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New File Sharing Networks
Posted by
michael
on Thu Jan 24, 2002 10:02 AM
from the bootlegging-for-dummies dept.
from the bootlegging-for-dummies dept.
An anonymous reader sends in: "Most readers of slashdot have been following the exploits of the RIAA and their attempts to shut down Napster, KaZaA, Morpheus, etc. In response, it appears some live music fans have taken things into their own hands and started new file sharing networks made exclusively for trading live recordings of bands that allow that sort of thing. The main player, RNL has reached version 1.0, features a distributed architecture, supports linux, and is even GPLed. Another peice of interesting software is Furthur. Though still only in beta, Furthur has cool features like allowing a user to piggy-back another user's download to reduce the load of the uploader."
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WinMX rules! (Score:3, Insightful)
Etree? (Score:5, Informative)
Haven't these guys heard of etree.org [etree.org]? Etree has been around for a few years, and exists to allow the trading of lossless recordings of live shows from bands who allow trading.
Its not p2p, mostly ftps and burn + post cds, but it has been there for some time. Loads of good shows too :)
Re:Etree? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.
A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3, so that's much larger files that are dealt with when trading the live music. That causes a major strain on the bandwidth, and therefore makes B+P's a prominant figure in the live music trading world.
usenet (Score:3, Interesting)
How Long (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, is it even worth doign anymore? Have a pure idea, watch it get cracked, then fade slowly to the background like the rest of the companies trying to do this. A sad world we live in today.
Or, maybe I am just jaded on these types of things.
*sigh*
Re:How Long (Score:5, Informative)
You'd think that a group of over 13,000 (that was last I heard a while ago, and with the second related story in a week, there are sure to be many more directed from
The fact is, if someone wants an illegal bootleg, there are plenty of other places to look rather than the etree.org lists. Rather than get flamed and endanger etree.org, those people just go elsewhere for those needs.
Check out etree.org's legal page [etree.org] for more information about policy. After 3 years, there still hasn't been an RIAA shakedown.
Er...how do we control this (Score:4, Interesting)
If they do somehow control it, it'll be interesting to see how the RIAA reacts to this.
Re:Er...how do we control this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Er...how do we control this (Score:4, Informative)
All shows on the Furthur Network are 100% MD5 verified! When users initially share a show, Furthur will run an MD5 verification check, to ensure the file integrity. If any file doesn't check out, Furthur won't allow it on the network
This gives them a lot of control over network content. Don't want something on the network? Pull it's MD5 sum from your database.
Anyone tried Furthur? (Score:1)
Wonder if this scares RIAA? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wonder if this scares RIAA? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the way I understand recording contracts is that the recording company owns the recording, but the band still owns the music. The band rarely gets enough of a cut from the contract that sales hurt their personal bottom line. Huge bands like Pearl Jam, Metallica et al are big enough to negotiate that sort of deal. This is why Lars from Metallica was one of the few artists who cared about Napster. If you'll notice the RIAA, not the artists, is suing people. They claim they are protecting the artists, but they are really looking out for their own pockets.
Most bands dont make money on the record, they make money on the concerts and appearances. Granted, they do make money, but it's usually small compared to what they make from other sources...why else would they tour? The recordings basically serve them as advertisements.
The bands typically own all rights to the music itself (not the recording) and they have the right to allow or disallow fans to record concerts.
Usual dislaimers apply...IANAL, esp a contract lawyer, and have never seen a 'typical' recording contract and am just make observations on what I've heard and read.
Hrmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Even on my blazingly fast 56k dialup connection? If I had 1 person sending me data I could get an amazing 4.5kps while if I had 10 people sending me data I would get
Doomed (Score:1)
Go ahead, claim that *everyone* uses filesharing for uncopyrighted material. Just at least admit to yourself that it's not true.
FileNavigator Rules (Score:2, Interesting)
What about.... (Score:1)
The piggyback feature would be excellent for larger files types.
WinMX (Score:2, Informative)
I get very good results with this. I have extensively subjected it to my "Matmos" test of file sharing programs, and shown it to be as good as kazaa/morpheus.
The main strength of the program is that it has its own p2p protocol, but also allows you to connect to multiple OpenNap servers at once (unlike napigator). If you are patient, you can log onto a sh*t load of servers and get excellent results.
