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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 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's up with this?
a couple of months ago the rebol site announced
that version 2.0 of morpheus would be based
on their language and i thought it was very interesting
and i have seen no one mention it since!..
it's still on rebol.com's homepage..
/// evilloop.com
... by making it a DDoS! You know, because DDoS just *looks* better than DoS. :p
Do you like German cars?
who writes like this?? was it gross and cootie-filled too?
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.
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.
So who thinks this was done by the RIAA? ;)
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
but is gnutella really better ? ymmv , but my experience has been that its far from effective....in getting requested relevant info
also iirc gnutella hsa `viral nodes` which can be injected into the network...wonder how that will affect the scenario here
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.
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
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...
I'm a little confused. Are they saying that the morpheus client allowed a 3rd party access to my registry settings?
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
rooooar
I'm a gnu/linux user that used to use windows. One thing I missed very much from windows was the ability to run Morpheus. I had to use my brothers windows pc to use Morpheus if what I wanted wasn't available to gnutella.
I've already noticed that there is more traffic in gnutella through the Limewire client. This could be the end for all proprietary file-sharing protocols including Napster.
Good riddance!
"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...
Stop being a bunch of doubting Thomases. Gnutella works. Those who don't contribute, doubt. Ritter's been discounted numerously, so don't bother bootstrapping from that.
Gene
Being able to type in an album and having the search find all the songs, download it automatically, organize them into folders and create a playlist.
Automation is the key. If this process could be stored as a command of some sort and sent to other peoples computers so that when you log off or shut off your machine the computers can search for and find all the files while your computer is off,then the location of the files be sent to you when your computer is turned on again.
I think rebol sounds interesting, Scripting sounds cool, i think automation is something that would take file sharing to the next level.
Not just automation, but perhaps an ability to use AI to figure out the type of music a user likes and doesnt like, and somehow use this improve search results for the music the user likes.
Like connecting to a network of all techno because the user downloads mostly techno, and have hundreds of little subnetworks created based on the music files people have on their computers.
so if you have mostly techno you connect to a group of techno networks, if you have mostly rap you connect to mostly rap networks.
Small networks of say, a few thousand users each while they may be somewhat centralized in nature, if theres enough of these networks its not like anyone would be able to stop it, and it wouldnt be morphues hosting it, it would be the users themselves.
maybw almost like direct connect or hotline, but your connection to these networks would be based on what you search for usually. If you search for many diffrent types of music you'll connect to some general network.
Music companies who would try to check up on whats on the network would most likely search from as wide a range as possible using some program or script, and would connect to a general network.
I dont know its just an idea and i have no idea how to technically do it, but something similar to how winMX works, using AI to discover the servers based on what users like, the discovery process would be whats automated
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
...but I was never able to actually try it: it wouldn't work through my firewall, and I couldn't ever find any doc on just what holes to open up.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
I like gnutella, but the problem with gnutella is the relative lack of people actually using it. Compare the, what, 5,000? 7,000? hosts normally connected to gnutella to the 600,000 hosts normally connected to Morpheus/Kazaa/??. The much-lower number of users means a much lower number of files available.
I tended to fire up Win4Lin and use Morpheus, simply to have access to the greater file selection available on that network. If Music City is able to move their Morpheus users over to Gnutella, I won't have to worry about that any more. Even if only 40,000-50,000 people move over, that still dramatically increases the number and types of files available via gnutella.
And we won't have to use a crappy Windows Morpheus client. Qtella will instantly gain access to those files.
If the gnutella network can handle the load, it sounds like a win-win situtation to me!
--- Biffster.org
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
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.
While I don`t know much about the Gnutella network, I`m certain of one thing; this will cause a content split. Ok, it won`t be the great cataclysm, but it`s sure to make things a bit harder to find.
;)
Think about it, how many people are going to be running both clients? Spyware aside (you can disable all the Kazaa junk with a few dll wipes & registry play), both the FastTrack & Gnutella networks will end up with less content, at least for a while. I'm sure only the very determined will bother running both clients, meaning things will be a touch harder to find.
