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Morpheus DOS'd and Moving to Gnutella
wackysootroom writes "According to a message from the CEO of Music City, a group of individuals has launched a DOS attack and tampered with the morpheus network in order to disallow logons to the FastTrack P2P filesharing network through the client.
According to the CEO's note, the hack involves changing registry settings on the client's machine (ouch) and rerouting the messages destined for their ad servers.
The good news in all of this is that morpheus will be giving up the proprietary FastTrack network for a Gnutella based filsharing system." It's
an icky framed page and you have to click through to read the really interesting
parts, but it looks to be true. Wonder how Gnutella will handle the growth
spike.
For the many people (myself included) who are now looking for a different FastTrack client check out this execellent page on how to install Grokster without spyware.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Click here for the unframed version. After a very brief introduction, the main story is here.
Better still, Gnuclues doesn't have banner adverts, let alone (ick) popups.
rooooar
I got the new Morpehus client and it does seem to be a less "polished" client (proabably as it is a knocked off version of Gnutella shipped out in a hurry). The system seems quite good (as I have not used Gnutella much) but I think it will take a few days for traffic to pick up to its usual levels. The UI needs to be changed a wee bit as it is slightly confusing. I'm sure multi-source downloads are in (although you can't tell what each source is doing like before) but I'm not sure if their supernode feature is still there. They need the quick filter system in where you can select what media to search for (e.g. music, video, documents).
One thing that is lacking in Gnutella is metadata - when downloading songs you can't tell how long they are, what album they are from (important when there are many different versions of a song - radio/street/2 step edits etc.), and comments about this. Hopefully this can be added to a new spec of the Gnutella network so all companies using the standard can have a common format.
I think this will be good for p2p and gnutella: an open standard, which will (hopefully) become better over time. If musiccity really GPLs their work with Gnucleus, everyone should be a winner.
I just tried the new version... Morpheus Preview Edition is basically an old version of the GPL'ed program Gnucleus. When you install it even displays the GPL as the click-through license.
They're however not providing the source, not yet at least. The Gnucleus developers claim that Morpheus didn't even bother contacting them before doing this.
I believe that Morpheus is telling the truth, since my personal experiences back them up. I will ramble now:
Okay, silly man that I am, I had both Morpheus and Kazaa installed on my machine (even though, until recently, they were exactly the same.)
So, last week, Kazaa, which is what I ordinarily used since I have a sick attraction to the color yellow, stops working well. The number of hits I get for searches drops by about a quarter, when I search successfully at all; for some reason I keep getting booted from the network and having to reconnect. "That's odd" I say to myself. Also, it proceeds to ignore the "maximum uploads" setting in my preferences, which I keep low so that other broadband users can get my files in reasonable time. Personally, I suspect that Kazaa installed some "upgrades" for itself without prompting me (or I clicked through the prompt without noticing, always a possibility); I should probably check timestamps and see. I have it set to prompt before auto-updates, but since it's ignoring some of my preferences I don't know how much I trust that.
Out of curiosity, I start Morpheus; and I get the message about being unable to connect to the network. So, Morpheus' failure to connect seems to coincide with Kazaa's service collapse - which is exactly what I'd expect given that 90% of the users within four hops of me (New York City) use Morpheus instead of Kazaa.
Now, I don't know about these DOS attacks / advertisement hacks. I tried to connect to Morpheus several times during this period, and none of my regsitry keys have been fiddled with, at least as far as I can tell. Ad-aware doesn't find anything wrong.
Okay, back to the conspiracy theory. I assume that the Aussie company that bought Kazaa is trying to crowd Morpheus out. While you and I know this is stupid, to them this must make sense; they think they can get all of Morpheus' old users to switch to Kazaa, boosting their add revenues.
Given this sort of despicable behavior on their part, I am willing to give Morpheus' the benefit of the doubt: the implication of Morpheus' comments is that someone involved in the Kazaa stack - that is to say, this Australian company that bought Kazaa - is behind whatever attacks occured.