However, there are some drawbacks. The interface is a little buggy (but a little more for the "power" user than morpheus). Also, getting a good list of OpenNap servers into the program can be a real bastard. I strongly advise looking here [trippymx.co.uk] and here [darkservers.net] for solutions to this problem. Also, as the name suggests, there is no linux version
Good old capitolism (Score:5, Insightful)
The music sharing phenomenon is too big to be a fluke. There's a serious market here, and that's what really has the RIAA scared. They know that, at some point, a market will flurish which breaks their members' business model.
Now, I have no exposure to this new network, so I don't even know if it's commercial, but I can assure you that with a demand this large, there will be thousands upon thousands of people trying to figure out a way to turn it to their economic advantage, and I say more power to them! The first key is the fact that there are already bands that want their music recorded live (Phish comes to mind). Next, there are new bands who have nothing to lose by sharing their music.
Given these, I think you could build a base of bands that promote their music (more specifically, their concerts) via a file sharing network. Then, you just have to find a way to brand yourself so that you remove the geeky stigma of file sharing (make it easier to use, get some high-profile musicians to mention that they use it, give it away with low-cost student computers, etc).
This is going to be a really fund decade. I suspect that this particular business will not descend into the kind of deccadence of the current music industry for at least another 5 years or so, but then, perhahps I'm just an optimist.
If you're looking for anonymity, (Score:4, Offtopic)
Small excerpt from their About page:
Freenet is a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds. Freenet is:
- Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
- Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
- Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
- Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n.
-end excerpt-Current 0.4 version of Freenet is working fine and 0.5 will be released soon, which should be considered as stable for production use.
OS advocatists take note: Freenet has been written with pure Java, so if you can get a Java interpreter for your OS, you can run Freenet. And in this particular case, using Java doesn't always mean the software will run slow. It's all about the implementation.
Re:Problems with Freenet (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just open shares ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Set up an index server that does this as well as downloads a lists.txt file that has all the songs in your share directory indexed, a shell script on a cron tab to reindex and upload you lists,
FUCK the RIAA and MPAA, they would have to remove network capability from all computers.
Im not trolling Im serious. Make it as grey as possible. There is no way MS / SUN
GREY, GREY, GREY .
Make it about the comanies violationg free speech, not in the lame ass way others have tried, ALSO a point you can sue judges, and cout officers, police etc, IF IT HAS BEEN PROVEN they VIOLATED you basic civil rights, Making people stop sharing whatever they wish I belive is a violation of my free speech. Set up a honeypot service, that only trades uncopyrigthed materials and lie in wait for the RIAA and some overzealous most likey bribed judges, and open fire, first nail the RIAA on hacking attempts, then go after everyone in line.
If the courts become succeptiable to injury as weel, maybe some of this crap would never make it in the first place.
Yes, I have reached karma cap and need no more, please mod this down as needed
Bands that Allow music trading (Score:1, Informative)
It even works for Hillbilly music. Check out www.bluegrassbox.com for an unbelieveable (hundreds of gigs) resource of extreemly high quality audio files in shn format.
And remember, Friends don't let Friends use MP3!
Furthur is great - RNL? Nothing. (Score:2, Interesting)
etree.org is okay, but it is just a listing of ftp sites when you get down to it. Yes, it is organized well and has lots of other info, but when you get down to it, just ftp sites.
The other major player in the live music scene right now is direct connect and shnapster - this is a live music hub using direct connect software, and it works well.
Furthur is the easiest to use with the coolest technology. Let's hope it takes off a bit more and continues to be as stable as it is.
Piggybacking? Hrm... not really. (Score:4, Informative)
Though I am no byte-level expert, this isn't really anything new or its misleading. What this seems to refer to is how the traffic would be routed. IE, if "Joe" has live Pearl Jam and 3 people request it, the network is smart enough to take bytes from people farther along in the download. Even then, thats more load-balancing.
Otherwise, this is no different from any other P2P filesharing mechanism where files naturally propagte from a source and are eventually downloaded from other nodes. Still, if your network were *smart* enough to resend packets as little as possible (IE, if the network would multicast concurrently-requested packets) then this would be leaps-and-bounds above current P2P.
How do they distinguish... (Score:2, Redundant)
These just looks like yet another crop of well-intentioned systems that are openly inviting abuse. Whether that is the true intention of the developers, with an honest-sounding mission to cover their asses, we really can't speculate... yet.
