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Looks Like the End of the Line For LimeWire
tekgoblin writes with news that a federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against LimeWire for copyright infringement and unfair competition. A notice on the LimeWire home page says "THIS IS AN OFFICIAL NOTICE THAT LIMEWIRE IS UNDER A COURT-ORDERED INJUNCTION TO STOP DISTRIBUTING AND SUPPORTING ITS FILE-SHARING SOFTWARE. DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL." An anonymous reader points to coverage at CNET, too.
Where am I going to download my r@ygold porn?
Wait... is it still 1998???
www.emule-project.com - open source, so it can't be shut down. I guess the servers could be shut down, but it also operates with a distributed peer2peer network as back up. I've been using it for years, it has almost everything.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
a thousand more to take its place.
Talk about a blast from the past.
Ahh Limewire! That takes me back... to the last virus I had (2003?).
I'm surprised its lasted this long frankly.
crazy dynamite monkey
I'm pretty sure that the closure of limewire will cause the amount of malware in the wild to drop dramatically.
Although I disagree with this whole sham, I honestly can't say that I'm sad to see LimeWire go. It is utterly ridiculous how many friend's and family's computers I have to clean due to viruses and crapware that came through LimeWire.
Next you're going to tell me KaZaA hasn't shut down either.
If only there were some way for people who had Limewire to share the executable.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
That I prefer to use Frostwire.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Is FTP next?
Piracy is solved forever.
Seems they love to troll Limewire to nab people for various underage porn possession. Can't imagine them liking having the easiest honey pot in the world being shut down.
[sorry, the /. filter nazi made me go LC]
this is an official notice that sneakernet is under a court-ordered injunction to keep distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is awesome!
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Can someone tell the judge to not use so many caps? It's like YELLING!
Frostwire's still up. http://www.frostwire.com/. Limewire != Gnutella, which is decentralized and thus impossible to shut down completely.
On a related note, I can't believe how stupid this ruling is. It's a Gnutella client! That's it! Limewire is responsible for nothing; it's the illegal distributors of copyrighted works, which LimeWire isn't, that are legally responsible for any of this. What's next, making HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/the Internet illegal because it "encourages illegal file-sharing"? Give me a break! Some of the best legal to download music I've found was promoted by Frostwire! The problem isn't file-sharing, obviously, but an outdated business model and a resistance to change.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Actually people should continue making shitty file sharing services and basing them in the US. That way the *IAA's of this world can feel like they're winning even as they are completely unable to do anything about torrent.
...And while you're at it, make those programs easier to use than torrent, so all the newbies make them popular and it seems like BIG NEWS when one gets whacked on the head with a hammer!
No kitty, this is my pot pie!
I am astonished that anyone still uses this...
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
DOWNLOADING OR SHARING COPYRIGHTED CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION IS ILLEGAL.
Yes, that is correct. But how can they shut down LimeWire through the vicarious actions of its users? It is the user's who are responsible. They share the data. Unless LimeWire themselves is hosting the copyrighted bits, what are they doing wrong? If they provide some helper service for getting nodes connected, perhaps that is the 'gotcha'. But even then, if they are just managing connections, they still are not hosting the data (AFAIK).
Should we shutdown chat clients and protocols because they allow people to disseminate links to copyright infringed data?
Should we shutdown production of all copy machines because they could be used to infringe copyright?
Should we ban hard-drives because they could be used to store copy-righted data?
Should we ban the human-brain because it could retain the contents of a copyrighted document?
Re. Tard. Ed.
Also, does the injunction necessitate YELLING? I know the out-moded channels are scared and all, but that is just icing on the cake.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
yeah... really
And with the advent of magnet links, no central tracker is needed, meaning no one but the search sites to sue.
Didn't you read the lameness filter? Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
So you need one of them newfangled LCD monitors to use it? CRTs are banned?
And the search sites can very well be hidden onion services... just add a Tor client to popular torrent clients and a button to launch the browser configured to use the Tor proxy, and anyone will be able to use it.
