2P client I've found (for Windows only though).
-- b0rk.
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.
>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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
songspy.com
freenet.sourceforge.net
winmx.com
gnutella.wego.com/
those
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
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). :)
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