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PC Mag Reviews Mercora P2P Radio
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mercora peer-to-peer streaming radio. It's not a service which allows anyone to download songs, however you can listen to any of the top 20 million plus songs available on the network from more than 2000 private radiostations. Mercora supports keyword search by genre, song name or artist name, but does not allow to listen to more than four songs from the same artist to avoid copyright issues. Any Mercora user automatically becomes a broadcaster, when the app scans the drive for digital music and then suggests creating an ad-hoc Internet radiostation."
Allowing users to listen to music they haven't bought? Without commercials, even? Who is paying MPAA for this? NOBODY?!??
"Joe, is that lawyer who handled the Napster case still available? Give him a call, will ya?"
Just
I don't see the difference between offering an MP3 or offering a stream to allow instant realtime listening.
Technically it is the same thing from the sender's point of view. It sends out bytes of copyrighted material. Just because the client software isn't saving those by default (think hacks, direct recording...) doesn't mean it isn't possible.
This software will probably result in new laws which will trouble normal webradios...
Let me be the first to say that I find this idea incredibly stupid. First of all, you are not very likely to find the song you want when you want it and there is a very slim chance that you will find a station that you would want to add to your favorites due to the random nature of the broadcasting selection process. In the end you just end up wasting a lot of your time listening to nothing and you begin to think that maybe you should just buy the CD. This smells like a RIAA sponsored project to me.
I just took a look at your little collection there and listened to a couple samples.. No offense, but that stuff sounds like crap. That kind of music is something people wouldn't wanna listen to even if *you* paid them.
So basically we can now choose between 3000 random users random 10-song playlists streamed over inadequate bandwidth without the ability to find any songs beyond the typical top-40 songs, or to save them. Add to that weird claims of legality, and privacy concerns from the scanning of the harddrive, and it suddenly doesn't sound so nice anymore. Not that it did sound any nicer in the first place. Most p2p apps already suck, making it even more artificially restricted doesn't really help.
There's a simple rule of thumb that I tell everyone, and you should too - fancy-pants website + closed-source freeware = bad news.
:D
However, it looks like this one is an exception. The EULA's and legal looks pretty solid. The guys who started it are ex-McAfee employees, with a tidy five million bucks to play with.
I imagine they have bigger plans than a spyware racket with this software, though I have no idea what. I would definately try it, but hell will freeze over before I give up my sexy GNOME desktop
You'd be better off with an open-source program like Peercast ;)
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Seems like more than one /.er has reported spyware being bundled (specifically Grokster), contrary to the PC Mag reports. Whether or not the spyware was intentionally bundled, this type of technology creates many security issues.
Desktop search apps have recently been under much scrutiny for privacy issues, such that the content read by the apps could be revealed to outside sources. However, desktop searches could theoretically operate without a connection to the internet, which means that a simple block of the program's access to external IPs should be able to prevent this from happening.
The whole basis of Mercora, on the other hand, is that it automatically searches the hard drive and streams the content to a public network. First off, I don't understand the business model of distributing free software to the public and then offering to pay royalties on every song broadcasted. No revenues & high costs = doom. Therefore, it appears likely that the company is operating on the premises of bundled spyware, as reported by some users. Needless to say, spyware itself creates enough privacy and security issues, but that is not even the worst of it.
Say some kiddie hacker reverse-engineers the technology and uses it to create a worm that searches computers for sensitive document formats (e.g. *.doc, *.xls, *.pdf come to mind) and broadcasts them to the public domain? Will Mercora's parent company pay for the damages done with this kind of scenario?
I am deeply disappointed that a reputable source like PC Mag gave this a 4/5 rating without alerting the public of the possible security issues with this technology.
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
Microsoft Antispyware flagged
MS Antispyware isn't ready for prime time yet, it gives false positives (it also flags the open-source P2P program Shareaza, which perhaps coincidently was written by the same guy as Mercora). Could it be MS just doesn't like P2P? (Pest Patrol is another that thinks all P2P programs are spyware.)