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Kazaa-lite Shut Down
atari2600 writes "Finally it has happened. Zeropaid is reporting that the Kazaalite K++ project has been shutdown by Sharman Networks. The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application."
Well I guess thats one way to stop P2P usage. Destroy the only good kazaa client.
Who cares, there ae enough GiFT frontends for both linux and windows available which will give you the same functionality.
Sharman shutting down K++ for copyright infringement? Isn't that what the RIAA is trying to do to Sharman... I know, I know, sharman doesn't actually host illegal files on their site, but it seems their entire business model revolves around copying music illegally.
I think Sharman will be in for a surprise once the find out that 75% of its 'users' were on the bootleged client. It's pretty obvious, those users aren't coming back either. The RIAA has already turned that network to shit with their corrupted songs. I guess we call all move on up to BitTorrent :D
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
Uhm.. They shutdown K++ , the CLIENT, not the fasttrackk network...
Zeropaid /.'ed. Alternative article. Probably the original anyway.. zeropaid has a habit of ahem 'stealing' news.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
My Kazaa Lite still works... I don't feel the need to upgrade anytime soon, so it's not going to make a huge difference to me. Heck, I'm still using Word 97.
Even if the Kazaa Lite website goes away, what's to prevent people from trading the old version of Kazaa Lite on Kazaa?
"Where do P2P'ers go when they die" ..."
"They don't go to heaven where the angels fly
The project, which had been set up to block spy and ad ware within the Kazaa Media Desktop Program has achieved notoriety within the P2p world through its simplistic approach and success in reverse engineering the Kazaa application.
However, the program infringed on the copyright of Sharman Networks, the company that now own and program the Kazaa Media Desktop application, after the purchase of the code and copyright in 2002. The FastTrack (Kazaa) network is financed through advertising systems, which Kazaa Lite K++ does not include, and so was seen as a threat by the owners.
Sharman have threatened legal action, and ordered that the offending content be removed from the official Kazaa Lite sites, including http://www.kazaalite.tk/ which now contains no reference to the existance of the application.
RatFaced said that the decision was ?Ironic, that Kazaa is complaining about copyright issues, especially as K-Lite ++ stands for everything that Kazaa CLAIMS to stand for... but fails to deliver.?
We will perhaps never see Kazaa Lite again, but we can hope that users will remain aware of the spyware that is hidden inside the Kazaa application, which is used to finance the creation of the software.
eMule and WinMX offer spyware-free alternatives to Kazaa.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Maybe except this one and this one and this one and this one and...
Of course, you have to install the spyware-enhanced version to get the spyware-free version, irony++.
And be it that it may that you are only interested in music, many other people do have other interests. I use kazaa k++ for perfectly legitimate reasons, such as finding beta patches to games or looking for humerous video clips.
Why should people "just buy the factory CDs anyway"? Most of them are crap. They are a waste of money. The RIAA has screwed itself with its own corporate greed by constantly promoting artists that are without talent. If I want to show the artists that I enjoy what they do, I will go to a live performance. Most artists are not seeing any substantial income from their CD sales- that gets eaten up by the record companies for a bunch of bullshit fees and promotion costs. Bands make their money from touring- and the RIAA now wants a bigger piece of that pie too.
You must be new here. You're not supposed to fill in all the steps; you use a ??? for one of them.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Not only has Sharman Networks succeeded in eliminating nearly every major resource of Kazaa Lite K++, they are systematically forcing it off the network.
How you ask?
Recent upgrades to Kazaa clients (2.5 and higher) make them less tolerant with outdated or non official clients such as Kazaa Lite K++. Kazaa Lite is based on a version prior to 2.5, therefore a current supernode will not accept its shares. Although this will cause network headaches in terms of traffic, the client will not be able to participate or download off the main FastTrack network. This will effectively cluster and isolate all modified Kazaa clients from FastTrack.
from http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=339
See, I live in a dorm, and we're unable to connect to Kazaa here, the network flat out won't let us, with no (legal) way around it. For some reason though, K-Lite still connects. Can someone reccomend a good program to me for all file types? I predominantly download movies, the occasional game to demo it, and sometimes music. And please don't reccomend iMesh. I don't know if I could have intentionally installed that much spyware on my computer. I strongly doubt they have anything of the GNU variety blocked, but there are so many GNU P2P programs I don;t know which one to get. Noobish question I'm sure, but any advice is appreciated.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
I've said this before, and I will say it again. BT is not a good network for illegal content.