Personally, I want to see the contract that Morpheus entered into with Kazaa for use of their network/software.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
It's doing fine so far.
If you go to the limewire site, click on the "network size" menu option and than the "historical", you will get a nice graph of the gnutella network size. You will notice two significant increases in network size over the past few months.
The first one occured when limewire released their 2.0 client with super peer functionality. Essentially this eliminated most of the scalability issues. The second little bump occured when morpheus released their gnutella client yesterday.
Right now the graph indicates over 200K nodes in the network. I'm connected to it using the limewire client. I consider this to be one of the best gnutella GUIs but luckily there's plenty of alternatives for those who don't like it.
Two notable features are missing however (also in the new morpheus client): Browsing someone else's files (like napster used to be able to do, morpheus consistently crashed if I tried to use this feature) and displaying/searching meta information (like album or song name).
The first feature would require a change to the protocol. Limewire tried to implement it using download slots but generally there are not enough available for this to work. The second feature requires some standard way of handling queries (right now it is unspecified what a gnutella client should do with a query).
Jilles
I agree completely. I've attempted to use Gnutella before, with many other clients, and all I've ever met with was frustration with the network. I mean, really, my average download speed was about 3K/sec. Looks like I'll have to figure out a way to use KaZaa without them spying on me.
> the Gnutella network appears to just be an all
> around poor method of sharing files
One thing I don't think people understand is that gnutella is basically just a search mechanism with a P2P transfer afterward. Once your search is complete and you begin your download, the transfer rate depends on the upload bandwidth of other person's computer. Download speed has LITTLE to do with the program you are running.
Also, I think trying to use gnutella over a modem is relatively painful, because of the lack of bandwidth. When using a 56K modem, downloads go about half the speed because the gnutella protocol takes 1 or 2 kbps. When using DSL, the bandwidth used by the gnutella protocol is almost negligable.
As of a month or two ago, I've now downloaded more material from the gnutella network than I ever did from Napster. Napster functioned better, I agree, but Bearshare/Limewire/etc. all get the job done quite well.
Try this page
What's really happening (probably).
I was one of the people who installed kazaa, and after readnig that, it is getting immediately uninstalled.
Joseph?
The released it, here it is:
http://start.musiccity.com/source/mpesrc1.zip
I highly recommend Xolox to anyone that can run Windows applications and uses GNUtella (haven't tried using it with Wine yet, could work). Xolox supports swarming, segmented downloading, resuming, automatic mirror searching, etc...
Xolox makes GNUtella useful! Trust me, you will find what you are looking for with Xolox, and you will be able to download it very quickly. Other clients lack swarming, which causes downloads to be a slow unreliable gamble, but with swarming, when you select to download a file, Xolox automatically searches for other peers that are sharing the same file - then Xolox downloads parts of the file concurrently from several peers. This allows for you to get maximum use of your broadband net connection. Furthermore, if you are downloading a file, and for some reason all of the peers that you were downloading from disconnect, Xolox searches for new peers with the file and resume the download were it left off. All of this is automatic, transparent, and very user-friendly.
While the company that made Xolox went under due to legal issues, a cracked version is available from the popular P2P site Zeropaid. Check it out! It's free, and it's useful.
How exactly is this good news? Have you used the Gnutella network recently? The larger it gets, the more it sucks. It does not scale well at all. Gnutella often sucks down more of my bandwidth just dealing with other peoples' searches than it does downloading the files I want. And finding the files I want is another matter altogether -- even if I do find a file named "Funk Soul Brother.mp3", I have absolutely no way of knowing whether it's really Fatboy Slim or just some renamed Enya track.
I love the FastTrack network, proprietary or not. It's got all the good bits of Gnutella without most of the bad bits. My bandwidth isn't sucked up by searches, and I can almost always find exactly what I want with one search. Furthermore, the amount of information it gives me on each file enables me to be pretty certain that I'm getting what I want before I start downloading it.
I think this is sad. I liked Morpheus. Now I'll be switching to Kazaa. Oh well.