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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.
This is just stupid. You would think that Morpheus is something hackers like, being a gateway to all kinds of illicit things. Instead, they are doing the equivalent of vandalizing their own house. Stupid kids.
As a longtime Gnugella user, I will be happy to see Morpheus users join the network. Per Metcalfe's law, this should make our network much more valuable. The past few revisions of the Limewire client in particular have made the service much more responsive. Although the experience has not yet surpassed Napster's brightest hour, given a few more months there will be no reason for that original fileshareing service to return. The limewire folks have even opensourced their client. Now, if only half the people reading this comment could pitch in...
"...What is good for General Motors is good for America." -Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense and fmr President of GM
"This unprovoked attack is being carefully investigated, as it appears that federal laws may have been violated. We are still attempting to discover who would want to eliminate the community of millions of consumers who are using the Morpheus software product to connect with other users around the world."
the RIAA anyone?
interesting that prior to this teir start page was
assuring users that "rumours" of a security hole in Morpehus was false. appaerntly it allowed others to change your registry settings...
I don't think that Morpheus is telling the whole story.
Last week they wrote something like, "one of our software providers made updates without telling us that made Morpheus software unable to connect to the network."
It sounds to me like FastTrack upgraded protocol versions, or something?
I don't see why Morpheus would voluntarily move to gnutella, since gnutella is quite inferior and their new software is pretty crummy. I've been looking around their forums and everything, but I can't seem to figure out what's actually going on. Anyone know any more info?
The benifits to using gnutella vs fasttrack are what?
Gnutella is non-proprietary. That's it.
Gnutella in order to be faster would have to be more centralized.
This can easily be done, you just have to make sure that more people use software like Clip2 Reflector that makes Gnutella more scaleable. I could easily see Morpheus creating there own version of Reflector that's bolted onto a Gnutella client so that unsuspecting broadband users will turn their computers into "superpeers".
I dont know, i like decentralized technology but Gnutella is horrible, theres no security (or maybe they finally fixed this?) meaning anyone can see your IP.
If you're worried about this, use FreeNet.
Its slow as hell, the design makes it difficult if not impossible to scale.
Much of the scalability problems of gnutella have been solved- it's just that not enough people are running gnutella software with these improvements. Since Morpheus has such a large user base, they could easily dump software with more advanced capabilities onto the unbathed masses, making the gnutellanet bigger and faster. Better yet, if their using GPL'd software as their initial codebase, the improvements that they implement will be given back to the community so that an intrepid group of coders can remove any adware or spyware "features".
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
So, the short answer to your question is that it's because gift doesn't work anymore. :(
________________________________________________
suwain_2
MusicCity used Sharman's network and was recently locked out for some reason. One has to wonder why.
Like most others here, I'm very curious about what really happened to Streamcast's Morpheus network. But in practical terms, I settled for trying for the new "Preview Edition". The Musiccity web site last night said that it would be available "in two hours" and indeed after that page was unchanged for more than two hours, the new edition was on Download.com. I had been thinking about rebooting into Linux but this gave me another reason to stay in Windows. That and my kids' wanting to play more Jimmy Neutron this morning.... The new client is really Gnucleus -- if you mouse over the "M" logo in the Tray, that's what it shows. The client is much more primitive than the old FastTrack one. It doesn't include an integral player, so you can't listen to files as they upload, unless maybe you have WinAmp or something running. It gives no clue about who the other end of a file is, so you can't choose one that's more likely to work, and it doesn't report the MP3 bit rate or ID3 info that you can usually see inside the FastTrack client. The failure rate is high -- most attempts to download just quit after ten seconds, though some wait and Retry and a few actually work. FastTrack was much more reliable in that regard. It also keeps popping up Internet Exploder windows. That's really annoying; I rarely use IE (only for "IE only" sites). It's mostly ads, I'm sure, but the current popups don't even work, causing another annoying distraction. Being Gnutella based, it probably has scaling problems. I'm on a broadband link, which helps, but I know about the basic math problem with Gnutella's original architecture and I don't know what has been done to fix it, in Gnucleus, Limewire or whatever. Again, FastTrack worked really well, and I hope they can merge its best concepts with Gnutella. I realize they had to get this out in a hurry. It's only a "Preview" so it shouldn't be viewed as a finished product. But it does weaken the competitive position of Morpheus.
from news.zdnet.co.uk, October 2001: "A copy of the legislation proposed by the RIAA last week would appear to have given the group broad latitude to attack file-swappers' computers without suffering any civil liability. No civil liability would result from "any impairment of the availability of data, a program, a system or information, resulting from measures taken by an owner of copyright," the proposed text read. " Speaking of hacking a computer's registry...
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
ahhh, but does it run on Linux???
From the technology section of the FAQ:
Q: Why is it better than other distributed networks such as Gnutella?
A: With Gnutella and similar networks, all connected computers acts as search servers on the networks. When a search query is initiated, it is sent to 2 to 4 other computers, which in turn passes the query to more computers, and so on. Effectively, each search query traverses the entire network. This creates a huge amount of traffic. Clients on slower connections (such as modem dial-ups) cannot keep up with this amount of traffic, which slows down the entire search process.
Seriously, I'm a fan of Morpheus, I just thought this was kinda finny...
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
The Morpheus folks have just redone a few interface elements in Gnucleus and called it their own. They didn't even have the brains to change all the dialog boxes with "Gnucleus" in them. I was just playing around and got a message telling me to restart Gnucleus for the settings to take effect. Odd, i was in "Morpheus's" client. It also uses all the settings i had in Gnucleus proir to installing this "new" client.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
I'm not sure it really bothers me that they were using a proprietary network protocol on Morpheus. Having used both Morpheus and Limewire I found Morpheus was significantly faster.
I'm not some Anti-Java Troll either, I believe the difference was in the network protocol and search efficiency.
This isn't to say Limewire was bad though, and with the Sun JVM 1.4 the mousewheel works right on Win32 systems (at last). So farewell Morpheus, I guess?
So here I am, all inquisitive and stuff, and looking at a result of the "strings Morpheus.exe" command (v1.3.3 of Morpheus). Guess what I see?
"PeX (c) by bart^CrackPl beta release"
Naughty naughty Fastrack people.
This page is the best info I can find on "PeX". The zip you can download looks like it's a cracked verison of something.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
Catch this link. This article caught the possibility of all this a couple of days ago.
The hacked-in ad server is "ads.riaa.org"
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
First off they have spyware anyway.
Second off it seems that they utilized the nature of the fasttrack network to basically kick all Morpheus users off and try and make them switch to Kazaa. Rat bastards.
Personally I think instead of switching to Gnutella Morpheus should have come out with a new version that isn't affected by the attack from Kazaa, and fucks over Kazaa clients too.
They could have got into a war coming out with new versions that would screw over the other company's client.
But I guess they didn't want a fight so they're leaving the FastTrack network.
Personally I wonder what the creators of the FastTrack network have to do with this...
Anyway, don't use Kazaa. Spyware, and DOS attack.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.