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Morpheus DOS'd and Moving to Gnutella 283

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
wackysootroom writes "According to a message from the CEO of Music City, a group of individuals has launched a DOS attack and tampered with the morpheus network in order to disallow logons to the FastTrack P2P filesharing network through the client. According to the CEO's note, the hack involves changing registry settings on the client's machine (ouch) and rerouting the messages destined for their ad servers. The good news in all of this is that morpheus will be giving up the proprietary FastTrack network for a Gnutella based filsharing system." It's an icky framed page and you have to click through to read the really interesting parts, but it looks to be true. Wonder how Gnutella will handle the growth spike.
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Morpheus DOS'd and Moving to Gnutella More

Morpheus DOS'd and Moving to Gnutella

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  • Sounds to me . . . (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonynnous Coward ( 557984 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:14AM (#3097574)
    . . . more like a convenient way to claim a third party was threatening their existence than to admit that a central server based, closed authentication system was very vulnerable to legal attacks, as the *AA have demonstrated to them.

    This move to Gnutella allows them to survive and to purport to offer a distinct file sharing product. Perhaps this will lead to some enhancements that make it back to Gnutella, since without the central login servers, they have no reason to repeat their forcing out of open source clients.

    Gnutella + bandwidth aggregation = good.

    • Gnutella + bandwidth aggregation = good.


      Hardly.

      There was a recent story posted on /. that demonstrated mathematically that Gnutella type networks cannot achieve the numbers of clients or transfers they claim. Do do so would suck up all the internet bandwidth, rendering the internet useless to all.

    • According to their previous press release [gnutella.com] back in December, they were planning to merge the FastTrack and Gnutella network somehow in their 2.0 release.
    • I don't think they faked the attacks.
      I have been using Morpheus the past week and the service was slow and sometimes you couldn't connect at all. The program gave strange errors like "you need to update your program to the new version" (There is no new official version yet). It worked fine on my other machine though. The musiccity website was down also. So I kind of thinks they really got DOSed, that's the feeling I get from what I saw.
  • what's up with this?

    a couple of months ago the rebol site announced
    that version 2.0 of morpheus would be based
    on their language and i thought it was very interesting
    and i have seen no one mention it since!..

    it's still on rebol.com's homepage..
    • Being able to type in an album and having the search find all the songs, download it automatically, organize them into folders and create a playlist.

      Automation is the key. If this process could be stored as a command of some sort and sent to other peoples computers so that when you log off or shut off your machine the computers can search for and find all the files while your computer is off,then the location of the files be sent to you when your computer is turned on again.

      I think rebol sounds interesting, Scripting sounds cool, i think automation is something that would take file sharing to the next level.

      Not just automation, but perhaps an ability to use AI to figure out the type of music a user likes and doesnt like, and somehow use this improve search results for the music the user likes.

      Like connecting to a network of all techno because the user downloads mostly techno, and have hundreds of little subnetworks created based on the music files people have on their computers.

      so if you have mostly techno you connect to a group of techno networks, if you have mostly rap you connect to mostly rap networks.

      Small networks of say, a few thousand users each while they may be somewhat centralized in nature, if theres enough of these networks its not like anyone would be able to stop it, and it wouldnt be morphues hosting it, it would be the users themselves.

      maybw almost like direct connect or hotline, but your connection to these networks would be based on what you search for usually. If you search for many diffrent types of music you'll connect to some general network.
      Music companies who would try to check up on whats on the network would most likely search from as wide a range as possible using some program or script, and would connect to a general network.

      I dont know its just an idea and i have no idea how to technically do it, but something similar to how winMX works, using AI to discover the servers based on what users like, the discovery process would be whats automated
  • ... by making it a DDoS! You know, because DDoS just *looks* better than DoS. :p

  • an icky framed page? (Score:5, Funny)

    by scamcdan ( 300729 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:15AM (#3097581)
    who writes like this?? was it gross and cootie-filled too?

  • What about the others? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Cirvam ( 216911 )
    What about the other programs that use the FastTrack network? They all look the same, and aside from using a diffrent plugin for the ads, I would thing that the networking protocol would be similer so this could affect them also.

    Also can anyone confirm that it does change the registry settings? Seems kinda farfetched even for just a file sharing program unless there were huge undisclosed security holes.
    • According to the Morpheus press release, the DOS attack targeted their ad servers, not the FastTrack network itself.
    • My impression was that the company that runs the FastTrak network that Kazaa and Morpheus both share decided to cut out Morpheus. A few days ago when I tried to go on Morpheus, I couldn't connect, and there was this message along the lines of "some of our technology partners have made changes that disable current versions of Morpheus." Nothing about a hacker attack...

      Maybe Kazaa paid the FastTrak people to do it or something.

      Whatever you do, don't switch to Kazaa. It is filled with Spyware, they are assholes.