It's efficient in distributing large files quickly, especially if lots of people want them. However, it does so at the cost of any and all anonymity.. It's trivial to find IPs of people sharing any file (just ask the tracker; it'll give you a FULL LIST), without even downloading the file/joining the swarm yourself.
The MPAA at least has already begun sending DMCA-ish notices to ISPs stating "BitTorrent" as the network name..
As I've also said before, Don't do things illegal in your country!
(And if you want to do them, maybe you need to move to a different Country? God bless Canada and the blank media tax; I don't mind paying a little bit on every CD-R for a music piracy license!)
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
I guess we can all move on up to BitTorrent :D
BitTorrent is too centralized for this kind of things (large scale, anyway).
Instead, check out eMule and Soulseek.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
At the bottom of one of the articles about K++'s shutdown, is a link for Diet K (http://www.dietk.com/).
Since the site doesn't really say too much about it, has anyone ever used it?
I just took a look at the Kazaa Lite homepage and found a new app on the list I haven't seen since my last check a few weeks ago.... It seems "Soul Seek" (that name bothers me) is the replacement they are now offering... One catch, IT'S A CENTRAL SERVER! So why hasn't the RIAA ran after this?
<conspiracy mode=1>
Maybe the RIAA has paid off the makers of K++ and made this new "app" as a honeypot for people to use instead so to collect data on users who request songs that are copyrighted... What kept K++ anonymous was its decentralized system, why would the RIAA not go after something that is directly hosting copyrighted files? Unless some news about the RIAA going after Soul Seek comes up, I am gonna steer clear of it...
<conspiracy mode=0>
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
What if the song you want is a special remix which isn't available in the stores? What if the album you want is from an artist who nobody sells and the label which origionaly released the song is not around anymore? Does going down to the store and shelling out $15 for a CD which cannot be purchased to support that artist hold water anymore? I feel this is the REAL tragady of P2P. Plus I live in the US, I happen to like Eurodance and other forms of music from Europe. However such music is not easy to find here especialy since CDNow was purchased by Amazon.
Everyone talks about getting their music for free and whatnot. For me P2P was all about discovering new music. When I was on Napster back in the day my CD purchasing budget was about $50-$100 a month! I was getting new songs which *I* liked, not what some marketing department wanted me to listen to. Also as I mentioned earler, what about preserving music which cannot be found leagaly? P2P makes for a great medium for this!
Damm u RIAA, Metalica and everyone else who was against P2P.
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
Windows Lite.
Longer? depends how far you are from the shops, and how fast your net connection is. N/m whether the store *has* what you want!
More expensive? haha.. one is free m8, or at least should be lower cost, if you're paying for the connection anyway or someone else is.
Lower quality? you're using the wrong networks, or don't know how to use them right, or are an audiophile who thinks he can hear differences but can't ABX them.
sorry to sound like an argumentative d*ck but the net *is* a better distribution method in general, for music.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
My main usage for P2P is still to sample songs from an artist. It used to be radio was the way to do so. With the radio playlists being controlled so heavily by a few companies. And those companies (Clear Channel, etc) in bed with the recording industry how do we as consumers get to listen to new artists that we might enjoy rather than what the industry wants me to buy? I stopped listening to the radio years ago because my musical tastes did not revolve around gangster rap or boy bands or female teenage pop sensations. So when I get a recommendation from my friends, I find the song. If I like it, I buy the album. If not, I delete the song. Others may not be as moral, but like most things in life, it's how you use something, not the item itself that really determines its value.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
On a side note, my best friend the sys admin for the hub was shut down because in a month he had uploaded roughly 1.5 tera of data. His friend and insider in the networking department looked up his file and found the following note:
"DO NOT RE-CONNECT WITHOUT FIRST TALKING TO B_______ E_______ FIRST! This is the most flagrant misuse of network reasorces I have ever seen in my career."
