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The Internet Media

Morpheus Infiltrates Other P2P Networks 300

Posted by simoniker from the nobody-is-safe dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Morpheus was the number one post-Napster P2P app until Sharman Networks took over KaZaa and got them bumped off the FastTrack network. Now Morpheus is back on FastTrack, according to MP3NewsWire, tapping into it and the other leading networks through a beta of the NEOnet technology in the just-released version 4. Thomas Mennecke over at Slyck speaks more about it with Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast Networks." prostoalex also points to a ZDNet article discussing this new version of Morpheus, and notes the Download.com warning that: "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."
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Morpheus Infiltrates Other P2P Networks More

Morpheus Infiltrates Other P2P Networks

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  • good... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mr_tommy ( 619972 ) <tgrahamNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:23AM (#8053155) Journal
    Doesn't this mean now that the RIAA only has to download one program when they want to find file swappers and what not?
    Morpheus always seemed to look a bit dated aswell..

  • So.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:25AM (#8053164)
    Morpheus got back in the Matrix? Any word on Neo?

  • Two keys for any successful new P2P client (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:28AM (#8053178)
    If Morpheus wants to capture a big share of the product market and really make a stand, it should do two things which I believe are critical:

    A successful 3rd generation P2P program should;

    a) Either have no spy-ware or, if necessary, do it out in the open. List each program that is in use, what it is recording, and remove it on an uninstall. It's one thing to have advertising and tracking information: its another to pull a Sherman and hide it all (and then !deny all when they get caught)

    b) Have some sort of way to filter out the fake files put out by record companies and the RIAA. Check files, particularly MP3s, for filler, or repetitions of strings (the usual cause of noise on fake MP3s). Make users able to chose the actual content that they are after. Perhaps also blacklisting of unreliable users from a user level?

    Put in these two features and your program can be competitive on any server (particularly ALL servers)
    • i'll add a "porn tag" on files, so you can find/avoid it.. I'm tired of these : [ 1] Donkey Rugrats en Paris - DVD [ 2] Donkey Rugrats a Paris - DVD Rip x [ 3] Donkey Paris Hilton (Full and Real).mpg [ 4] Donkey Paris Hilton (Full and Real).mpg [ 5] Donkey Rugrats_Paris.avi [ 6] Donkey Rugrats en Paris - DVD Rip x ... Rugrats, rugrats everywhere!!! The world has gone crazy!

    • Re:Two keys for any successful new P2P client (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:48AM (#8053256) Journal
      b) Have some sort of way to filter out the fake files put out by record companies and the RIAA. Check files, particularly MP3s, for filler, or repetitions of strings (the usual cause of noise on fake MP3s). Make users able to chose the actual content that they are after. Perhaps also blacklisting of unreliable users from a user level?

      In other words, make it as simple as possible for you to infringe on someone else's copyright.

      I tell you what, why don't you write such an app with such a filter and see how long it takes for RIAA and the courts to come down on you like a ton of bricks for deliberately designing a tool that a) stops them from posting their own material, whilst, b) helping people infringe on their copyrights as easily as possible.

      Writing a P2P application isn't against the law, but I bet designing a P2P application that uses such measures to intentionally block RIAA (or any other copyright holder) from trying to track down individuals that are wantonly infringing on their copyrights will be severely frowned upon by the courts.

      Contrary to what you might believe, you don't have a right to infringe on copyrights. And the Napster, etc court decisions decided you can't use the "unlimited friends" defence to protect your ass. If you want the latest Britney Spears/Eminem/Outkast/whoever CD then you can pay for it.

      Now watch me get flamed to hell and back by half of Slashdot nation. Like I care about karma: if I did I wouldn't be writing this post, would I?

      • Re:Two keys for any successful new P2P client (Score:4, Insightful)

        by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:56AM (#8053274) Journal
        "In other words, make it as simple as possible for you to infringe on someone else's copyright."

        Actually, no. This makes it even easier to prevent copyright infringement, its all about who controls the blacklists. Really though, these features are just useful, just like a gun is useful. Whether its used for 'good' or for 'bad' is all perspective, but either way its got use.

        "Like I care about karma: if I did I wouldn't be writing this post, would I?" As someone who hit the karma cap with 'goatse.cx' in their name, I can tell you this is the typical counterculture troll that gets modded insightful by the same people that listen to Limp Bizkit. (this now being the counter-counter-culture troll that gets +3 informative, but then -4 for this amendment.)
      • "Writing a P2P application isn't against the law, but I bet designing a P2P application that uses such measures to intentionally block RIAA (or any other copyright holder) from trying to track down individuals that are wantonly infringing on their copyrights will be severely frowned upon by the courts."