      Tim

  • Pointless vandalism (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is just stupid. You would think that Morpheus is something hackers like, being a gateway to all kinds of illicit things. Instead, they are doing the equivalent of vandalizing their own house. Stupid kids.
    • You would think that Morpheus is something hackers like, being a gateway to all kinds of illicit things. Instead, they are doing the equivalent of vandalizing their own house. Stupid kids.

      it wasn't "kids" at all. The "virus" was kazaa taking back their revenue stream through a propagating back door.
  • So who thinks this was done by the RIAA? ;)

  • Grokster w/o spyware (Score:5, Informative)

    by 3ryon ( 415000 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:16AM (#3097590)
    For the many people (myself included) who are now looking for a different FastTrack client check out this execellent page on how to install Grokster without spyware [project-insomnia.com].

  • but is gnutella really better ? ymmv , but my experience has been that its far from effective....in getting requested relevant info

    also iirc gnutella hsa `viral nodes` which can be injected into the network...wonder how that will affect the scenario here

  • Unframed (Score:4, Informative)

    by GSV NegotiableEthics ( 560121 ) <autecfmuk001@sneakemail.com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:17AM (#3097595) Homepage
    Click here [musiccity.com] for the unframed version. After a very brief introduction, the main story is here. [musiccity.com]

  • Gnucleus... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Canis ( 9360 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:17AM (#3097596)
    Morpheus Preview Edition is basically just Gnucleus [gnucleus.net], which is a GPL'd Gnutella client for Windows. So you might as well just use Gnucleus -- it's got all the same features (plus some Morpheus PE doesn't appear to have yet -- I guess they must've forked off an earlier version).

    Better still, Gnuclues doesn't have banner adverts, let alone (ick) popups.

    • Re:Gnucleus... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jamesbarlow ( 169861 )
      The thing is, at any given moment, you have about 600,000 users [musiccity.com] connected to the Morpheus network. And they were averaging about a million downloads a week.

      So, whatever protocol Morpheus decides to use will suddenly have millions of people on it.

      I like the gnutella network, and in fact I really like how in accessing it, Morpheus is using its 'supernode' technology (only computers that meet certain speed/connection requirements become nodes). Searches are faster, because you're not waiting on someone with a 56k dialup to process your search request before he passes it on. (by the way, I hear that BearShare is going to, or has already started, implementing this same idea to help stabalize the gnutella network)

      But my main point is this: whatever network Morpheus decides to use, be it fast track, gnutella, something else, or a combination, there will instantly be a large amount of shared files on said network.

      So, in my interest of finding the maximum number of DivX movies possible, I think I'll probably stick with Morpheus for the time being.

      I do hate the damn popus, though.

  • Gnutella is Toasting better every day (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cameronk ( 187272 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:22AM (#3097603) Homepage
    As a longtime Gnugella user, I will be happy to see Morpheus users join the network. Per Metcalfe's law [smsu.edu], this should make our network much more valuable. The past few revisions of the Limewire [limewire.com] client in particular have made the service much more responsive. Although the experience has not yet surpassed Napster's brightest hour, given a few more months there will be no reason for that original fileshareing service to return. The limewire folks have even opensourced their client. Now, if only half the people reading this comment could pitch in [limewire.com]...
    • While I certianlly do support more consolidation on the filesharing front (anything to stymie the RIAA/MPAA cartel), I think that a supporters of P2P conducting DOS attacks against each other is a little counterproductive. Yes, in this case it seems to have been effective at stimulating an increase in the network effects of the Gnutella system, but I worry that future attacks will only damage the usefulness of the system. We have enough to worry about what with the SSSCA.

  • Not good for other FastTrack clients (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Constrain_Me ( 551193 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:22AM (#3097604) Homepage Journal
    Stating the obvious Having the userbase from Morpheus off FastTrack will cut the ammout of files available to oter FastTrack clients like KaZaa, thus decreasing their popularity, and possibly forcing them to move to a new network. If Gnutella scales well, it would be a good thing, if it doesn't...
  • I'm a little confused. Are they saying that the morpheus client allowed a 3rd party access to my registry settings?

  • Gnutella? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Evro ( 18923 ) <evandhoffman AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:26AM (#3097619) Homepage Journal
    I wonder why they don't use the giFT [sourceforge.net] network.
    What is giFT, you ask? giFT is an acronym which stands for the GNU Internet File Transfer project. This project is an initiative to attempt to unify the divided peer-to-peer community following Napster's demise. The basic underlying concept of giFT is that there should be no direct connection between the user interface preferred by the user, and the back-end protocol. This is tackled using a collection of several components together:


    src/
    The giFT daemon acts as a "bridge" between multiple backend file sharing protocols, exposing them to the end developer in an easy to understand XML-like interface protocol. Yes, I know what you're thinking "hey, that sounds a lot like Jabber!". Well, you're partly correct. Jabber worked by setting up a finite number of translation servers on the Internet, requiring the user to authenticate with one extra remote server in order to take advantage of this technology. We feel that the task would be better handled by a local daemon that acts transparently to the user, feeding the benefits solely to the developer. The giFT team believes that the best way to improve the state of file sharing on the Internet is to allow developers to take on the complex (and unique) tasks specific to their project, rather than re-inventing the wheel that each interface and network must have.