We shall certainly see, though, once the RIAA inevitably turns its attention to these new networks.
RNL - To big. (Score:1)
I'm sorry, RNL may be great , but I'm not going to use it.
I went to site to have a look at it, and started downloading the Windows installer, (hey I'm at work), 5Mb! There's just no way I'm going to install a filesharing client that's so big
MD5 Checking & illegal uploads (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as illegal uploads are concerned, there is a list [furthurnet.com] of the bands and material types that are currently allowed. I haven't tried this app yet, I will as soon as I get off work, but I would imagine that client communicates with a centralized server to check MD5 sums and also check filenames so the only way to actually put up a illegal file for sharing is change its name to something like 11.29.98-Phish-David-Bowie03.shn and post it as a new file so a MD5sum is created. BTW my domain, http://www.phataudio.org was originally an old school phish mp3 site ;)
Does anyone know.. (Score:1)
Electronic music only sharing system (Score:1)
-motardo
NetMess (Score:1, Informative)
http://go.to/netmess
So Much Music, So Little Time (Score:4, Informative)
It would be quite sad to see
Welcome to RNL! (Score:4, Funny)
Would you like to install xGator? xGator allows you to fine great deals on products specifically tailored to you!
[ ] Yes [*] No
installing RNL-1.0-01a.rpm.....
installing xGator-2.4.1....^C^C........
modifying
modifying
Congratulations! RNL has been installed!
The beauty of Furthur (Score:1)
* Files are associated with shows (ie band/date). So if I am downloading Grateful dead 8/27/72, I don't need to look for all of the individual songs. I just download the show and all the files are there.
* Support for MD5 checking. This ensures that a) all the files are there and b) it is an exact digital copy of the original seed. I can verify this with the etree database [etree.org]
Must...get...multicast...working! (Score:1)
some other info (Score:4, Informative)
One system the author fails to mention is Circle [monash.edu.au], which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow [monash.edu.au] he'll be giving at linux.conf.au [linux.conf.au]
My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)
Also to note are Chord [mit.edu] and GISP [jxta.org] which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.
Where is the RIAA and distributers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why doesn't the RIAA come out with their own damn P2P?
It could be fully under their control. They would be able to block certain songs, and maybe only let certain 'hot' singles out. Most of all, this would give them stronger legal basis when fighting current P2P companies and networks. They can point to their own network saying they own all rights to distribute their music, and thus other programs are violating their own legal market. Their refusal to distribute music electronically has hurt them more than anything else. We 'steal' music online, because there isn't one good for-pay network out there.
But, of course we still don't buy into the fact that P2P has hurt music sales. I believe one problem is the fact that a average CD costs $15! When I was still paying for music a CD usually cost $12.99 - if it was $15 I wouldn't buy it. I was shocked to see "SALE!" signs over CD's at Media Play reading in the upwards of 15-16 bucks.
But by their own account P2P saves the Recording Industry money. They haven't admitted this out loud, but read this from their website: [speaking on why the price on a CD isn't 30 cents]
Then come marketing and promotion costs -- perhaps the most expensive part of the music business today. They include increasingly expensive video clips, public relations, tour support, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the songs played on the radio. For example, when you hear a song played on the radio -- that didn't just happen! Labels make investments in artists by paying for both the production and the promotion of the album, and promotion is very expensive. New technology such as the Internet offers new ways for artists to reach music fans, but it still requires that some entity, whether it is a traditional label or another kind of company, market and promote that artist so that fans are aware of new releases.
Huh? Makes sense... kinda'. But when I search for an artist I find all sorts of new songs. Many of which are great, but never make it to the radio.
If the RIAA adapted the Fast Track technology [and of course make other than Windows clients] they could promote their own music on that main page. They could even tag certain songs as "hot" or "new".
I mean, they can iron out the details, but considering they've got loads of cash. They've got the marketing minds that brough us O-Town and the like. Why can't they put this together?
Why are we hard at work marketing their songs? Why are we using our bandwidth and time? Why are we donating our computers to distribute music? Why are we bothering with P2P?
Simple: It works. We've found a better way. It's not free music. It's because they refuse to step into the year we live in.