Dilbert RSS feed
From the cnet article:
"RIAA lawyers have told the judge that LimeWire costs the record labels about $500 million in lost music sales every month."
So with LimeWire shut down, will record sales increase by $500 million every month? Hopefully they will use current sales figures including the 2 months AFTER the shutdown to calculate the lost sales prior to the shutdown and not just take the RIAA lawyers word for it. My guess is they will see little, if any, sales difference after the shutdown.
A truly sad day indeed.
Actually I've found it was up to this day VERY popular with the clueless. As a PC repairman I ask my fellow repairmen to bow their heads in a silent moment and give thanks to the HUGE number of viruses from the fake files on Limewire and Kazaa, which made many of us mucho money. Hell the whole thing was plumb full of "name_of_popular_song.mp3.exe" viruses that the clueless would fall for time and time again.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Good! Maybe my users will get less viruses now.
Amen to this. Every single charity case home PC repair job I took in from one of our users had malware of some variety. And every single one of those had Limewire installed and actively used. Let us ring the village bells and partake in feast to celebrate the slaying of this most wicked beast.
The media companies have stood up against rampant piracy to protect artistic expression and innovation! This is truly a victory for The American People.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
well part of what killed limewire was the fact they tried to sell pro versions. lets not forget how loaded with spy-where it is loaded with. they where in it for the money it was pretty dammed clear. and being the client is genutella i dought shutting it down is gonna do anything. we still have frostwire and im sure someone else is gonna use the gpl code and make another one.
It's the end of the lime for them alright, and it's sad to see such a historic piece of software going out on a such a sour note.
Cruise control for cool, like most Limewire users.
I was talking to a younger cousin about file-sharing, and when I mentioned Limewire he said that was kind of old and listed newer file-sharing sources. It completely blew me away. We aren't even that far apart! Although it is expected, since when I was younger my high school group went from Napster to Kazaa to Limewire to BearShare to Shareaza, etc, but still. It's like that whole "when I was young we [insert soothing tale of yore]" concept is happening faster and faster, and I'm not even old yet.
My favorite was the "name_of_popular_song_crack.exe". I guess they thought if they cracked the song they wouldn't get a please insert the original cd prompt when playing their mp3?
Amen.
Actually people should continue making shitty file sharing services and basing them in the US. That way the *IAA's of this world can feel like they're winning even as they are completely unable to do anything about torrent.
The *IAA's don't want to win. Winning would mean a marginal increase in new sales (from the downloaders who actually can afford the stuff they download), but a sharp decrease in profits from extremely punitive lawsuits. Their optimal move is to continue playing both ends of the game (dues from artists paying essentially protection fees and settlements/damages from lawsuits). All they really have to do is continue lobbying enough to keep the status quo and drown out any artists that attempt to call them out.
All I can say at this point is Fuck Lars Ulrich, and fuck everything they've made since the black album.
For many many years, they were my favorite band by far. But now I only purchase Megadeth for my thrash metal fix.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The advantage of P2P's like Limewire was that it did not share crappy_commercial_music.mp3 while you were downloading crappy_commercial_music.mp3, and as such you could not be fingered for the crime of distributing crappy_commercial_music.mp3 since you were in fact not distributing it.
False.
The LimeWire client had a tray icon and instantly accessible animated bar graphs displaying traffic to and from your shared files folder.
You could view the shared files folders of other users and link to them directly.
Comments and ratings could be attached to files.
The ego of the uploader who was a primary source of a file could be as visible as a billboard on the I-90.
LimeWire had its own built-in chat client.
The workings of the system were fully exposed to even the most naive user.
A lot of those are actually bots that listen for any query and based on it, return a plausable sounding result that really points at a virus.
It's all my sisters know how to use, unfortunately. Similar case with lots and lots of people. I've thought of teaching them the art of Google + BitTorrent (honestly, I find almost all of my music from searching Google), but it seems too complicated for them (and they'll still get their computers infected, possibly easier).
Never understood why torrents didn't catch on as well. First mover advantage, perhaps?
profits from extremely punitive lawsuits.