        So you want to be flamed to hell? Well, I wont bite.

        Ill just rip your argument to bits.

        You are basically saying it is legal for a "copyright holder" to null the privacy of "non copyright holders".

        Im glad
        • Well RIAA's not interested in you if you're in the Netherlands, is it? And they can find out that much from your IP address, so tell me why what I've said offends you?

          I've not suggested for a second that copyright holders have the automatic right to null the privacy of non-copyright holders; that's something for the courts to decide.

          What I have said, is that if you were to write a P2P application that bent over backwards to thwart any and every effort made by RIAA (and others) to limit the infringement of
      • Contrary to what you might believe, you don't have a right to infringe on copyrights.

        Framed in a sheerly legal way, the above statement is correct. Framed in a moral/ethical way, the above statement has as many differing opinions as slavery and women's rights had in their heyday.

    • Re: Two keys for any successful new P2P client (Score:5, Funny)

      by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:57AM (#8053282)


      > Have some sort of way to filter out the fake files put out by record companies and the RIAA.

      You mean, the stuff they try to pass off as music these days?

    • so basically emule?

      a) it's opensource.

      b) it generates checksums for files, making it easy for sites such as sharereactor.com and shareconnector.com to offer quality-assured releases.
    • Why wouldn't an eBay like feedback system work for P2P apps? If someone shares tons of incomplete files, or is the host for a dozen RIAA plants, then make it known to the world.

  • Hrmm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by acehole ( 174372 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:29AM (#8053182) Homepage
    I wonder what the size of the profit they reap from spyware?

    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your eating habits, deliver doomsday predictions, collect the neighbours paper, or may leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth."

  • Unsafe Client? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Mork29 ( 682855 )
    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."

    Doesn't Kazaa do these things anyway?

  • "Third-party applications" my ass... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kcbrown ( 7426 ) <slashdot@sysexperts.com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:32AM (#8053196)
    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."

    Why would anybody ever download something bundled with the crap referred to here, much less install it? Such "third-party applications" make the main product worse than useless.

    I'm surprised there isn't a completely open-source, distributed P2P filesharing application widely available to people. Such a thing, when advertised as been spyware/adware-free, would likely be a huge hit. But I guess the "distributed" problem is a tough one, and it's the only way to avoid having to host some sort of master server (which would be expensive).

    BitTorrent is probably the closest thing we have so far, but it doesn't provide an index or anything along those lines...

  • Hmmhmm... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:33AM (#8053201) Journal
    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."

    Who [lavasoftusa.com] cares [kolla.de]?

    • applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information,
      and may do numerous other things, including (but not limited to):
      • sleeping with your little sister
      • sleeping with your mother
      • drinking all your beer
      • making your milk turn
      • signing yuo up for jazz mags, to be delivered to your workplace
      ...
    • With KaZaa, at least, the program won't run if you strip out some of the core spyware. There are alternatives, of course, but the point stands: sometimes using Ad-Aware can piss off the program you're trying to use, and make it refuse to function.

  • What spyware ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DennisZeMenace ( 131127 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:33AM (#8053204) Homepage
    'Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings.'

    The answer to spyware ? Two words: "Reverse Snapshot".


    Long live VMWare.


    DZM

  • legal? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dreadlord ( 671979 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:34AM (#8053207) Journal
    TFA starts:

    Morpheus 4 is Here and Legal

    Morpheus 4 is here and legal - "the only American file-sharing software ruled legal by a U.S. federal court," its owner StreamCast Networks boasts.

    But never says why and how, further more, how is it legal and supports FastTrack network at the same time?

    Anyway, FastTrack isn't the network it used to be, the quality of its files is getting worse and worse, many times you'll download something to find out that it was something else but renamed, I've switched to eDonkey long time ago, much better file quality, yes it's slower, but that is just fine with me as long as the file quality is OK.

    It's much harder to share fake files in eDonkey anyway, because of the file hashing and voting system.
    • Anyway, FastTrack isn't the network it used to be, the quality of its files is getting worse and worse, many times you'll download something to find out that it was something else but renamed, I've switched to eDonkey long time ago, much better file quality, yes it's slower, but that is just fine with me as long as the file quality is OK.