    OpenFT/
    OpenFT is a p2p network designed to exploit all the functionality giFT supports. Loosely based on FastTrack's design, OpenFT aims to become the new pseudo standard in file trading on the Internet, but we'll settle for Total World Domination.

    • Re:Gnutella? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by suwain_2 ( 260792 )
      I was looking at gift a while ago... I went into IRC to ask for some help with getting it working, only to be told by one of the developers that gift no longer works.

      So, the short answer to your question is that it's because gift doesn't work anymore. :(

      • Re:Gnutella? (Score:4, Informative)

        by cduffy ( 652 ) <charles+slashdot@dyfis.net> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:42PM (#3097874)
        giFT no longer accesses the FastTrack network. It currently accesses the OpenFT network just fine.
        • Yes, and after FastTrack's little stunt with Morpheus causes the Federal Government to look at it and go, "Uhm, yeah, right, you don't have any control over your network. That's real good, tell us another one" and pull a Napster on it, giFT will be what we have left. And it'll still be better than Gnutella, because despite Limewire's patching and fixing, the network just doesn't scale that well.

          Unlike FastTrack, which is run by a company looking to turn a profit, and thus is readily attackable through the courts, giFT (OpenFT) will be completely decentralized and user-to-user, just the way FastTrack claimed to be. They might attack the people who distribute the software, but as deCSS showed, there'll always be mirror sites.

          At this moment, I see 65 people on OpenFT, sharing 64,042 files totalling 399.0 gigabytes. Granted, that's not an awful lot compared to FastTrack, but then, there isn't a working FastTrack client for Linux anymore, so you take what you can get. And of course, the more people share, the more stuff there'll be to search through. And sooner or later, there will be Windows & Mac OpenFT clients.

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

        by qwkbrnfox ( 559919 )
        I was following the development of giFT for a long time. There was a change of leadership recently, and quite a bit of turmoil. The new leaders are a little, er, touchy (check the sourceforge messages - some of them are pretty funny) However, there is now a totally usable (if not feature-rich) front end for giFT.I'm still using gnutella because of the bigger base, but I'm going to make a point of leaving a giFT daemon running. Give it a try - it looks like a good protocol, and it's dead easy to install (use the CVS, follow the instructions) and let run in the background.
  • I'm a gnu/linux user that used to use windows. One thing I missed very much from windows was the ability to run Morpheus. I had to use my brothers windows pc to use Morpheus if what I wanted wasn't available to gnutella.
    I've already noticed that there is more traffic in gnutella through the Limewire client. This could be the end for all proprietary file-sharing protocols including Napster.
    Good riddance!

    • The best decentralized file sharing ive used is WinMX also known as openNAP or Napigator.

      Making a program which works like this, but using an automated way to generate subnetworks instead of having users create them.

      Imagine connecting to a general network.

      Once you connect you search for MUSIC.
      This connects you to a general music network.

      You dont search for just music but jazz music.
      This connects you to a group of other people who also search for and have alot of jazz music on their computer. So you connect to the jazz nodes.
      By breaking networks up into groups, just like in the real world people with the same interests, they form cliques, clubs, groups, a network in my opinon would be best if using AI it created networks and subnetworks within them based on what groups of users like.

      You like jazz, rock and rap, and this is what the majority of your files are, this can be calculated via fuzzy logic that you like mostly these 3 types off music, so you become part of one of, or all of these 3 networks. The AI also watches for what you search for alot, and connects you to networks based on that. Because you dont really know what networks you are connecting to it seems very decentralized.

      Gnutallas problem is it connects everyone to everyone, perhaps creating small groups, and then connecting these small groups to each other would be best.

      The person with the fastest connections will help in hosting the lists of nodes on a subnetwork.

      The company, simply has to connect people to the main networks such as Jazz, Rap, Rock from which the subnetworks get formed by the users, and leeches connect to the subnetwork host nodes.

      I dont know if this would work, its not like i tested it, but hotline does something similar just not in a very good way.

  • a funny quote (Score:2, Interesting)

    by C_nemo ( 520601 )

    "This unprovoked attack is being carefully investigated, as it appears that federal laws may have been violated. We are still attempting to discover who would want to eliminate the community of millions of consumers who are using the Morpheus software product to connect with other users around the world."

    the RIAA anyone?

    interesting that prior to this teir start page was
    assuring users that "rumours" of a security hole in Morpehus was false. appaerntly it allowed others to change your registry settings...