Would you believe that they actually lose money on that shit? Lawyers aren't cheap, especially evil lawyers (even though they make up most of the supply).
12 x $500,000,000.00 = $ 6,500,000,000.00! I'll tell you what, if you give me $6,500,000,000.00, I'll give you back $525,000,000.00 per month for 12 months. OK? Think of all the profit you'll make on your investment!
I am reasonably sure that the injunction requires that the injunction document itself be published. I'm not sure because reading what would have to qualify as the world's shittiest scan of a facsimile of a document would do irreparable damage to my eyesight.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
You only just noticed?!
Between the difficulty and the extreme popamole, video games have been through some serious decline during the last decade!
The last decade for the most part has obviously been one of graphics whoring; I am sick and tired of graphics being placed ahead of everything else, this means that gameplay and plot suffers tremendously. If I was to use Fallout 3 as a benchmark, I'd claim that plots and settings have become completely inane.
It doesn't help that reviewers gawk over the graphics and pass 9/10's out like candy on Halloween.
not that I mind, it has just resulted in me buying very few games.
and now to get modded as troll and/or flamebait...
I made thousands of dollars from removing crapware on Limewire infested machines. Now what am I gonna do? Sniff...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Funny, I'm the one who repairs computers for everyone I know, my computer has been in emmaculate shape for years, and yet I *gasp* have LimeWire on it! And I've never gotten a virus! Shocking!
The real deal? Use your smarts and don't just download anything and everything from it and you WON'T GET A F*CKING VIRUS YOU MORONS.
Because we can always write the sheet-music to all these songs they don't want us to share, and then we can pass-around the sheet-music to our friends and fellow musicians so we can all play a tune at the expense of an often-hated Band. What will the judge do next, besides outlaw pens and paper? Do writing implements cause counterfeiting, like how so-many art-thiefs redraw a copy of a master painting and then slip into the museum to swap their copy for that expensive original? Does the judge outlaw brushes and ink as well to stop this? With so many "lay" judges that have no experience in the implementations of technology they quickly outlaw the medium rather than the MOTIVE. Let us not forget that the judges today are in-fact verry lay and worse they regard experts in the juries as vile simply because the judge is empanneled by the verry monopolists of commerce that put a many-toothed cog into the labor of society to draw the verry energies of the people into a proprietary form of counterfeit that is the privilege of the State consuming the Country.
Back in college in one of my lecture it was mentioned that on one of those networks that you could easily filter out all files of a certain size something like 95K of which over 99% were viruses (one of about four flavors) and that will eliminate something like 80% of the viruses and files on the network.
Yes! And they are useful for finding things that aren't on the torrents. http://www.emule-project.net/ is a good decentralised file sharing network.
Only, what, 300 Limewire clones left to go? lulz xP And then you haz torrents as everyone's mentioned. And Usenet. And half the things relevant to mai interests are mass-uploaded/mirrored to MegaUpload + Mediafire + Hotfile + Rapidshyte.. etc.. I hope that Federal Judge feels proud of himself, he might as well have killed his first mob in an mmo. Congrats d00d, you only have about 999,999,999 left to go before you accomplish anything :3
Amen, brother. Limewire-induced viruses paid my beer money all through college, and in fact got me laid on more than one occasion. (Yes, I know Slashdotters don't get laid, but I'm not joking!) I found it was quicker and easier to pull a backup-and-reinstall job with most virus infections, rather than trying to fight them. The process takes about two hours, the majority of which is waiting for file copying or OS installation. Combine this with clueless (not to mention broke) frosh women who were surprised the resident geek was unstereotypically cute ... yup. Good times. Cheers to Limewire, savior of geeks everywhere.
name_of_popular_song.mp3.exe
I can't seem to download your link? I keep clicking but nothing happens.
And the "marginal increase in new sales" is debatable as you'd be eliminating a portion of your network effect from free/warez distribution. While this is also small, there's a chance it could be a greater effect than that from people who now need to buy it.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's immaculate, fuck-stick. Pretty sure the only reason you think you've never gotten a virus is you're too stupid to know when you've got one.