      I've always felt that this has very little to do with the FastTrack network it self but rather companies who work under the authorization of the MPAA to try to make the n

      • Re:legal? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Dreadlord ( 671979 )
        I don't know much about how files are identified over FastRack, but I think that the way files are hashed and identified over eDonkey works just fine, and the voting system of Kazaa is weird, you are able to vote only for your own files as excellent/average/poor, so those who share fake files will tag them as excellent anyway.

        In eDonkey clients, your vote for the file is based on the hash value, so when you download a file flagged as non-fake, you can be sure that it's not fake, otherwise you can simply vo

    • Re:legal? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by julesh ( 229690 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @06:18AM (#8053342)
      how is it legal and supports FastTrack network at the same time?

      It is perfectly legal to use the FastTrack network without authorisation from Sharman... they don't own the computers that constitute the network, they just own the software that is usually used to run it.

      If you write your own re-implementation by reverse engineering KaZaA to determine how it works, that is perfectly legal. For the same reason that, for instance, Wine is a perfectly legal piece of software.

      So, basically, Morpheus has a re-implementation of FastTrack from scratch.

      What is possibly a little concerning is that it appears to be a download-only implementation...
      • Just use Gnutella. gtk-gnutella's recent version includes most of the modern features of all of these commercial apps while a) being open source b) not including spyware c) running under Linux and other free-as-in-whathaveyou operating systems.

        There are also other good clients for POSIX-like systems running X, but gtk-gnutella is the one I've been using and the last few versions are great. I pulled down the isos for Fedora Core 1.0 in a fraction of the time the ftp servers were choking it up to me....
        • Whilst I'm usually a supporter of gnutella, I can understand the desire to support FastTrack. The network has something like 20 times as many users and a much wider variety of files available.

          The plus side is that as Morpheus leeches all these files from FT, they'll become available to those of us who do use gnutella.

  • Increased network traffic? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by boer ( 653809 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:37AM (#8053218)
    Some 70 to 80 per cent of Internet traffic is already P2P related. I wonder if a sizable portion of this is pure query traffic. I would assume that applications such this one that support multiple networks would be cause for increased query traffic all around. Therefore in my opinion it's hard to say if this development is a good thing at all.

  • MUTE 0.2.1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:37AM (#8053219)
    January 21 MUTE 0.2.1 was released.

    http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

    Jan 7 slashdot posting about MUTE 0.2 [slashdot.org]

    Changes includes mention of a time out problem in win32 version fixed. I hope that also reduces the tendency for MUTE to abort downloads.

    It may be a bit wobbley in these early stages, but it's anonymous and doesn't install spyware and crap. Worth supporting if only by running it so there are more active nodes.

  • it's not spyware, honest guv! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Arathrael ( 742381 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:38AM (#8053221)

    The user comments [com.com] at download.com have more mention of the apparent spyware - to quote one comment:'The claim by the program vendor that this software is free of Spyware is utterly ridiculus. I installed it on a fresh install of Windows XP Pro. It installed "Websavings by Ebates" without the option to opt out.' But then, maybe that's just intrusive adware and not technically spyware - not being familiar with this ebates doobrey I wouldn't know.

    On the RIAA comment, the download.com blurb states that 'Morpheus protects your privacy with integrated access to public proxy networks.' But I'm a bit skeptical about that myself.

  • Please spy on me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:51AM (#8053263)
    It's always been a mystory to me how to actually become a participant in the Nielsen ratings system. If 3rd generation p2p apps with spyware actually fed back information as to what I was downloading and watching... I would think that would be most spiffy, well except for that whole MPAA RIAA thing, but ignore that for a moment.

    I for one would be perfectly willing to submit what I watched in the hopes that it would improve its ratings, so long as the process didn't lag down my system. I would also be perfectly willing to live with comercial content if it paid for the media.

    • But that's not what spyware does.

      Spyware companies take money from one company and use their spy system to redirect your web surfing to that company's content rather than their competitors. For (completely fictitious) example, Sony pays Gator a lot of money, and when you go shopping online for an X-Box, you are bombarded with popups for Sony Playstations. Your email account will also be plagued with advertisements for Sony products. You might think, "Hey, I was just thinking about buying a game console,

    • It's always been a mystory to me how to actually become a participant in the Nielsen ratings system.

      "You don't call us, we'll call you." (Insert soviet Russia Nielsen joke here...)