Needless to say we framed it and put it on the wall.
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
Does running btdownloadheadless on a foreign shell account while going through an open proxy in brazil through your neighbors insecure wireless access point count as another country?
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Alot of people don't seem to care about Kazaalite. To some degree I don't either; it certainly doesn't effect me. This does, however, set a very bad legal precident.
Alot of the spyware out there is destructive. It can and does slow your computer down, mess with your system settings, and in some cases completely disable your computer. Perhaps if Kazaalite was making money off this (i think they might have been..maybe it was diet kazaa) it would be a slightly different matter. Regardless, users of their own computers should have the right to disable software which causes their computer to do things which they don't want it to. Hell, forget doing it for a profit. A car manufacturer can't prevent me from buying a modified or refurbished car from a private dealer.
Alot of people out there want to pass consumer rights laws to combat the DMCA and other intrusive laws. This is not a good solution -- its only an eternal game of cat and mouse. These laws need to be repealed. Sure, let microsoft use copy-protection and other schemes for their xbox, but don't stop me, as the owner of that piece of equipment, from modifying it so that it does what *I* want it too.
The problem with your argument is that most people don't want to download all the songs on an album- they only want a few. To download 2 or 3 good songs off of an album at high quality (192kbps+) still takes less time than it would to get in your car and drive to the store. And it is also infinitely cheaper.
Funny you should say that because there was a USA Today article in today's newspaper that discussed the implications of a single song music market, ie- the end of the album. There are still some artists who produce albums as an artistic whole, not just a bunch of singles, but as a complete artistic statement. The fear is that if the per song market becomes dominent, that the art of albums will consequently suffer.
Definitely some interesting thoughts to consider. I've been on both sides of the fence. I've bought albums that I thought, "Wow, the rest of this sucks." and I've also bought albums and thought, "Wow, I'm so glad I have all of this, it rocks!".
Who said Freedom was Fair?
I predict that the only consequences that this could have for Sherman's network are negative ones. Honestly, have the sharers with fast connections been using the proper, sherman client? Simply, NO! Can one really expect, after so long sans spyware, these advanced, high-speed users to begin to use their spyware-filled client? Simply, NO! These users will maintain the status quo by continuing to use their existing Kazaa-lite clients, or they won't share on the Kazaa network at all; either way, how does this help you, Sherman?
I don't know about you, but none of the wal-marts's within a hundred miles of me are open past 11 nor do they open before 9.
Mail-order companies also refuse to deliver there? What is this place, Antarctica? International Space Station? Los Angeles South Central?
Especailly for people like me who like the smaller, less known bands that don't sell in big (if ANY) stores.
A "smaller, less known band" is usually also harder to find at the p2p's.
But for the artists that I like, I would rather pirate their CD and send them the $20 directly.
Nice idea, but somehow everyone stops on the first half.
I would love it if Sharman blocked downloads of its signature :D
You know, how the whole P2P industry claims that they don't have control over their content, and that it's really a medium intended for legal distribution. Heh.
Overnet (formerly eDonkey)
Games, Software, Keygens, Cracks, anything you can think of, just a little slow at beginning of download, but after awhile, downloads from over 100 sources at a time.
DC++
Games, Software, Keygens, Cracks, anything you can think of, just a little harder to use and overall slower, unless you use the 1stleg hublist (http://www.1stleg.com/PublicHubList.config)
Soulseek
Mainly for music. Search for artists, select lots of tracks, leave on overnight and PRESTO! Instant GIGABYTES of music.
BitTorrent
Use other sites to search for files, and download with this software.
That's all I can think of right now, but that should get you started.
That's fine, assuming that everything you want is available for sale. My wife and I have several thousand CDs and an even larger number of LPs (remember those?).You'd be amazed at how many things that were issued on vinyl have never re-appeared on CD.
During the "Golden Age" of file sharing we were in that group of people who were uploading far more tracks than we ever downloaded. And the vast majority of our uploads were tracks we had ripped from vinyl and cleaned up. Tracks like obscure Siouxsie Sioux EPs and b-sides. We were the first people to rip the "Will Powers" album.