If you look at it even now, FastTrack seems to have put up with a swamping of new users, but 1 out of 3 people aren't sharing (sitting behind a firewall? yea right..). I'm certain Morpheus isn't going to get a lot of it's defected client base back, mostly the net newbies I'd imagine, which will leave Morph' on Gnutella with it's only problems with file availability.
I don't know, it's hard to say anything for certain; let's see how the Gnutella network handles the extra load. As long as I can find my pr0^H^H^H educational videos somewhere, I'll be happy
I am BelDion's
According to their previous press release back in December, they were planning to merge the FastTrack and Gnutella network somehow in their 2.0 release.
The best decentralized file sharing ive used is WinMX also known as openNAP or Napigator.
Making a program which works like this, but using an automated way to generate subnetworks instead of having users create them.
Imagine connecting to a general network.
Once you connect you search for MUSIC.
This connects you to a general music network.
You dont search for just music but jazz music.
This connects you to a group of other people who also search for and have alot of jazz music on their computer. So you connect to the jazz nodes.
By breaking networks up into groups, just like in the real world people with the same interests, they form cliques, clubs, groups, a network in my opinon would be best if using AI it created networks and subnetworks within them based on what groups of users like.
You like jazz, rock and rap, and this is what the majority of your files are, this can be calculated via fuzzy logic that you like mostly these 3 types off music, so you become part of one of, or all of these 3 networks. The AI also watches for what you search for alot, and connects you to networks based on that. Because you dont really know what networks you are connecting to it seems very decentralized.
Gnutallas problem is it connects everyone to everyone, perhaps creating small groups, and then connecting these small groups to each other would be best.
The person with the fastest connections will help in hosting the lists of nodes on a subnetwork.
The company, simply has to connect people to the main networks such as Jazz, Rap, Rock from which the subnetworks get formed by the users, and leeches connect to the subnetwork host nodes.
I dont know if this would work, its not like i tested it, but hotline does something similar just not in a very good way.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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?
I've been message board hopping, and to tell you the truth, I'm not sure the Gnutella network needs to worry about a usage spike.
Almost all of the messages I saw posted were complaints about the new Morpheus ranging from "All of my downloads are ass slow!" and "I can't connect to any servers? What's a node?" to "This piece of shit won't even install".
Most people on almost every message board I saw had a negative comment for the new Morpheus. Hell, I didn't see a single positive one. Most people were planning on migrating to Kazaa, and this was a group of tech-savvy people who know about the spyware in Kazaa.
It's too bad this had to happen to Morpheus, because the Gnutella network appears to just be an all around poor method of sharing files. Sure, flame me. The ideology behind it is fine, but it's execution is less than stellar.
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
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.
MusicCity used Sharman's network and was recently locked out for some reason. One has to wonder why.
I have a broadband connection; with one, gnutella rocks! [grin] But without one, gnutella is still usable. I had to go a month without DSL after FirstWorld shut down their home DSL service. I still used gnutella, and was still able to get the files I wanted. True, downloads took FOREVER. But that is the price one pays for connecting via dialup.
Gnutella is an open standard; numerous clients exist for the network, including a number of native Linux clients. This provides a more diverse network and, theoretically, a larger amount of shared data.
I do agree that AudioGalaxy's design rocks. I would love to see a p2p network using AG's architecture. One that didn't limit people to only sharing MP3 files.
--- Biffster.org
"Bite my shiny metal ass."
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.
Off had I would suspect chaos agents of the music industry, who have been doing things the wrong way for a long time.
But this is just idle, unfounded speculation
Right.
Since it appears that the attack on your computers came from the closed proprietary FastTrack-Kazaa software, we have opted not to continue with this p2p kernel.
Which is just as well. I do note this article in newsbytes, and wonder if someone got an inside edge to fasttrack someplace.
cloak and dagger operations indeed.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
If you download Morpheus v3.3.3.1 (the new version) then you might notice that it now runs off the GPL license! Morpheus is now opensource! The doc legal.txt says that the source code is available from their site but there is no link up there yet, the only way to obtain the source code so far is to follow the little link that says sourcecode in the mainpage of morpheus when it boots up.
http://www.nu-vision.org
As I write this, I am connected using Morpheus v1.3.3 and am downloading a file from another MusicCity member. Anyone know why this is? I had no internet access for about the last week so I missed all this Morpheus madness, and now that I am back (albeit on dial-up) it seems slower (naturally) but otherwise it's all right. Even so, I'm downloading Gnucleus.