      Last year, I got an envelope in the mail. Inside the envelope was a booklet with 24 hours worth of time slots for a week's worth of days. The envelope also contained 5 crisp $1 bills, along with a request that I write down what I was watching on TV in the appropriate time slots, and send the booklet back in the enclosed pre-paid

  • RIAA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ArbiterOne ( 715233 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @05:55AM (#8053272) Homepage
    Just face it... P2P isn't going away. P2P clients are like Whack-A-Mole: As soon as you smack (sue, crash, buy out, whatever) one, three more pop up.
    So, RIAA, do like the government strategy : If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
    I'm waiting for the RIAA 'official' P2P network that allows record labels to profit from the spyware ads on a user's machine. Not like I'd use it, but... it's a better (and more profitable) idea than suing 15-year-olds. And it makes the RIAA look like the good guy!

  • P2P App recommendations? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @06:12AM (#8053332)
    I recently saw "Poisoned" being used on a Mac OSX box and it brought home to me the generally sucky nature of P2P on Windows I had been using KaZaA + DietK but switched to a recent build of KaZaAliteK++ which is much leaner and more friendly, but can't match Poisoned's multinetwork, spyware-and-adware-free smoothness Which P2P apps would /.ers recommend for the Windows platform?

  • so what? (Score:5, Informative)

    by trotzki ( 64532 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @06:36AM (#8053392)
    Discussion is already up on the MLdonkey Lists about possible infringement of the MLDonkey GPL License.

    MLdonkey [beam.to] connects to all kinds of Networks, as Edonkey, Overnet , Bittorrent , Gnutella, Gnutella2 and Fasttrack and that seems where the Morpheus NEOWhateverTech (insert your favourite marketing-droid-speak here) code comes from.
    BTW, apart from being GPL and from being written for linux originally, MLdonkey gives you a nifty web-interface which lets you search and download (at home) all sorts of stuff while hanging out at the office :-)

    • MLDonkey is written in OCaml, and Morpheus in Visual C++. I doubt they copied any of code (since it obviously wouldn't compile or anything). They may have referenced MLDonkey, but that's an entirely different (and probably legal) situation.

      Besides, many programs are doing the multi-network thing lately. Shareaza pops to mind as well.

      • MLDonkey is written in OCaml, and Morpheus in Visual C++. I doubt they copied any of code (since it obviously wouldn't compile or anything).

        Some of the fasttrack code in mldonkey is originally from GiFT, written in C and is GPL'd.

        I doubt they copied any of code (since it obviously wouldn't compile or anything). They may have referenced MLDonkey, but that's an entirely different (and probably legal) situation.

        From the FAQ [morpheus.com]

        Q. How does Morpheus connect to FastTrack and Edonkey?

        A. Morpheus int

    • and also hasn't (really, they've been working on the next version but nothing's really come out) been updated for months. And is quite buggy. And franky just doesn't download as fast as most other clients. That said I use it all the time because it's nice to run in the background getting rare stuff.
  • i actually dled and installed it cause access to a bunch of nws sounded good and i figured i could just remove any spyware. plus here is an actual quote from the beginning of the licence agreement: "Morpheus values your anonymity and privacy. Morpheus does not contain or bundle malicious spyware." THE FUCK IT DOES. In addition to the My Search bar, Ebates, and BroadcastPC it admits to installing it has 3 or 4 other progs plus an ad window and popup ad thingy built into the gui. most of this shit runs

  • Living amongst the pirates... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:00AM (#8053447)
    <kidding> Does anyone else think that all these references to the Matrix movie are just some lame attempt at getting attention by wanna-be-popular 15 year olds? How about all the people who got +5 funny for mentioning the Matrix and didn't get that they were admitting that they didn't get the joke but thought that it was clever? Sigh.

    And Next on Slashdot, 3l3T3_h4k3r_20x6 releases his newest P2P app: Trinity.</kidding>

    P2P was a neat concept way back when it was called a bulletin board. I guess it still is a neat concept, now that we have IM for sharing snapshots and web-camera streams. The truth, however, is that it isn't nearly as effective in pushing around bits as administering a cheap Linux box with 200GB of HD off a cable modem with a bunch of college frat buddies.

    Moreover, it isn't nearly as good as having a private server with 500+GB of storage on a college LAN... I lost count after the 5th HD was added to my frat's file server. Dues in a frat house go to the 60"HDTV, game systems, parties (It's all about the Super Bowl), and the file server "as needed". As long as you meter/throttle the bandwidth so that the file sharing outbound network doesn't spike the University's network admin's attention (or better yet, have a student network admin in your frat), bandwidth consumption looks just like a massive Quake (or other FPS) game. Match that to the right port for Quake, etc, and even the best sysadmins are fooled.