It's fine if you don't know what I'm talking about and it's also fine if you don't care. But the point is that there were a lot of people who wanted these tracks and the no way to get them. What are they supposed to do? For instance, it's the Xmas season. Labels release special tracks to radio stations - Warner Brothers' collection used to be called "Winter Warnerland" and had some really bizzare stuff. Fans want every track and every track simply isn't for sale.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
There's a new Kazaa spyware-free client out called Fat-Free Decaffinated K!
Procrastination sucks.
Well, I object to the stupid cd-r tax! I mean, I don't ever burn my downloaded music! Why should I pay the RIAA to burn my warez ! ;)
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
I use kazaa k++ for perfectly legitimate reasons, such as finding beta patches to games or looking for humerous video clips.
Who's he trying to fool with "humorous video clips" We all know what he's really downloading.
I do. We have a similar thing in the US. Every time you buy a blank audio tape, video tape, or DAT tape, Disney and others get a cut of the sale.
Why should the producers of "Martin Luther King Speaks" have to pay Disney for the privilege of producing their own program?
See the RIAA doesnt want you to sample tracks before you buy them because they want you to buy the cd to sample the track. This way no matter what they always get the sale. Now that the consumer has such an easy way to sample whole albums/track to decide where they like it or not RIAA is loosing money from you and me not buying the whole cd. They hate you and me for that. All of a sudden my cd purchase choices have gotten smarter and "I" save myself money by not spending $20 for a piece of plastic because most of the album sucks.
Thats right RIAA "I" save money by pre listening to music from P2P.
Anyways Im hung over so all ove the above might not make any sence once I reread it in a few hours.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
When you watch a pirate movie, everyone's a criminal, and technically everyone's a "bad" guy, but still within the logic of the movie there are distinct people you come to think of as "good guys" and "bad guys".
Napster is the crazy, "bad but cool", immoral and greedy but gallant and kind pirate. His death scene is dramatic and gets you all pissed off at whoever it was who took him down. Afterward his crew scatters and his ship is sold off to some random merchant group.
Gnutella is the romantic, moral, and heroic pirate who fails either because of incompetence but because his own lack of cruelty (or, depending on how you look at it, his softness) is in the end exploited as a weakness.
Sharman Networks is the band of pirates which is just plain EVIL. They don't care about anything, they have no positive qualities, and despite the whole pirates-are-cool mentality of the movie, I mean, come on, they're just *evil*. Their leader, Kazaa, is bloodthirsty and cruel, and he killed his gallant and kind first mate Morpheus-- who is played by Orlando Bloom and who most of the audience had fallen in love with at that point-- in cold blood, out of pure envy and greed.
The RIAA, of course, is the stock British Navy captain, because even though he technically represents "good", and technically one supposes his job is to go around and save lives and stuff, you root against him anyway, because he's a slimeball, he's blatantly corrupt, and everyone who works for him was cruelly and forcibly conscripted into a hellish life of prison-like service to the navy during raids on passing ships which are not really (when you think about it) much different from the raids performed by the pirates.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I could care less, I stopped downloading from it some time ago. Another /.er recommended iRate, which is quite good.
I could care less what a program wants to "spy" on when it's on a VMware os with a bare bones WinXP Pro install. Shut down VMware, don't save the changes, and I start VMware every time with a fresh, uh... virgin :) os and my P2P app.
www.vmware.com
Here's a tip, make one VMware session that has all the known P2P apps outthere. Let the spyware install! Horray! Bwcause there is nothing to spy on. Inside the dedicated "P2P machine" I keep all the P2P's in the startup and hide all desktop icons and even the taskbar is set to autohide. Start the machine, download stuff, then just ftp to main box. Then shut down vmware without saving. Simple.
Open source equivs to VMware? There are some I think. Know of any?
Any idea how hard it is to find Sultana in the US? There's one mail order company I have found that has one of her CDs despite her allegedly being one of the more popular Turkish rap acts.