Wake up RIAA, you can't fight it any longer. Go after the guy pressing thousands of CD's and making money off of your work. Leave us alone, we aren't making a thing. It's wrong to be making cash on their works. It's not wrong to refuse to go back to an old system that is dying quickly.
Every computer today is sold with a CD-RW. Let us do it.
Slightly OT: Kazaa locks out Linux clients...? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems Kazaa is locking out Linux clients from connecting to their network. I know the network was down due to their recent sale to another company, but now the Windows clients work (apparently), but the Linux client remains unlinked from their download pages, *AND* existing clients cannot connect.
Oh well. The gift project (http://gift.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]) appears to be coming along nicely, so screw Kazaa. :p
Windows (Score:3, Informative)
There's an Open Source project hosted on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] called Gnucleus [gnucleus.net]. Here is the project page [sourceforge.net].
It supports multiple hosts download, so if you were an user of Xolox [xolox.nl], but want a client that development still continues and you want to get those large files using multiple connections, get it now. Sadly, download of partial files from other hosts is still not possible (since there's no consensus from the Gnutella protocol developers about how this should work).
Gnucleus even has a LAN mode, so you may run it to share files over your network that has locked ports or net access blocked (great for colleges!).
Finally! (Score:3, Interesting)
P2P for B? (Score:2)
Like instant messaging, most of the services are created with home users in mind. That means they lack the enterprise-strength management and security features needed by business.
Trying to use MSN Messenger (for example) inside our organization allows connections to the outside world. Same thing with the Fasttrack file sharing systems.
Has anyone used IM or P2P successully in a business? What did you do to keep the system secure, and how did you manage it?
These technologies are awesome and it's easy to see how they could benefit business.
May have to check this one out! (Score:2)
'Controled file sharing'... (or 'Central server?') (Score:1)
2) How can one really ensure that the music being shared is allowed to be shared?
Check the file header? (Like that couldn't be cracked in under an hour)
Use a huge database to store filenames and checksums of shareable files?
What if a user changes the encoding of a file. Can they still share it? (as it no longer resembles to 'allowable' file)
As someone that runs one (Score:5, Interesting)
REM has a kind of blind-eye mentality toward the sharing network, so long as what is being shared is live or unreleased tracks. As well, we allow sharing of other bands which support this mentality (Wilco, Pearl Jam, Patti Smith, Radiohead, U2, etc).
A lot of the files are sourced by someone running a free FTP server (called ThinkTankDecoy, which makes sense if you know REM history). People download from that server and it permeates through the shared server.
Ice Magazine recently ran a feature on our sharing system, a U2 one and Pearl Jam. Here's a quote:
"At www.murmurs.com, www.fivehorizons.com and www.u2bloodredsky.com- three unofficial but overt REM, pearl Jam, and U2 sites- one can easily nevigate past message forums and band news to locate mp3 concerts uploaded by fans. The U2 site is set up like a database, and provides tips for people un familiar with PTP. The REM site requires user registration, and directs how to install its own custom file-swapping software. It also recently featured an exclusive interview with guitarist peter Buck. when told that both a rare 1980 show and thhe entire, unedited portion of the recent MTV "Unplugged" broadccast had been posted to Murmurs.com, he replied "I like the fact that we've done this huge mountain of work, and that every now and then I'll find a bootleg of some 85 German tv show...."
Ice Magazine is maintstream industry press.
Considering the size of U2, PJ and REM, its nice to see that at least some big bands don't listen to the RIAA's squawking.
Ethan
Furthur is the goods. (Score:1)
Trading FTP server addresses/logins on a mailing list always seemed sort of antiquated to me. There was always talk of creating a P2P program specifically for the Etree community, and I'm glad it's finally here and ready for prime time.
They call it a beta, and there are a few rough edges, but it's been running (and doing multiple simultaneous transfers) for the last 10 days on my machine without stopping.
Last I looked there were about 850 clients connected - I'm hoping after this story this number will jump and there'll be even more great music on the network.
Ironic (Score:1)
linux p2p Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
After dabbling in p2p for a bit. I found PHEX [sourceforge.net]worked for some large files. However I found all the p2p client/servers had a few things problematic about them.
'Piggy-backing' would be nice, but reliabe would be better. In the end it has a ways to go. Large files are the biggest problem.
Furthur website overload (Score:1)
The current furthur network has over 15,000 shows available, which totals over 5TB.
/.ted already?