  • Stop being a bunch of doubting Thomases. Gnutella works. Those who don't contribute, doubt. Ritter's been discounted numerously, so don't bother bootstrapping from that.

    Gene
  • ...but I was never able to actually try it: it wouldn't work through my firewall, and I couldn't ever find any doc on just what holes to open up.
    • ...but I was never able to actually try it: it wouldn't work through my firewall, and I couldn't ever find any doc on just what holes to open up.

      It's always worked fine through the Linux-based firewalls I set up, though a smaller group of files will be available than if you can forward the appropriate port (I think it's 1214) to the machine that's running the client.

  • I like gnutella, but the problem with gnutella is the relative lack of people actually using it. Compare the, what, 5,000? 7,000? hosts normally connected to gnutella to the 600,000 hosts normally connected to Morpheus/Kazaa/??. The much-lower number of users means a much lower number of files available.

    I tended to fire up Win4Lin and use Morpheus, simply to have access to the greater file selection available on that network. If Music City is able to move their Morpheus users over to Gnutella, I won't have to worry about that any more. Even if only 40,000-50,000 people move over, that still dramatically increases the number and types of files available via gnutella.

    And we won't have to use a crappy Windows Morpheus client. Qtella will instantly gain access to those files.

    If the gnutella network can handle the load, it sounds like a win-win situtation to me!

    • Re:Excellent, if the gnutella network can scale... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jilles ( 20976 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:17PM (#3097763) Homepage
      It's doing fine so far.

      If you go to the limewire site, click on the "network size" menu option and than the "historical", you will get a nice graph of the gnutella network size. You will notice two significant increases in network size over the past few months.

      The first one occured when limewire released their 2.0 client with super peer functionality. Essentially this eliminated most of the scalability issues. The second little bump occured when morpheus released their gnutella client yesterday.

      Right now the graph indicates over 200K nodes in the network. I'm connected to it using the limewire client. I consider this to be one of the best gnutella GUIs but luckily there's plenty of alternatives for those who don't like it.

      Two notable features are missing however (also in the new morpheus client): Browsing someone else's files (like napster used to be able to do, morpheus consistently crashed if I tried to use this feature) and displaying/searching meta information (like album or song name).

      The first feature would require a change to the protocol. Limewire tried to implement it using download slots but generally there are not enough available for this to work. The second feature requires some standard way of handling queries (right now it is unspecified what a gnutella client should do with a query).

  • My Impressions (Score:4, Informative)

    by Master Of Ninja ( 521917 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:41AM (#3097659)
    I got the new Morpehus client and it does seem to be a less "polished" client (proabably as it is a knocked off version of Gnutella shipped out in a hurry). The system seems quite good (as I have not used Gnutella much) but I think it will take a few days for traffic to pick up to its usual levels. The UI needs to be changed a wee bit as it is slightly confusing. I'm sure multi-source downloads are in (although you can't tell what each source is doing like before) but I'm not sure if their supernode feature is still there. They need the quick filter system in where you can select what media to search for (e.g. music, video, documents).

    One thing that is lacking in Gnutella is metadata - when downloading songs you can't tell how long they are, what album they are from (important when there are many different versions of a song - radio/street/2 step edits etc.), and comments about this. Hopefully this can be added to a new spec of the Gnutella network so all companies using the standard can have a common format.

    I think this will be good for p2p and gnutella: an open standard, which will (hopefully) become better over time. If musiccity really GPLs their work with Gnucleus, everyone should be a winner.
  • While I don`t know much about the Gnutella network, I`m certain of one thing; this will cause a content split. Ok, it won`t be the great cataclysm, but it`s sure to make things a bit harder to find.

    Think about it, how many people are going to be running both clients? Spyware aside (you can disable all the Kazaa junk with a few dll wipes & registry play), both the FastTrack & Gnutella networks will end up with less content, at least for a while. I'm sure only the very determined will bother running both clients, meaning things will be a touch harder to find.

    If you look at it even now, FastTrack seems to have put up with a swamping of new users, but 1 out of 3 people aren't sharing (sitting behind a firewall? yea right..). I'm certain Morpheus isn't going to get a lot of it's defected client base back, mostly the net newbies I'd imagine, which will leave Morph' on Gnutella with it's only problems with file availability.

    I don't know, it's hard to say anything for certain; let's see how the Gnutella network handles the extra load. As long as I can find my pr0^H^H^H educational videos somewhere, I'll be happy ;)
    • Spyware aside (you can disable all the Kazaa junk with a few dll wipes & registry play), I actually could not do this with the latest version of KaZaa. AdAware found the spyware DLL and registry settings, and nicely deleted them for me. But then, when I tried to start KaZaa, I received an error, "A required component of KaZaa has been removed. KaZaa will now exit so you can re-run KaZaa setup and fix this problem." OOPS!