What no one seems to mention yet is that the new searching is bad. I left Bearshare and gnutella because I couldn't do searches on a specific type without having to manually filter them each time. As well, the fasttrack clients give a lot more information, per-user searching (for searching the high-bw users), it appears better shotgunning and restarting, etc. Everyone switched to morpheus for one reason - they hated gnutella! How is THAT going to change with this move? Someone should just make an installer to install a spyware-free version of grokster so that the masses can use it freely, then we'll see how many people flip. As well, dealing with all MC's outright lies about security - first there wasn't a prblem, now there is - and their ripoffs of clients in general makes me wonder about throwing support behind them.
Moderate that post up!
:). All credit due to the guy I'm responding to.
Just in case no-one does moderate him up, I'm reposting his link with my bonus. I can't be whoring because I'm capped
Excellent journalism here.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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!
MCs denial of any security -however embarrassing denial may not be as synical as it seems. As I understand it, the hole was part of te spyware - not the morpheus client. Spyware by its very nature is the most commece driven and secretive section of the software industry. It is within reason to suggest that FastTrack left musiccity in the dark. I tried Gnuttella when napster died -It was lame on my Shitish Telecom 56k line - but frankly so was napster and morpheus. As networks and software advances, things can only get better - A decentralised GPL client is the only way to go, that was apparant after napster its the only model tha wont crack under legal pressure. PS -I think it was the RIAA
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
I've been using WinMX for a long time and personally prefer it over Morpheus, but it never seems to get mentioned as an alternative. I often am searching for semi-obscure stuff that Morpheus cant find. Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, anyone?..
One thing that rankles me is MusicCity's absolute failure to give props to Swabby for developing the software they're using. It seems to me that they don't play well with others. On the bright side, the gnutella network has more than doubled in size so far today! (http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/size) One point that has gone unnoticed in this discussion is that fasttrack had limited file transfers to 128kpbs MP3 files. Because gnutell does not supply metadata, files of greater quality will now be available, (although people should really be migrating to ogg's by now).
I downloaded Kazaa during this whole fiasco. It feels the same as Morpheus, but doesn't seem to run as well. Searches take FOREVER and the results were pathetic. All this while it was reporting on average of 200k more users being connected to the network. I launched it 3 times and not once was I happy with it. Morpheus just seemed more polished than the Kazaa client.
:(
As for everyone crying about the pop up ads, stop crying because I have the solution!
Simply load up IE, goto TOOLS -> INTERNET OPTIONS -> SECURITY -> RESTRICTED SITES and add http://ads.musiccity.com as a restricted site. You will no longer see ads or get pop ups in Morpheus.
I'm not sure if I want to try the latest incarnation of Morpheus, it doesn't sound very appealing. I guess it's time to uninstall Morpheus and Kazaa and give WinMX or Audio Galaxy another shot
/.
If this page is at all correct, MusicCity are lying through their teeth.
Apparently the FastTrack protocol was upgraded a little more than two weeks ago. A grace period of two weeks was given, to allow users to upgrade their clients. Remember what the Morpheus requester said? "Your program is to old to connect the network."
Grokster, the third (and smallest) FastTrack licensee upgraded their client, Morpheus for some unimaginable reason did not.
Apparently this is a question of politics... Kazaa/FastTrack and Morpheus have had some sort of falling out. Morpheus have long been working on their 2.0 version. Gnucleus say that they have felt for some time that Morpheus is moving toward gnutella.
<speculation>
For some reason, Morpheus became pissed of with Kazaa, and to decided to devote a few man-years to constructing a new client + protocol upgrades which would let them move to the gnutella network without the users even noticing. Kazaa pulled a fast one and changed the protocol, without notifying (perhaps even keeping the docs from) Morpheus, and here we are...
