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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.
who writes like this?? was it gross and cootie-filled too?
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
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...
rooooar
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
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.
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
What's really happening (probably).
I was one of the people who installed kazaa, and after readnig that, it is getting immediately uninstalled.
Joseph?