      Sounds to me like KaZaa is now setting up their client so it won't run if you don't run the spyware version.

      I d/led and installed this on 2/27/02, btw.

  • What's the real story here? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:47AM (#3097677) Homepage Journal
    I don't think that Morpheus is telling the whole story.

    Last week they wrote something like, "one of our software providers made updates without telling us that made Morpheus software unable to connect to the network."

    It sounds to me like FastTrack upgraded protocol versions, or something?

    I don't see why Morpheus would voluntarily move to gnutella, since gnutella is quite inferior and their new software is pretty crummy. I've been looking around their forums and everything, but I can't seem to figure out what's actually going on. Anyone know any more info?

    • Re:What's the real story here? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ckedge ( 192996 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @11:55AM (#3097695) Journal
      > I don't think that Morpheus is telling the whole story.

      No shit!! The entire explanation seems a bit wierd to me, a Software Engineer. It feels like a know-nothing higher up threw together three or four buzzwords to come up with some idiotic story.

      Look at this quote:

      According to the CEO's note, the hack involves changing registry settings on the client's machine (ouch) and rerouting the messages destined for their ad servers.

      He could just be talking about individual users who were blocking their Advertisements by using their hosts file!!!!

      This smells. Not that I'm complaining, it was nice while it lasted, and it was "free" as in beer. But now I've got 2-3 GB of partially downloaded files that are useless. (shagrined is the word.)

      Ok, next time, lets use a "free as in freedom" network that doesn't have any centralized login. Do all the uneducated schmucks out there hear me?

    • Re:What's the real story here? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:01PM (#3097712)
      There could indeed be more to this story than meets the eye. Check out this interesting post [zeropaid.com] to get an idea of some of the mysterious goings on that are allegedly behind the Morpheus switch.
    • I believe that Morpheus is telling the truth, since my personal experiences back them up. I will ramble now:

      Okay, silly man that I am, I had both Morpheus and Kazaa installed on my machine (even though, until recently, they were exactly the same.)

      So, last week, Kazaa, which is what I ordinarily used since I have a sick attraction to the color yellow, stops working well. The number of hits I get for searches drops by about a quarter, when I search successfully at all; for some reason I keep getting booted from the network and having to reconnect. "That's odd" I say to myself. Also, it proceeds to ignore the "maximum uploads" setting in my preferences, which I keep low so that other broadband users can get my files in reasonable time. Personally, I suspect that Kazaa installed some "upgrades" for itself without prompting me (or I clicked through the prompt without noticing, always a possibility); I should probably check timestamps and see. I have it set to prompt before auto-updates, but since it's ignoring some of my preferences I don't know how much I trust that.

      Out of curiosity, I start Morpheus; and I get the message about being unable to connect to the network. So, Morpheus' failure to connect seems to coincide with Kazaa's service collapse - which is exactly what I'd expect given that 90% of the users within four hops of me (New York City) use Morpheus instead of Kazaa.

      Now, I don't know about these DOS attacks / advertisement hacks. I tried to connect to Morpheus several times during this period, and none of my regsitry keys have been fiddled with, at least as far as I can tell. Ad-aware doesn't find anything wrong.

      Okay, back to the conspiracy theory. I assume that the Aussie company that bought Kazaa is trying to crowd Morpheus out. While you and I know this is stupid, to them this must make sense; they think they can get all of Morpheus' old users to switch to Kazaa, boosting their add revenues.

      Given this sort of despicable behavior on their part, I am willing to give Morpheus' the benefit of the doubt: the implication of Morpheus' comments is that someone involved in the Kazaa stack - that is to say, this Australian company that bought Kazaa - is behind whatever attacks occured.

      Personally, I want to see the contract that Morpheus entered into with Kazaa for use of their network/software.
  • I've been message board hopping, and to tell you the truth, I'm not sure the Gnutella network needs to worry about a usage spike.

    Almost all of the messages I saw posted were complaints about the new Morpheus ranging from "All of my downloads are ass slow!" and "I can't connect to any servers? What's a node?" to "This piece of shit won't even install".

    Most people on almost every message board I saw had a negative comment for the new Morpheus. Hell, I didn't see a single positive one. Most people were planning on migrating to Kazaa, and this was a group of tech-savvy people who know about the spyware in Kazaa.

    It's too bad this had to happen to Morpheus, because the Gnutella network appears to just be an all around poor method of sharing files. Sure, flame me. The ideology behind it is fine, but it's execution is less than stellar.
    • What was the name of the third service that was using the Kazaa network? Is it still around and if so, is it packed with spyware like Kazaa is?
    • I agree completely. I've attempted to use Gnutella before, with many other clients, and all I've ever met with was frustration with the network. I mean, really, my average download speed was about 3K/sec. Looks like I'll have to figure out a way to use KaZaa without them spying on me.

