Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)
iowastatedaily.com
iowastatedaily.com
In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.
Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.
Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.
Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).
I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights.
For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be it: live streaming, analysis, interviews, replays, highlights.
It competes directly with tv streaming, but it can do that because it has a much smaller following.
Is it as easy to steal as it used to be? I'm not even sure I know where to get torrents reliably atm. Last I knew pirate bay was always being disrupted.
And is it easy to rip stuff when the source is streamed? Like dvds, music, software is easy to copy and distribute when it was just a cd to copy and some authentication to work around.
Im totally out of the piracy loop, maybe im wrong and still as easy as getting on to pirate bay and find a decently reviewed torrent?
Its not the Napster era of finding any obscure stuff because torrents work on popularity, but should be good enough for 95% of your searches.
Besides, at this point, I believe Piratebay will survive forever.
Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).
There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).
I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.
As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.
I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.
In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.
The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.
Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.
If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.
If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.
It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.
It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.
P2P can't be 100% leeches, so the lawyers always have plenty of people to go after.
To get to the tech savvy folks, they tear down VPNs and force the hands of ISPs.
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
The search there isn't great but I find a huge % of things I'm interested in come up on a websearch for: artistname albumname bandcamp
I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.
I'm a musician myself but have no interest in recording or selling music.
I guess this depends on the genre, area, etc. But whenever I've talked to (low to mid level) musicians, live performances are basically the only way they make money.
The sale of music is so ridiculously low for them, particularly considering the low percentage of profit they get, that it might as well be considered an ad for the live performance.
There's a middle level out there. The genres I'm familiar with are things like folk, fiddling, some classical. Some of those people are good enough to travel a little bit, and have a supportive following. Sometimes a local organization will help arrange for a venue, and promote it. Those folks always have a briefcase full of CDs with them.
There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take.
I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.
It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited.
It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)
because you don't actually "have" the files.
Today it's too easy. Why research, Spotify/Netflix and the like will dump more in your face than you could handle in a lifetime.
Added to that, there's not much concept of 'building a collection' anymore. It used to be a personal point of pride. I have 3000 songs! Today the model is to just stream everything on the fly.
I think that's because not everyone had access, inclination or capability to access all that. Speeds were way lesser, bandwidth wasn't unlimited, most people were still on CDs and were more keen on converting them for the MP3 players.
Now that everyone can listen to all the music at any time using user-friendly apps, maybe it isn't as rare anymore.
Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, practically all the time, with everything standardized, be it interfaces, commerce or buzzwords/jargon.
From 'The Incredibles' - >> If everyone is special, no one is.
I think it used a pig as a mascot. Then there was an even more secret attempt to revive it
OiNK! FOUND IT!
https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-fre...
Also, you were 20years younger and so were more enthralled by novelty.
I still think The Pirate Bay was the best website ever, but for degenerate disenfranchised Pirates like myself.
I learned Watchmaking from that site, and I doubt 90% of the stuff I downloaded was copy written.
Oh yea, I ended up buying all the books I downloaded over the years.
My horology library has probally 40 books, and I ended up with a side occupation.
You think younger people now don't feel the same way you did? And that they won't wistfully be talking about the times that Youtube gave them all the content they could ever dream of?
Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it.
Yeah, those were "fun" days. I'm not sure I'd go back to them.
It would probally feel better now, but the consequences are too stiff.
It felt good to be a gangster at a time when the laws were grey, or enforcment was not as easy as today?
Ahh never mind, I don't feel like getting into it.
what has changed culturally is pseudonymity became real names, with all the baggage that comes with it, and that makes people more conservative. If you want an objective measure of that, look at the attitudes towards nudity. Nowadays, crypto is a space that brings back anonymity, and you can see all the chaos it brings with it. but chaos is mystery and people also love those
On the other hand most people wouldn't want a completely free internet. 4chan versus Reddit and the public chose Reddit.
They prominently use SSO, encourage the use of their app, and embed dozens of trackers.
They're actively trying to develop social features and get people to embed their identities.
This creates stickiness, a moat, and aids monetization.
Look to Twitter. They're forcing phone number association and blocking valid accounts from logging in without one. This will happen to Reddit too eventually.
Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.
More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
Back when broadband had just hit Seattle I ran a server on an old PowerPC
IA paraphrased quote from a user:
> I am actually signed to TVT records but it this server’s contents that enables my creativity.
These days I pay for everything, but that testament to digital freedom sticks with me.
I agree to delete all backups within 24 hours as per the internet act signed by Bill Clinton.