So I don't get the point.
Someone could just put a mirror somewhere else in the world (as allowed by the GPL) and allow other people to keep downloading it..
--
Is the whack a mole machine broken or something?
Don't get your panties in a knot, the virus he doesn't have disabled his spell-checker so he didn't know.
IT'S OVER... well actually it's about 31, I forgot to declare my int long.
If it's not a long int, it can still go to 4294967296 if it is unsigned. Shortest you'll get is bit (max 1), then byte/unsigned short int (256)
"As a PC repairman I ask my fellow repairmen to bow their heads in a silent moment and give thanks to the HUGE number of viruses from the fake files on Limewire and Kazaa, which made many of us mucho money."
*WHAP!* That's for implying that torrents are anywhere near safe.
Do you know how many idiots have a fucking rootkitted Windows install because they got it from torrents? I live in Southern California, I have ABSOLUTELY ZERO shortage of business on that end.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Amen to that!
It's immaculate, fuck-stick.
Nah, he actually meant emasculate, which means, well, lack of fuck-stick.
How can there be unfair competition against a monopoly? That's what copyright is. A monopoly. Therefore there IS NO competition.
And if all this "property" is so valuable, how come they aren't paying taxes on it?
Hell the whole thing was plumb full of "name_of_popular_song.mp3.exe" viruses that the clueless would fall for time and time again.
You ought to thank MSFT. They hide extensions, auto execute files, and do not require any special action to enable an executable to run.
Ah, the irony...
Only real idiots would download it. You can identify the fake files very easily, their wrong filenames are just glaring... You can also identify them by their filesizes and filetypes.
It's too slow, too big, too unwieldy, too Java heavy (thus slow), and there are plethora of other SW to step in, like Azureus. So long, LameWire, it was nice to meet you, but your time has now passed into obscurity.
Your Former User.
Upload the songs to napster.....
Actually people should continue making shitty file sharing services and basing them in the US. That way the *IAA's of this world can feel like they're winning even as they are completely unable to do anything about torrent. ...And while you're at it, make those programs easier to use than torrent, so all the newbies make them popular and it seems like BIG NEWS when one gets whacked on the head with a hammer!
Then we can make the first rule "You do not talk about usen**, I mean torrents"
You could also easily sort by filesize... if you're looking for a 6 minute long song, chances are the mp3 of that is not going to be 60KB. It's going to be closer to 6MB usually. The problem is that it would require using your brain, and most users of the network weren't/aren't savvy enough to think that far.
I'm guessing the judge did this just for the many lulz that would result.
It's also very popular among people downloading child pornography.
Yep, but let's all say a second prayer ... that these folks don't all start switching to Macs! .....
The Mac Limewire users I've known were still able to run it, downloading anything they wanted, without a single issue
I know. It's astonishing because people shifted off a "do a search and find something; it never fucking goes away" model to a "file on a network with a backing tracker that eventually disappears and the likelihood of leechers that download a torrent and then disconnect so 99% of the shit out there has no seeds." We left the model where you could always find anything ages ago.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Maybe because in one model, you keep finding torrents you can't download because they're behind paywalls and stupid shit, and the torrents vanish eventually, or never download because of no seeds; while in the other, information actually persists and the network isn't reliant on any given operator.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Winning would mean a marginal increase in new sales
That's a fallacy. Music pirates have been shown in study after study to spend more on music than non-pirates.
It has never once been shown by any reputable research that anybody ever lost a cent to piracy.
The RIAA's war against file sharing isn't a war against pirates, it's a war against indies (their competetion), who use the internet to get their works in your ears. The RIAA has a monopoly on radio airplay, the indies don't.
Free Martian Whores!
Funny thing about torrents. It turns out that usually the main install executable is perfectly fine - it installs a clean copy of whatever program you're pirating. And since most commercial developers even code-sign their setup.exe files, you can even view the digital signatures on the files and verify them.