</speculation>
For those of you who are interested in where those juicy 3.500.000 users are going, I have followed the IRC at MusicCity. At first, everyone was in a state of complete panic. Seriously, some of the reactions were quite unbelievable... My life is over! My life is over!!! or how about this one The FBI are at my door!!! Delete your files!!! Delete you files ***NOW***!!!!! :-)
Then, about half defected to Kazaa/Grokster, while the other half waited for the new version.
The new version arived, 1.500.000 persons installed it. Unfortunately, 95%+ thinked it utterly sucked and most of them are currently seeking desperately for a new system.
Note: numbers are based on dl stats at download.com. Currently 1,998,910 downloads of Kazaa this week, and 1,394,331 for the new Morpheus.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
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
I assume that by design, you are referring to the underlying architecture of these systems? AudioGalaxy is basically Napster. It's a centralized system that avoids lawsuits by occasionally filtering their songs when things are looking ominous and with some people at its head that have connections with the record industry.
As far as security goes, it is true that the Gnutella protocol does not include encryption, whereas FastTrack encrypts many of its packets. Just running netstat will show you everyone's IP on either network.
I strongly encourage everyone to support Gnutella as an open standard. As Lawrence Lessig has eloquently argued in "The Future of Ideas," open standards are vital to encouraging innovation and for creating resources that can be enjoyed by all, not the few.
Thanks.
Adam Fisk LimeWire LLC
Adam Fisk
In 3rd part of the movie "Matrix" hero named "Morpheus" will die. But p2p software Morpheus died TODAY. I have installed new Morpheus and it SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS!!! Then I installed KaZaA, uninstalled Morpheus, and everything works TOTALLY PERFECTLY, I have managed to download already that what I wanted!!! And search results I am getting from KaZaA are very very similar to this what Morpheus used to be. Shortly speaking: company from MusicCity.com commited suicide!!! I invite you to join KaZaA - I am there online as well as over 1 million other people... jpzr from http://WirelessSoftware.info - the super-portal for wireless software for cell phones and mobile computers.
Think about it, how many people are going to be running both clients? Spyware aside (you can disable all the Kazaa junk with a few dll wipes & registry play)
Just dismissing the spyware as a minor inconvenience seems wrong to me. I may be biased and a bit of a fanatic (i run ad-aware weekly on my win box at minimum, and after every software install)...
but i certainly wouldnt consider it a minor inconvenience, how many *typical* kids who fire up Kazaa to grab music even worry about spyware, let alone are competent to use RegEdit to disable it without trashing their easily screwed up OS (ok, ok its allready screwed up when it runs right but thats another story)
Spyware is one of the huge problems that theese P2P shareware/freeware progs have, and i wish more people would take that into consideration when choosing a client...the sooner theese people realize that the end users of their product dont approove of spyware, the better.
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
Well, the flaimbait tag is there, and I don't want to start anything. But I have to respond to a little of the FUD...
Gnutella is horrible. The design just sucks and honestly i could have come up with a better design for a network.
That's classic negative argumentation for you there, and I for one am tired of hearing that kind of comments from everyone (this extends out of the tech realm and into all walks of life, BTW). "Product XXX is bad. I could do better in my garage." I encourage you to do so then. Join a development list and contribute your comments on better network design. These efforts need all the help they can get.
Gnutella is horrible, theres no security (or maybe they finally fixed this?) meaning anyone can see your IP.
That's not really a "security hole" in my estimation. Anyone serving you a webpage can see your IP. That information is out there. Remember the mantra: "Security through obscruity is no security at all." Rather than trying to hide your IP address, it's incumbent on you not to leave that IP wide open to exploitation. That's security. Just my $0.02.
Howard Dean for president
Morpheus didn't work, so I installed Kazaa. But their new client causes Internet Explorer 6, Windows Explorer (w2k) and Netscape 6.2 on my computer to crash as soon as I press any key (yes, I am sure that Kazaa is responsible for this), and I don't know what does Kazaa have to do with what I type in my browser except if they are spying my keystrokes. Then I installed fresh w2k, the freshest security patches and the old Morpheus (1.3.3), then I connected to the Internet and I could not connect to the Morpheus network, which shows that the story about hacking my registry settings does not hold. It seems that both Morpheus and Kazaa are fooling us from some (economical) reason. If Morpheus brings their users to Gnutella network, that's great. There can be no fooling on open source.