And where do I send my money to buy a new copy of Bjork's "Telegram" (which I had on CD and lost and now have only the case it came in). That was a fan club release of which only a few hundred copies were ever distributed - so I guess I just never get to hear those songs again? How does that help the artist? How does Bjork (or her label) profit from my never being allowed again to listen to music from her that I once enjoyed?
Siouxsie and Budgie took the initiative long ago and setup their own online label and they have been able to profit from it ever since. I have no qualms about shelling out $20 for one of their CDs because I know where most of that money is going and I've enjoyed their music for nearly 30 years now. There's a lot of other artists I'd love to send money to - Neil Young, Kate Bush, Linda, Sultana, Bjork (whose albums I have purchased in the past but, sadly, I have had to forego in the last release because of my commitment to boycott the RIAA) and Moloko.
Is it my fault most of these artists either cannot put up personal web spaces because of record company contracts or they simply don't realize there may be profit in it for them?
Even if it was, it ain't anymore. The net has been the best thing in the history of recorded music for the dedicated music fan. It's too bad it's taking so long for the artists to catch up with that revolution... but they will. Just as soon as their old contracts run out.
Ever since I started to listen to internet radio I never used a p2p network again, and I havent looked back. Go to www.shoutcast.com. They have all types of music, for free, at decent quality. You can use winamp to play streaming audio for windows, or xmms to play streams on linux. No more dicking around with dcc or kazaa networks. Oh yeah.. unlike normal radio there are no commercials either.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
I assume that your comment is meant call gift-fasttrack "yet another kazza clone." It is not. What it IS is very worth your consideration.
GIFT (http://gift.sf.net) is now a wonderful program that connects to Fasttrack (kazaa,) the old fasttrack network (openfasttrack), the opennapster network (old napster), and gnutella. When you do a search in one of the gift frontends you do a search in all of those protocols.
The interfaces could use some polishing (i like giFTcurs the best), but I think gift has a tremendous amount of potential.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
diet kazaa is an interesting product.
it modifies the kazaa client at runtime, and therefore is not in dmca-trouble (the authors are rather careful about it).
it suppresses ads, paid search results, and kazaa spyware. it also allows more than the limited number of searches, automatic re-searching for files, and other nifty things.
the only problem with it, is that you need a full kazaa install, and therefore must install the kazaa spyware (which is then removed by dietk).
i would recommend it.
You are forgetting the crucial network supported by giFT: OpenFT. The old fasttrack network is long gone, dead ever since Sharman Networks dumped it for the new version. OpenFT is being developed exactly because it's tough to depend on proprietary software that chooses which platforms to support and leaves everybody else in the dark.
We should benefit a lot from OpenFT as it matures. So far, it's the best offering we have for a non-centralized, Kazaa-style network.
...when we'll see the first network (that I'd know of anyway) that'll use "friends" that'll route the content. Basicly, you send out requests looking for a friend of a friends of a friend that has what you seek, and it'll get routed through them.
Yes, it would slow the network speed to about 1/nth, where n is the average number of people you have to route through. However, n needn't be very large in practice. As has been shown with the socalled "small world" network theory, each person needs few outside links to make n small. And online, that is easier than ever.
Basicly, I'd think it would be most useful if each node kept a small search database (e.g. the share lists of all their direct friends), and if not found, pass the request on. Would make for a bit more transfers, but a (zipped) metadata file is trivially small compared to an mp3 or divx rip. Think it'd be more efficient than searching local node only. It would also give you a good list of files you could browse where transfers should be fast (direct P2P), which is always nice.
The advantages would be great: No central point of attack. No way to "scan" the network. Your identity is only revealed to your friends, who already know you. Because I know many people do not appriciate opening up their files to the entire Internet. However, they'd have no problem sharing with friends and family.
Also, your bandwidth goes to someone "close" to you. (Priority should probably be given to closer friends, both because of less links involved (more efficient) and because they're friends per se).
I think that'd be a welcome addition to the current crop of P2P nets, not to replace the current P2P nets but rather to replace the direct IRC/ICQ/MSN/FTP/whatever transfers. I definately think there's a market here for all those that have been scared off more traditional P2P nets.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings