Napster Attacks Open Source Clone

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday November 29, 1999 @06:19PM from the putting-the-genie-back-in-the-bottle dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "In a letter, the author of a Gnome-based Napster clone was pressured to remove distribution of the program due to the fear that source availability would make the Napster servers less secure [if] gnap is not ceased." UPDATE by RM: Ryan Dahl, gnap author, has spoken with Napster, says they've come to a happy understanding, and has removed the "letter from Napster" (and his response to it) from his page. He also tells us that he and Napster are working together on an article for tomorrow, which we eagerly await.

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Before freaking out by jfunk · 1999-11-29 13:31 · Score: 5

Look at the comments on the main page.

The Napster guy is valid in his assumption that open specs will cause lots of hacking. However, he seems to forget that keeping it closed will not stop hacked clients from emerging. Gnap is proof of this.

If you're going to bombard Napster with email, don't flame. Just indicate that security-through-obscurity simply doesn't work. Any sort of protective measures he wants to do should be done on the servers, not so much the clients which everyone has access to.

I personally would like to see lots of encryption.