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.

Comments

Sounds to me . . .

[Anonynnous Coward]

. . . more like a convenient way to claim a third party was threatening their existence than to admit that a central server based, closed authentication system was very vulnerable to legal attacks, as the *AA have demonstrated to them.

This move to Gnutella allows them to survive and to purport to offer a distinct file sharing product. Perhaps this will lead to some enhancements that make it back to Gnutella, since without the central login servers, they have no reason to repeat their forcing out of open source clients.

Gnutella + bandwidth aggregation = good.

What about the others?

[Cirvam]

What about the other programs that use the FastTrack network? They all look the same, and aside from using a diffrent plugin for the ads, I would thing that the networking protocol would be similer so this could affect them also.

Also can anyone confirm that it does change the registry settings? Seems kinda farfetched even for just a file sharing program unless there were huge undisclosed security holes.

Re:What about the others?

[uebernewby]

According to the Morpheus press release, the DOS attack targeted their ad servers, not the FastTrack network itself.

Not good for other FastTrack clients

[Constrain_Me]

Stating the obvious Having the userbase from Morpheus off FastTrack will cut the ammout of files available to oter FastTrack clients like KaZaa, thus decreasing their popularity, and possibly forcing them to move to a new network. If Gnutella scales well, it would be a good thing, if it doesn't...

Re:Gnucleus...

[jamesbarlow]

The thing is, at any given moment, you have about 600,000 users connected to the Morpheus network. And they were averaging about a million downloads a week.

So, whatever protocol Morpheus decides to use will suddenly have millions of people on it.

I like the gnutella network, and in fact I really like how in accessing it, Morpheus is using its 'supernode' technology (only computers that meet certain speed/connection requirements become nodes). Searches are faster, because you're not waiting on someone with a 56k dialup to process your search request before he passes it on. (by the way, I hear that BearShare is going to, or has already started, implementing this same idea to help stabalize the gnutella network)

But my main point is this: whatever network Morpheus decides to use, be it fast track, gnutella, something else, or a combination, there will instantly be a large amount of shared files on said network.

So, in my interest of finding the maximum number of DivX movies possible, I think I'll probably stick with Morpheus for the time being.

I do hate the damn popus, though.

Re:Gnutella?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, *sooner* or later.

Guess what? Most people use Windows and Mac, and while I am a techno-savvy fellow, I have no desire to download a source package and compile it at 11:07AM on a Saturday morning.

This whole business of "The binaries are out of date... Use CVS!" is utter bunk.

You instantly destroy your userbase by denying access to anyone who doesn't use their machine for development (which is admittedly a small segment of the *NUX world). This is a HUGE segment of the Windows world.

You want to supplant the big boys? Offer some real competition.

E-Mail for Kazaa

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

info@kazaa.net

press@kazaa.net

If you haven't read any other comments or articles, Kazaa is responsible for taking Morpheus off the network they shared through some sort of semi-viral attack. Let them know how you feel.

Now what?

[ImaLamer]

Now what do I do with these gig's of files that I was downloading before the network went offline.

Seriously gigs of Bang Bus.