However, it's the attached keygen or crack that's usually either a trojan or has a malware wrapper around it. I'd say that most keygens and cracks are infected, and your antivirus is actually telling the truth when it says they're infected. It's practically impossible to get a clean keygen/crack, even ye olde crack sites often now unwittingly host them. It's far more profitable this way as it's trivially easy to release a crack and hope someone bundles it together with the software to make it easy.
And even usenet's not immune. I can't remember a day when browsing I don't see thousands of identical posts containing the same virus executable with different names.
Hell, it's even gotten into movies (the movie's 600MB, but it's just a 2 minute video saying "You need to install XXX to play, please visit www.fishysite.com to download").
Explains the rise of the old .nfo file with the required serial number built in - you can't trust cracks and keygens to actually work.
Also you should thank Microsoft for making hidden filename extensions the default, so it's brain-dead simple to have someone click on Trojan.MP3.exe.
Free Martian Whores!
That's all fine and dandy until some *real* illegal content gets distributed through your node.
If it were my sisters I'd put them on Emule, and simply place MSE or another free AV and have it scan their download folder upon opening. The only trick is you'd have to run it once for them, as there are bots that will put "Name_of_song.mp3.exe" but here is how you fix that, just do the first search and put in some BS like "flegalsnortch" and anything that shows up you flag as spam. There are also a few other tricks, like putting Peerrates server list as the ONLY source, by disabling "update server from clients" and simply have it use the Peerrates server list on startup. with Kad it is distributed and they'd only need the server list for the first few hookups anyway.
While I fortunately don't need P2P, and my family spends too much time on MMOs to waste downloading, having to deal with customers that used to get infected via Limewire all the time taught me how to lower their risks. IMHO emule would be a better bet if you don't want to spend all your time cleaning crap out. The final bit of advice would be to use Peerblock, which helps block the spammers and leaches.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It also acts as a torrent client.
I am not devoid of humor.
I use it a lot for finding specific MP3s that would never appear on a BT search site. I can fire up a Gnutella client and start downloading some obscure song that's too old or rare to be on iTMS or Amazon within a minute or two.
I guess I don't really know how queries work on the Gnutella, but I assumed they work a bit like this (if it doesn't, it should):
1) to search for "metallica shit music", a client hashes the words "metallica", "shit" and "music" to get 3 keyword-hashes;
2) it asks for filenames containing keywords that hash to any of the 3 keyword hashes (by direct flooding of peers or any other more intelligent mean, like kadmelia-type of query routing);
3) each client contains a table (or part of the global distributed hash table) containing the correspondence between keyword-hashes and filenames/filename-hashes (which was created when the file was selected as "shared")... it gives a reply based on that (the query may include logical operations like OR, AND or NOT, to refine the search, which should be processed by the client originating the query, to minimize information leaking).
The results is that such bots cannot know what filename to return (in a way that it is a plausible "good result" for a certain search query) because the whole query string is unknown to them, unless they spend lots of time creating rainbow tables for this specific hash (i.e. they might as well just create copies of the virus with suggestive names containing lots of "good"/"hot" keywords, share them and hope people fall for it).
I know courts are slow, but all caps day was several days ago.
But what if they believe their own propaganda?
Got this email
This is an official notice that LimeWire is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. Downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal.
If you would like to unsubscribe from LimeWire software promotional offers, please click here
It didnt sound like a promotional offer to me :)
And why do they still have me on file for a product I bought (and stopped using) ~7 years ago ? I unticked all of the "Spam me" boxes.
LEGAL NOTICE
This is an official notice that LimeWire is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software. Downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal.
If you would like to unsubscribe from LimeWire software promotional offers, please click here
Didnt sound like a "promotional offer" to me :)
And why do they still have me on file for a product I (sadly) bought in about 2003... I unticked all the "please spam me" boxes.
Many versions of Windows have a "disable file extensions for known filetypes" option enabled by default.
That means that:
Super cool video.mpg.exe
Hot naked girls.jpg.exe
Are not obviously executable when viewed in explorer. Typically the icon is changed to match Windows' default, to further the deception.
It's not all the stupid user's fault. Windows is helping, too.