(The only reason is our absurd, anti-culture copyright laws)
Not that many years before the dawn of BitTorrent, I was making, mixing, and trading APEs and FLACs of self-recorded tapes (dubs, live, local) and record collections in niche communities and channels that no longer exist- bullied off the net because they didn't make money for someone else. I lost everything to hardware failure a few years later and left the scene, but I'd be thrilled to find anything from back then still circulating.
Have a music sharing service accessible via subscription. You can share anything you want including copyrighted music. If someone downloads copyrighted music from you, detected via audio fingerprinting, the service will pay the copyright holder from subscription fees - kind of like how streaming services do it now.
Granted this would require copyright holders to all buy-in but I guess we can just exclude the music of non-cooperating copyright holders from the network, again via fingerprinting, although this “restricted form” of the service will be of lesser value.
Now that I think about it, in a way, I feel YouTube has already taken up this role in the aforementioned restricted form since it publishes everything without seeking anyone’s permission and only removed stuff if there are complains.
But humanity isn't ready to handle that it seems.
(Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)
We need a The Eye for The Eye that backs up The Eye
I don't. I am tired of looking up a movie in some service I pay for and getting nothing. It doesn't matter what streaming company I choose, there's always something that just isn't there.
Music? If you stray from the mainstream path, you're on your own. Mercifully YouTube is still a respectable repository of music. There are often gaps in the playlists now but what can you do?
Back then we had instant access to everything humanity had ever created. The monopolists ruined it all and replaced it with their garbage services.
It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed
When I asked the lab assistant about it, he pulled up my info and then proceeded to lecture me on the spot about how bad I was for having that file. Note that I didn't have a single MP3 file on any school computers. "I see you have Napster. We scanned for Napster and disabled all the accounts that have it. Don't you know that stealing is wrong? You're totally in violation of school policy, are abusing our lab, and should be reported to the administration for disciplinary action. I guess I can re-enable your account if you promise to delete Napster right away."
This same school freaked out when I wrote a buffer overflow lab for a computer security class. "We will NEVER teach students how to undermine the security of computer software in THIS department!!"
This same lab assistant went on to accidentally delete everybody's home directory in the entire department with 3 weeks left in the semester (a failed attempt to write a script that correctly deletes core files from a cron job at 1:00 in the morning). And he also failed to make sure that backups were being done (they weren't).
Napster didn’t yet exist, so we were maintaining a huge (for the time) shared library of mp3s, VCDs, games, and all the rest - this proved extremely popular at boarding school, where they shut off the network and internet access at 8pm (or so they thought). We played cat and mouse for a while until we compromised the physical security of cabling, and started just splicing in, and at that point they realised they weren’t going to win.
We eventually reached a détente, where I ran a shadow network and piracy hub between 8pm and 6am, and didn’t interfere with their operations, and they didn’t interfere with mine. By the sixth form, I was helping them harden their network, with the understanding that after I left they’d allow my successor to continue to run our parasitic network - which they did, until it was voluntarily wound down in the face of obsolescence.
To their credit, my punishment was brilliant. I was removed from computer class and placed in gym.
I was sharing some music from the early times of classic heavy metal, the NWOBHM. A compilation album done by Lars Ulrich with the songs that had inspired him. One day I received a message from someone in England. He was very surprised to find a song from the band of his brother-in-law on napster. He had always thought it was a band that had amounted to nothing. A week later I chatted with the bass player or drummer (I forgot) where he talked about the band. They felt forced to either go commercial, like Def Leppard, or go thougher, like trash metal from the US. The band was divided and that is where it ended. I forgot the name of the band.
The album is now even on wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Meta...
By the way I was using a console client for linux, nap.c. Does anyone remenber that? I ran it on my 486 pc on a console. Just like virtual tty's it had virtual screens built in with search, shares, chat, etcetera.
I loved the ability to discover artists I didn’t know about by looking through people’s collections. Such a great discovery feature.
It was all illegal, but it just an amazing time.
Of course, very directly, Spotify would not exist without Napster.
But a step further, it opened the eyes to end-users about their collective power, and the beauty of distributed distribution. It was the first proof that "regular" users would buy into such a thing. Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.
Evidence: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/...
You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
You "mine" it by joining their folding@home team, and you get banano based on how many folding@home work units you complete. It's pre-mined though, so maybe that doesn't quite fit.
There was another cryptocurrency I remember which was mildly popular years ago called Primecoin, which attempted to find a certain type of prime numbers. It's interesting, but I'm not sure if it ever provided any actual usefulness from the work performed.