    • Re:The Morpheus users DON'T like this at all! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > the Gnutella network appears to just be an all
      > around poor method of sharing files

      One thing I don't think people understand is that gnutella is basically just a search mechanism with a P2P transfer afterward. Once your search is complete and you begin your download, the transfer rate depends on the upload bandwidth of other person's computer. Download speed has LITTLE to do with the program you are running.

      Also, I think trying to use gnutella over a modem is relatively painful, because of the lack of bandwidth. When using a 56K modem, downloads go about half the speed because the gnutella protocol takes 1 or 2 kbps. When using DSL, the bandwidth used by the gnutella protocol is almost negligable.

      As of a month or two ago, I've now downloaded more material from the gnutella network than I ever did from Napster. Napster functioned better, I agree, but Bearshare/Limewire/etc. all get the job done quite well.
  • The good news in all of this is that morpheus will be giving up the proprietary FastTrack network for a Gnutella based filsharing system.

    Woo-hoo! This means I won't have to build a Windows box just to get those Family Guy episodes I wanted.

    Assuming, of course, that its _the_ Gnutella network and not something running a similar protocol.

    --saint
  • Ungrateful bastards.

  • GPL Violation? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Majix ( 139279 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:04PM (#3097724) Homepage
    I just tried the new version... Morpheus Preview Edition is basically an old version of the GPL'ed program Gnucleus [gnucleus.net]. When you install it even displays the GPL as the click-through license.

    They're however not providing the source, not yet at least. The Gnucleus developers claim that Morpheus didn't even bother contacting them before doing this.
    • Granted that the source needs to be disclosed; but Morpheus has no obligation under the GPL to tell the Gnucleus developers about what they're doing.

    • Re:GPL Violation? (Score:2, Informative)

      by manly_15 ( 447559 )
      The source code is avalible here [musiccity.com] If you can't follow the link, go to musiccity.com [musiccity.com] and click on 'source code' in the bottom left frame.

  • Sharman Networks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by drwiii ( 434 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:07PM (#3097731) Homepage
    Based on the tone of what I've read from both sides, this seems to be more of a corporate fall-out between MusicCity/Morpheus and Sharman/Kazaa than anything else.

    MusicCity used Sharman's network and was recently locked out for some reason. One has to wonder why.

  • Some experiences with the "new" Morpheus Preview (Score:5, Interesting)

    by isdnip ( 49656 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:11PM (#3097741)
    Like most others here, I'm very curious about what really happened to Streamcast's Morpheus network. But in practical terms, I settled for trying for the new "Preview Edition". The Musiccity web site last night said that it would be available "in two hours" and indeed after that page was unchanged for more than two hours, the new edition was on Download.com. I had been thinking about rebooting into Linux but this gave me another reason to stay in Windows. That and my kids' wanting to play more Jimmy Neutron this morning.... The new client is really Gnucleus -- if you mouse over the "M" logo in the Tray, that's what it shows. The client is much more primitive than the old FastTrack one. It doesn't include an integral player, so you can't listen to files as they upload, unless maybe you have WinAmp or something running. It gives no clue about who the other end of a file is, so you can't choose one that's more likely to work, and it doesn't report the MP3 bit rate or ID3 info that you can usually see inside the FastTrack client. The failure rate is high -- most attempts to download just quit after ten seconds, though some wait and Retry and a few actually work. FastTrack was much more reliable in that regard. It also keeps popping up Internet Exploder windows. That's really annoying; I rarely use IE (only for "IE only" sites). It's mostly ads, I'm sure, but the current popups don't even work, causing another annoying distraction. Being Gnutella based, it probably has scaling problems. I'm on a broadband link, which helps, but I know about the basic math problem with Gnutella's original architecture and I don't know what has been done to fix it, in Gnucleus, Limewire or whatever. Again, FastTrack worked really well, and I hope they can merge its best concepts with Gnutella. I realize they had to get this out in a hurry. It's only a "Preview" so it shouldn't be viewed as a finished product. But it does weaken the competitive position of Morpheus.
  • We are still attempting to discover who would want to eliminate the community of millions of consumers who are using the Morpheus software product to connect with other users around the world.

    Off had I would suspect chaos agents of the music industry [foxnews.com], who have been doing things the wrong way for a long time.

    But this is just idle, unfounded speculation

    Right.

    Since it appears that the attack on your computers came from the closed proprietary FastTrack-Kazaa software, we have opted not to continue with this p2p kernel.

    Which is just as well. I do note this article in newsbytes [newsbytes.com], and wonder if someone got an inside edge to fasttrack someplace.

    cloak and dagger operations indeed.