I too used to use Morpheus. But, I kept getting the error that my client was outdated and I needed to download the new one. I did -- but, I still couldn't connect. So, I finally said "fuck it" and installed KaZaa instead.
As you install KaZaa there is a wizard that asks which components you want to install. I keep hearing about "spyware" built into KaZaa. But, I don't believe it. All the programs that come BUNDLED with KaZaa are spyware (New.Net, Offer Companion, Gator, etc..). But, if you uncheck all the boxes for these programs they won't be installed on your computer! The only time these spyware programs get installed is if you're a lazy bastard who just clicks the "NEXT" and "OK" buttons all the way through the wizard.
However.... after I installed KaZaa I ran Lavasoft's AdAware (www.lavasoft.de) to search for any remaining spyware. It did detect a software plugin which displayed KaZaa's ads. I used AdAware to remove it. But, then KaZaa stopped working and I had to reinstall it.
For the most part -- I haven't been as happy with KaZaa. The search takes forever! In one case I was searching for a piece of software. I tried the search once with no results. I waited 2 minutes and tried again. This time I found some results (but, not what I was looking for). I think a majority of people are using KaZaa for MP3s which is fine. But, I always liked the selection of movies, apps, and other things available on Morpheus. It's a shame to see such a good tool go down the shitter.
Speaking of good tools going down the shitter -- has anyone else notice that "MailExpire" disappeared? It used to be at www.mailexpire.com but they are gone now. It was a cool service run by an Irish company for creating expiring email addresses to avoid spam.
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?
Didn't Morpheus recently post that the reports of a security hole in their product were false? Now apparently they are admitting to a security hole of massive proporations. I mean, having anybody on the Internet change the *registry* settings on my computer is a huge flaw. Doesn't this concern anyone?
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program... provided that you also do one of the following: ...
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code...
I've been doing some research, and I've been unable to find anything on the subject. With the lack of information available about Sharman Network and Nikki Hemming (CEO of Sharman), I think this looks like an attempt by the RIAA to purchase Kazaa and shut down Morpheus (the largest group of file sharing members). They then release a new version of Kazaa stating 'Morpheus members join the new Kazaa network', which also apparently has the ability to not only include spyware, but also snitchware (where it will know what you are downloading and possibly report back to those manufacturers or artists for legal procedings). I don't know what Kazaa originally included for spyware, adware, or snitchware, but I know that Morpheus only included adware. It evens appears that whoever (I have no proof of this being related to the RIAA, but I would think that they would be smart enough to cover their tracks and hire this one person, Nikki Hemming, to be their scapegoat) made the changes didn't think that StreamCast would change over to the Gneutella protocol. I think the RIAA has decided that legal battles are taking too long and going nowhere, so maybe they have decided to take matters into their own hands and are trying to shut down the P2P networks by buying out certain providers and then forcing other clients to be unable to connect. Sounds like something the slime at the RIAA would do.
It's true. There was a file that I hadn't finish downloading from Morpheus. When it shut down I installed Grokster and it finished if for me. I bet the same holds true for Kazaa
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?
They basicly appear to cite the zeropaid.com article mentioned earlier, but try offer a more neutral comment on what the facts are, and what is speculation.
Even when the computer's doing nothing.
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.
Catch this link. This article caught the possibility of all this a couple of days ago.
Lets face it, Gnutella is a bandwidth hog & its as slow as all buggery
Otherwise you'll never have more than 65 people using it.
Otherwise you'll never have more than 65 people using it.
(now I got the title right)
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.
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.
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
The new Morpheus Preview edition makes you accept the following license:
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
..
..
What are the best Gnutella interfaces out there?
I tinkered around with it in the early days, but haven't touched it since all these commercial projects have popped up. I'd use one that worked on either windows or linux, but it would have to be able to work from behind a NAT.
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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
How dod they shut down the network, anyway? I listened to one of those C|net webcasts where the CEO stated (in so many words):
"We can't be shut down because we have no central servers. Even if the comapny shuts down and dissapears, the software clients are still out there and will continue to connect to eachother. It's unstoppable!"