    Lest you think that this is too paranoid, I have a colleague who only traded audio or video on his private 10/100 ethernet switch which was behind a Linksys NAT/firewall from his dorm room's connection (he graduated recently). In these days of IPods and USB2 devices, a portable 200GB HD can be filled up pretty quick. They cost less than $200 for a USB2 200GB drive.

    Another friend started using NetFlix recently, and copying the DVDs to DVD-Rs (they are even cheaper at $1 per 4.5GB in bulk).

    A recent alum halfway around the world shares popular series like Farscape or Carnivale in DivX. One of our friends likes to encode the director's comments and such when he rips DVDs. Others go for the make-it-fit-in-700MB VCD. These are all private networks with strong encryption. Having a "P2P network" of geeky college aged friends with a central file store provides orders and orders of magnitude the bandwidth and security from being caught.

    I'm not saying that I don't purchase media (now that I live on my own, I do have a cable subscription). But when I go back to the house on the weekend, there's a good selection of media.

    Let me just say that DRM doesn't work, and neither does software activation. People don't rip crappy stuff. All my friends buy content (CDs, MP3s, DVDs, etc) when it suits them. Busting all my friends would be nice for the MPAA, RIAA, or BSA, but lets just face it, that's not going to happen, because this content is on private devices. The wire taps required to even discover the shared content aren't legal, and aren't practical (go ahead and try to wire tap my dorm's P2P WEP protected 802.11g WiFi network). The answer is to provide the content at high quality on demand over that broadband channel. TV does this, with the exception of the on-demand part. At 3AM, though, if I want to watch Farscape season 2 episode 4, that's what I want to watch with no commercials at DVD or DivX quality.

    It's a good thing we live next to a guy with an open WiFi network. I might be afraid to post something like this from my home network logged in with my user name... You can trace this message off a few bounces into some poor guy's closet, and if you get the IP address, then it may or may not have been changed since his network seems to be going down regularly (see related thread on RIAA lawsuits).

    • go ahead and try to wire tap my dorm's P2P WEP protected 802.11g WiFi network

      You do know that WEP can be easily cracked [shmoo.com], right? I realize that some access point vendors have tweaked their firmware to not send weak IVs, but as I understand it the attack is still possible (especially if you have a way of injecting extra traffic into the network).
    • Dues in a frat house go to the 60"HDTV, game systems, parties (It's all about the Super Bowl), and the file server "as needed".

      No shit? So much for the notions that fraternities promote public service and academic excellence...
  • For some things, the fastrack network is still ok, but since Kazaa Lite killed themselves when they decicded to try to start charging, a new client is a good thing. The original Morpheus was the first p2p ap i used, and it was great back then. I'm kind of dissapointed now, because originally it was touted as a spy/adware free version or Kazaa. Just my thoughts, i think i'll stick with the last version of K++.

  • Command line (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:26AM (#8053534)
    Whats the best UNIX command line based p2p application out there? In an ideal world if there was a web interface for it too then that would be much better.

    I can't run a windows or a Linux GUI application, hence the question.

    Can anyone suggest anything?

    Many thanks

    • mldonkey [nongnu.org] comes to mind...

      You can use it on a console and has a web interface and a GTK interface.

      • mldonkey comes to mind...

        Really cool. The problem I have now is that the code runs on a port and my firewall won't allow access to it.

        Is there any way you can have a port 80 based script that will act as a proxy so that requests are passed from my browser to it and then onto the program?

    • Re:Command line (Score:2, Informative)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

      giFT [giftproject.org], I think. Consists of a server (can connect to OpenFT, Gnutella, Fasttrack, Soulseek, etc, at varying success rate) that does the downloading, and a client that can be on remote host as well if desired. The best client for it just happens to be giFTcurs, a console app...

  • Illegal item breaks in illegally (Score:3, Insightful)

    by redhawk1044 ( 744077 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:44AM (#8053636)
    Isn't funny how an application that distributes mp3 illegally is now breaking into other applications that do the same thing, which instead of doing only one illegal action it is now doing two
  • Now Morpheus is back on FastTrack

    and

    Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings.

    Which is why I'm glad I still have a copy of KazaaLite. Sure, it's been shut down but you can still download the client via FileMirrors.com [filemirrors.com], and it doesn't have any of spyware/malware shit.

