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Shutting down Kazaa
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting wired.com article on the fight between the world's media corporations and Kazaa. The lengths Kazaa has gone to to keep itself immune from attack (incorporated variously in Vanuatu (where?), Estonia and Australia), seem to have largely paid off - until now."
I'm firewalled so that I can't initiate outbound connections on strange ports (i.e., if it's not for http, ftp, instant messengers or, er, that's it. They refuse to open smtp up, because of the threat of spammage. I mean really.) and any attempted incoming connections that are not assosciated with another connection (e.g. a recently initiated http connection to a web server) are automatically dropped.
KaZaA lets me connect to people over socket 80 (http), so It Just Works. I tried Gnucleus and it dodn't work because people refuse to set that to listen on socket 80.
Want me and all the students at this college, AND their massive caches on gnucleus? Then FOR FUCK'S SAKE USE UNIVERSALLY OPEN PORTS.
Really. If someone invents a system whereby people everywhere can download from an open port (and use another open port to upload to people) then you'll get the thousands upon thousands of gigs of stuff students (among other people) have on their 100mbps connections.
Think I'm joking? Get everyone to set gnucleus to listen on socket 80 (or write a new system that allows people to download and upload to open ports). You could make a fucking profit out of it, but the people who would do it are bound to be gplers. Go ahead. I dare you to.