So what the hell? If we all still have clients, how did they shut down the network that has "no central servers" ???
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
i liked the fasttrack network because all their clients have the support of searching MP3s according to bitrates. i hate 128kbps...
once morpheus moves to gnutella network, i'll have to be stuck with kazaa.. fucked-up-spyware-shit. not that there arent any spyware removal programs out there, but it's such a hassle. it's like installing a virus but removing it with your virus scan.
it's already bad enough that i have to reboot to windows to use any fasttrack client because there simply isnt one that 'works' under linux.
the clients are already bad enough since people dont share on their networks. the search results show what you're looking for, but you can never seem to download from them.
... remember the good old napster days when you can search by album and download them without hitting that search button more than twice?
i wonder what the status is for the giFT development...
my blog
Now there seem to be 188 users online, sharing 256,727 files, totalling 1.18 terabytes!
Still small potatos compared to KaZaa, for sure, but it's heartening to see the numbers growing as people start tuning in and turning on. Yahoo!
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I just tried Gnucleus and the new Morpheus. After that I spent about half an hour in the Morpheus channel fighting with the operators. I used to recommend Morpheus to everyone but I have totally turned against them now. Morpheus can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.
What they did is they took an open source program at http://www.gnucleus.com and basically "stole" it, though it's legal to do so under the license it was released. They took the source code for the program, without even informing the gnucleus guys, put their own branding info on it, added popup ads, and released it as the "new" Morpheus. They added NOTHING, they just made it worse with ads, There is not a single reason to run the new Morpheus. Go with Gnucleus -- it's precisely the same program, but with the ads removed.
Also, since the people that did Gnucleus actually are able to write their own software, Gnucleus will be the source of improvements and updates, not Morpheus.
The channel operators on Music City are very afraid of people learning this fact. They kicked me several times for mentioning Gnucleus. Somehow they think they can supress the fact that they entirely ripped off other people's work. It's not going to happen, though, you can't hide lameness of this magnitude.
Morpheus has discredited themselves forever as far as I'm concerned.
Once again: go to http://www.gnucleus.com and use their software. Delete Morpheus at once.
now that morpheus is switching to gnutella which doesnt scale well, how long will it take before people start to flock to something else, and the real question is what will they flock to. kazaa has spyware, gnutella will be messed up soon due to morpheus, and in my experiance winmx and limewire never get a good connection
Well, I got on The big 'M' tonight, and instead of the usual 4-500,000 people there were only 2,500. After an hour, it said ONE PERSON! ME!
Do I get a prize for being the last Morpheus user?!?
forget about m$, nothing is secure these days
should do is rerelease a version of Morpheus that uses the technology that was state of the art when the engine was reversed by OpenFT. In exactly that period of time i got the best transfer rates, the fastest searches, the most results. That way they could take advantage of their protocol benefits (metadata and such), have an existing net to jump on and lure their followers into and a app that will whip Sharman all the wy to Tazmania and back.
...(list incomplete and some items probably redundant)
Well... it was fun while it lasted. Let's see what's next. I am still waiting for the client that incorporates them all - OpenFT, gnutella, limewire, edonkey,
+++ath0
I'm working on the Samizdat protocol, which is an agile adaptive protocol capable of deceptive encryption of traffic.
Samizdat is capable of filesharing, IM, email or even (anonymous) webserving. It works on a plugin system with API kernels for samizdat apps.
I hope to have individual service apps for each kind of use, and a suite app like Mozilla that does the lot.
Samizdat is planned to be a distributed tree network, fast localised servers provide the search results locally and the local database of files.
It works by not revealing to you what the actual url resources come from, users can vote servers to be comprimised if they try to spread viruses or censorship on the network.
Samizdat is going to be free, open and GPL. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm ready to listen and put them in the mix.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I'm glad they're getting rid of FastTrack. KaZaA had spyware, I could never get a Morpheus account, and I already use Gnutella a lot -- having more users can never hurt. :)
[insert witty comment here]
I know this is really not "technically" related but I wonder if they pulled the rant off of their front page concerning the "alleged" security risk while using their software/network and the indignant stance that the allegations were false?
Patche says, "You will attract more flies with honey than vinegar... but who wants flies?