    Morpheus was great before it got kicked off FastTrack, then it changed and sucked.
    • AFAIK Kazaa Lite will also be kicked off FastTrack following the latest Kazaa upgrade, which KL can't follow because the lawyers have shut it down.

      These things go in fashions - Napster lost it and Kazaa probably will too. People will use whatever is easiest, safest and has the most files, and if the major pirates^H^H^H^H^H^H^H sharers hated spyware and were using KL, they'll up sticks and move to eDonkey or whatever when KL gets switched off. The effort of doing so is negligible.

  • People still use P2P? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by localghost ( 659616 ) <dleblanc@gmail.com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:30AM (#8053870)
    I wasn't aware of anything you couldn't get over BitTorrent. Why would you mess with spyware-ridden software and risk getting subpoenaed by the RIAA for slow download rates and fake files?
  • nothing compares to poisoned for OSX. gnutella, fastrack, gift all in one search

  • I used to love Morpheus until... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trolling4Dollars ( 627073 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:13AM (#8054243) Journal
    ...I found IRC. Of course now that many of the IRC operators have banned file xfers, it's a lot harder to find the things I liked (mostly recorded TV shows that I missed like Sliders, Enterprise, Voyager, etc...).

    Now this?
    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."

    When the average person ELECTS to use something even after reading this warning, you can be assured that the Internet has really and truly become McNet. (McDonald's reference for those of you unfamiliar with it) Hmmm... now that I think about it, it sounds like the Microsoft EULA, and plenty of people accept that every day. ;P

    A sad day indeed. A sad, sad day...

    • ...I found IRC.

      IRC has been around much longer than any modern p2p network. IRC was ancient when I started using it in 1999, when napster came out. IRC was what people used to suppliment their ftp downloading.

      Of course now that many of the IRC operators have banned file xfers, it's a lot harder to find the things I liked

      IRC ops can't ban file transfers, as far as I know. File transfers with clients such as mirc are direct client to client (DCC, also could be called p2p). That's why all the kiddie
      • Not trolling. Actually, I was well aware of IRC as I used to use it in college in the 80s. But... it got really boring until about 2000 when people were actually shipping things with DCC that I was interested in (above mentioned TV shows).

        As far as the banning of file transfers, it's pretty much policy everywhere now. Before they just used to have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Personally, I abide by policy, laws, rules, etc... That's why I don't pirate software, music or movies. I buy everything

  • Impressions.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by pangel83 ( 598985 ) * on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:54AM (#8054650) Homepage
    I had installed it in my desktop two days ago and I can't say that I was impressed. ----I know that it is still beta----, put it has a lot of way to go! -It uses the mldonkey fasttrack plugin in order to connect to the kazaa network... Hmmm... doesn't this mean that they should provide source or something? Correct me if I am wrong -User interface is awful!! Big ugly graphic buttons and I have the impression that I didn't see any proper menu bar. Of course, there is a ad-box in an uncomortable position taking up a whole strip of the screen just in order to display an ad in the middle. At least kazaa ads to not take up a whole row (There are the play-stop-etc buttons next to them) - There is no way to see the peers you are connecting to (At least that was my impression after the 20min. period that it had the honour of being installed in my machine) -UI was slow on my P4 3ghz, 1gb ram (!) -It crashed.

  • What about OpenFT (Score:3, Informative)

    by Assassin_for_Atari ( 691252 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @11:05AM (#8055398)
    In all this talk about a "open" protocol and client that doesn't have spyware, Im suprised that I never hear /.'ers talk about OpenFT/giFT client. I had been using it regularly but constant changes to the protocol and server updates made me look else where. Even though this was a problem I'm supprised there isn't a bigger community pushing giFT and there efforts to help make it a solid product. I noticed they have more clients and one that works with windows now (cross plat is good). Like I said its been awhile since I used it but at the time I loved it. After reading this post I revisted their site [sourceforge.net] and it looks like they are making progress so Im assuming that they have a some what more stable protocol that doesn't get changed all the time. I think ./'ers should either take a look at it or give it another try like I AM!

  • Vmware. hehe. woot! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @12:04PM (#8056237)
    "Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."

    And my third party software (VMWare) inside which I run your little programs on a dedicated image with nothing on it but P2P programs doesn't really care. Spy away.

  • Open source alternative KCeasy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by havaloc ( 50551 ) * on Thursday January 22, 2004 @12:42PM (#8056723) Homepage
    KCeasy available at www.kceasy.com also taps into the Kazaa network, is open source, and spyware free. Check it out.

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