  • If you download Morpheus v3.3.3.1 (the new version) then you might notice that it now runs off the GPL license! Morpheus is now opensource! The doc legal.txt says that the source code is available from their site but there is no link up there yet, the only way to obtain the source code so far is to follow the little link that says sourcecode in the mainpage of morpheus when it boots up.
  • As I write this, I am connected using Morpheus v1.3.3 and am downloading a file from another MusicCity member. Anyone know why this is? I had no internet access for about the last week so I missed all this Morpheus madness, and now that I am back (albeit on dial-up) it seems slower (naturally) but otherwise it's all right. Even so, I'm downloading Gnucleus.
  • What no one seems to mention yet is that the new searching is bad. I left Bearshare and gnutella because I couldn't do searches on a specific type without having to manually filter them each time. As well, the fasttrack clients give a lot more information, per-user searching (for searching the high-bw users), it appears better shotgunning and restarting, etc. Everyone switched to morpheus for one reason - they hated gnutella! How is THAT going to change with this move? Someone should just make an installer to install a spyware-free version of grokster so that the masses can use it freely, then we'll see how many people flip. As well, dealing with all MC's outright lies about security - first there wasn't a prblem, now there is - and their ripoffs of clients in general makes me wonder about throwing support behind them.

  • Now I rember... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by speedfreak_5 ( 546044 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @12:48PM (#3097898) Homepage Journal
    from news.zdnet.co.uk, October 2001: "A copy of the legislation proposed by the RIAA last week would appear to have given the group broad latitude to attack file-swappers' computers without suffering any civil liability. No civil liability would result from "any impairment of the availability of data, a program, a system or information, resulting from measures taken by an owner of copyright," the proposed text read. " Speaking of hacking a computer's registry...
    • October 2001: "A copy of the legislation proposed by the RIAA last week would appear to have given the group broad latitude to attack file-swappers' computers without suffering any civil liability.

      Old news, and was reported on slashdot. Fortunatly there was a general uproar over that clause and it was never actually included in any legislation.

      -

  • MusicCity's better change its FUD, then (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EschewObfuscation ( 146674 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @01:41PM (#3098079) Journal
    From the technology section of the FAQ [musiccity.com]:

    Q: Why is it better than other distributed networks such as Gnutella?
    A: With Gnutella and similar networks, all connected computers acts as search servers on the networks. When a search query is initiated, it is sent to 2 to 4 other computers, which in turn passes the query to more computers, and so on. Effectively, each search query traverses the entire network. This creates a huge amount of traffic. Clients on slower connections (such as modem dial-ups) cannot keep up with this amount of traffic, which slows down the entire search process.

    Seriously, I'm a fan of Morpheus, I just thought this was kinda finny...
    • Ironicaly enough, Gnutella's search model does suck. If we've leaned anything about P2P it's that bandwidth is golden, yet gnutella wastes ungodly amounts of bandwidth routing searches. The fact that the amount of bandwidth used at every servlet for searches is directly proportional to the total servlets on the network means gnutella scales teribly.

      Fasttrack has the right idea for searches, idealy you have some servlets which are dedicated to chaching share lists and routing searches. Once you get a small(er) number of servlets handling searches, each of which handles a few hundered of the sharing servlet's share lists, and routing them between each other you get much more efficient use of bandwidth since each time the search is passed over the net it gets searched against several hundered users' share lists instead of just one.

  • READ THIS NOW (Score:5, Informative)

    by billybob ( 18401 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @01:57PM (#3098142)
    What's really happening [zeropaid.com] (probably).

    I was one of the people who installed kazaa, and after readnig that, it is getting immediately uninstalled.
  • The released it, here it is:
    http://start.musiccity.com/source/mpesrc1.zip [musiccity.com]

  • I'm not sure it really bothers me that they were using a proprietary network protocol on Morpheus. Having used both Morpheus and Limewire I found Morpheus was significantly faster.

    I'm not some Anti-Java Troll either, I believe the difference was in the network protocol and search efficiency.

    This isn't to say Limewire was bad though, and with the Sun JVM 1.4 the mousewheel works right on Win32 systems (at last). So farewell Morpheus, I guess?
  • Didn't Morpheus recently post that the reports of a security hole in their product were false? Now apparently they are admitting to a security hole of massive proporations. I mean, having anybody on the Internet change the *registry* settings on my computer is a huge flaw. Doesn't this concern anyone?

  • Xolox, still the best GNUtella client (Score:3, Informative)

    by Jagasian ( 129329 ) on Saturday March 02, 2002 @04:15PM (#3098691)
    I highly recommend Xolox [zeropaid.com] to anyone that can run Windows applications and uses GNUtella (haven't tried using it with Wine yet, could work). Xolox supports swarming, segmented downloading, resuming, automatic mirror searching, etc...

