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WinMX Suspends Operations
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck.com is reporting that it appears the WinMX network has shut down its operations in response to the RIAA's letters threating legal action. Although the WinMX network is currently down, this may only be temporary as developers seem to have relocated from Canada to Port Villa, Vanuatu."
Sure it is very interesting. But I wonder what will happen if every p2p company takes refuge in Vanuatu. The laws specifically prohibit pornography and don't even think about applying if you've got money laundering on your mind. U.S. can easily pressurize a country of the size of Republic of Vanuatu to extend their laws to prohibit sharing copyright work!
yep, and Joe User can still be sued for downloading the "pirated" movies/music/games/etc. no matter WHERE they got it. Just a thought, you know if they had did this with P*rn during the early days of the 'Net the things we have now would have taken a lot longer to get here. It's a fact that early adopters (and improvers) of technology have been those on the "dark side" such as P*rn and Gambling.
I used WinMX for a while, as it was much more featureful than the crappy Napster client of old and the subscribership was outstanding. I don't seem to remember any feature or message in WinMX that helped users pirate music. It's true that some people used the software to trade music, but there is absolutely no proof that the program was designed for that purpose. I don't know why they took the network down. It is a simple P2P file sharing utility and nothing more.
Furthermore, WinMX is freeware. I presume the author made no money from it. Regardless, why is the RIAA challenging this poor guy on the grounds that he has broken another country's laws?
"We have every reason to believe that this tiny island country is harboring terrorist agents of Al-qaeda, and is developing weapons of mass destruction to threaten its neighbors with."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
i've been useing winmx for several years and it has worked well for my purposes. one of the key features was that it allowed you to log onto a large choice of "open nap" networks, and it was there i found what i was looking for. folks, who like myself, ripped old records and digitized then. i just cked and i am still hooked up with six open naps and have traffic up and down. to find a client for open nap ck source forge and search on open nap.
Considering they're bound to be owned by anybody BUT the government (its only in places like the US, UK, Ireland etc where the state actually owns significant amounts of the fibre), some ISP's insurance somwhere would have the resources to fix them, yes.
"It should be especially hilighted that Kazaa has already moved to Vanuatu, so the island clearly has decent internet connectivity in place already."
Just to be clear... that's where Sharman Networks is headquartered for tax purposes. They don't have servers there. There are probably a dozen outfits on Vanuatu that'll set up a PO box for you and forward your mail.
Running afoul of the Berne Convention or local copyright laws was probably never a reason for Sharman's setting up in Vanuatu -- you can generally be nailed in any country in which you do business, regardless of the address printed on your articles of incorporation.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Then help us out and update the Wikipedia. That's what the whole thing is all about!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
For starters, why not make a trackerless bittorrent-like network? Oh well, back to the land of unicorns and castles in the air. :(
Trackerless torrents are already supported, even in the official client.
If you're asking for a eDonkey-like thing with BitTorrent as the underlying protocol instead of the FastTrack network, that already exist too in the form of eXeem.
However, from my experiences, it's about as good as eDonkey in efficiency. That's the problem with less centralized networks. Since it's so easy to just seed yourself, people start seeding 20 copies of seemingly the same thing, where half of them were maybe misnamed torrents, and the rest 10 are forming groups of 5 instead of one group of 50, causing the speed to be about 10% of that on a centralized and more controlled tracker.
Also because such UI's basically encourages seeding and downloading from multiple sources, a lot of users may seed 5 things at once and leech from 10, and you run into eDonkey's problems with unfocused transfers. You think "yay, I found something with 20 sources", and then you see each source had about 2 kbps to spare for that specific torrent, since it's so easy for those to just start a lot of different downloads at once.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Even when being half serious, one can be insightfull I would say.
And regardless, what grantparent post said points at a problem that is real and very serious, and that a substantial part of the US population is refusing/unable to see. Should I just conclude from your post that you are among that group?