    Xolox makes GNUtella useful! Trust me, you will find what you are looking for with Xolox, and you will be able to download it very quickly. Other clients lack swarming, which causes downloads to be a slow unreliable gamble, but with swarming, when you select to download a file, Xolox automatically searches for other peers that are sharing the same file - then Xolox downloads parts of the file concurrently from several peers. This allows for you to get maximum use of your broadband net connection. Furthermore, if you are downloading a file, and for some reason all of the peers that you were downloading from disconnect, Xolox searches for new peers with the file and resume the download were it left off. All of this is automatic, transparent, and very user-friendly.

    While the company that made Xolox went under due to legal issues, a cracked version is available from the popular P2P site Zeropaid [zeropaid.com]. Check it out! It's free, and it's useful.
  • The hacked-in ad server is "ads.riaa.org"

  • Maybe we ought to boycott Kazaa (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheOnlyCoolTim ( 264997 ) <tim...bolbrock@@@verizon...net> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @05:58PM (#3099041)
    First off they have spyware anyway.

    Second off it seems that they utilized the nature of the fasttrack network to basically kick all Morpheus users off and try and make them switch to Kazaa. Rat bastards.

    Personally I think instead of switching to Gnutella Morpheus should have come out with a new version that isn't affected by the attack from Kazaa, and fucks over Kazaa clients too.

    They could have got into a war coming out with new versions that would screw over the other company's client.

    But I guess they didn't want a fight so they're leaving the FastTrack network.

    Personally I wonder what the creators of the FastTrack network have to do with this...

    Anyway, don't use Kazaa. Spyware, and DOS attack.

    Tim

  • E-Mail for Kazaa (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheOnlyCoolTim ( 264997 ) <tim...bolbrock@@@verizon...net> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @06:01PM (#3099054)
    info@kazaa.net

    press@kazaa.net

    If you haven't read any other comments or articles, Kazaa is responsible for taking Morpheus off the network they shared through some sort of semi-viral attack. Let them know how you feel.

  • Now what? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ImaLamer ( 260199 ) <john@lamar.gmail@com> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @06:43PM (#3099186) Homepage Journal
    Now what do I do with these gig's of files that I was downloading before the network went offline.

    Seriously gigs of Bang Bus.

  • GOOD news?!? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Wonko42 ( 29194 ) <ryan+slashdot@[ ]ko.com ['won' in gap]> on Saturday March 02, 2002 @06:44PM (#3099190) Homepage
    The good news in all of this is that morpheus will be giving up the proprietary FastTrack network for a Gnutella based filsharing system.

    How exactly is this good news? Have you used the Gnutella network recently? The larger it gets, the more it sucks. It does not scale well at all. Gnutella often sucks down more of my bandwidth just dealing with other peoples' searches than it does downloading the files I want. And finding the files I want is another matter altogether -- even if I do find a file named "Funk Soul Brother.mp3", I have absolutely no way of knowing whether it's really Fatboy Slim or just some renamed Enya track.

    I love the FastTrack network, proprietary or not. It's got all the good bits of Gnutella without most of the bad bits. My bandwidth isn't sucked up by searches, and I can almost always find exactly what I want with one search. Furthermore, the amount of information it gives me on each file enables me to be pretty certain that I'm getting what I want before I start downloading it.

    I think this is sad. I liked Morpheus. Now I'll be switching to Kazaa. Oh well.

  • I just tried Gnucleus and the new Morpheus. After that I spent about half an hour in the Morpheus channel fighting with the operators. I used to recommend Morpheus to everyone but I have totally turned against them now. Morpheus can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.

    What they did is they took an open source program at http://www.gnucleus.com [gnucleus.com] and basically "stole" it, though it's legal to do so under the license it was released. They took the source code for the program, without even informing the gnucleus guys, put their own branding info on it, added popup ads, and released it as the "new" Morpheus. They added NOTHING, they just made it worse with ads, There is not a single reason to run the new Morpheus. Go with Gnucleus -- it's precisely the same program, but with the ads removed.

    Also, since the people that did Gnucleus actually are able to write their own software, Gnucleus will be the source of improvements and updates, not Morpheus.

    The channel operators on Music City are very afraid of people learning this fact. They kicked me several times for mentioning Gnucleus. Somehow they think they can supress the fact that they entirely ripped off other people's work. It's not going to happen, though, you can't hide lameness of this magnitude.

    Morpheus has discredited themselves forever as far as I'm concerned.

    Once again: go to http://www.gnucleus.com [gnucleus.com] and use their software. Delete Morpheus at once.
  • should do is rerelease a version of Morpheus that uses the technology that was state of the art when the engine was reversed by OpenFT. In exactly that period of time i got the best transfer rates, the fastest searches, the most results. That way they could take advantage of their protocol benefits (metadata and such), have an existing net to jump on and lure their followers into and a app that will whip Sharman all the wy to Tazmania and back.

    Well... it was fun while it lasted. Let's see what's next. I am still waiting for the client that incorporates them all - OpenFT, gnutella, limewire, edonkey, ...(list incomplete and some items probably redundant)

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