I don't see any reason that a cryptocurrency couldn't be tied to something like protein folding or climate simulations. People just don't choose to do so.
When bitcoin mining first became a thing, it felt like they'd found a way to make distributed computing (like the seti and protein folding projects) profitable.
That was distributed computation, but all the data was coordinated and stored centrally.
It didn't take off though: The first-mover advantage of "that one guy who runs a Direct Connect server which you can also chat on" was too strong. (I just disagreed with the centralization.)
I had to use a VPN to get Spotify to play smoothly and not repeatedly buffer when playing a song.
This lead to the rise of an internal Direct Connect network that allowed students to form our own internal file sharing network that was approximately functionally equivalent to Napster and the like.
This also lead to the complete and total network saturation of some parts the dorms where we clearly had clusters of students trying to get their download on. It's just really hard to try to understand how people will respond to available incentives; not just here but in all areas of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2hub
I remember the first time I saw a file download faster than 80mbps was using i2hub. It was 4am and I remember thinking at the time "shit, I'm gonna get flagged" and sure enough my dorm internet was disconnected the next morning. Fun times.
We'd take the complaint, check the netflow logs to verify that the IP in question really was running file sharing software at the same time, turn off the Ethernet port, report them to the Dean of Students, turn them back on after the deans talked to them, etc., etc.
My boss at the time was sick of doing the RIAA's dirty work for them (back then the RIAA was way more vigorous about enforcement than the MPAA. I don't remember why). So he decided that we were going to make a web site to give step-by-step instructions with screenshots to show how to disable file uploading in every p2p client available. We didn't care what the kids were downloading because the DMCA complaints only came in from uploads.
Fast-forward a year or so and the site is pretty popular. We'd get asked by at least one or two other universities a week if they could copy our instructions locally for their students. Being a university, of course we would encourage it and only ask for attribution for the copyrighted text and images.
Every now and then, I'd Google around and see who was using our instructions, and one day I noticed a .com show up in the results, which was unusual. I don't remember what the name of the site was, but it was some site trying to convince people that copyright infringement is bad and the music industry really are the good guys, etc. I know for sure we didn't get any requests from anyone like that, so I did some digging.
The site didn't have a DMCA contact listed (as required), so it took some serious digging to find out who really owned the site. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was owned and operated by none other than the Recording Industry Association of America. They had stolen the entire site, text, screenshots and all, removed our copyright information, and rebranded the pages, claiming the work as their own.
I dug through my email to find the most recent takedown notice they had sent us, changed all the names to reflect the current situation and fired it off to the RIAA's General Counsel. About 10m later, I got a phone call from a very concerned attorney. I genuinely couldn't stop laughing as he was talking, so I referred the matter to our attorneys and thought no more of it.
It sucks to know that your career has peaked so early. It's all been downhill from there.
What we have now, I don't know, feels inauthentic.
https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-is-using-news-feed-to-promo...
And on Mac, Poisoned! With support for FastTrack (Kazaa), Gnutella (Limewire), OpenFT, OpenNap, and eMule.
But dial-up was too slow, so it was usually quicker to repair a friend's iPod and make a backup using iPodRip or Senuti.
It soon became very clear the problems of centralization for this purpose, decentralized networks thrived. Most proprietary implementation eventually died. The open ones, emule and gnutella2, although a small shadow of what they were, are still alive.
In the meantime bittorrent evolved and the industry had to bow to streaming services.
But, if anyone still wants to "fell the napster taste", the closest I know today is soulseek. There's a good client, called nicotine+, that works very well last time I tried.
While napster's from 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815233144/http://www.audiog...
So, I think you're right. Strangely wikipedia agrees with my first thought... Maybe someone should fix it.
EDIT: audiogalaxy satellite came after napster, but audiogalaxy had a mp3 since at least may 1999.
It also had a much larger indie community than Napster. I discovered so much good music on Ag that I still listen today.
Not just that, but I've gotten back into IRC recently and there are still channels out there where you can still get individual tracks with CTCP.
Of course, "the industry" doesn't care equating one with another.
From https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate
It's not so much that words gain meanings, this word gained that meaning three hundred years ago.
I've got electric light.
And I've got second sight.
And amazing powers of observation.'
from: Nobody Home, The Wall 1979 by Pink Floyd
And today even less home with even more shit.
https://masaar.net/en/sandvine-the-surveillance-octopus-in-t...
Is there a replacement or equivalent for Hotline today?
GLoarbLine PhareRouge seems to run on Mac OS 10.13.6, but I don't know any IP addresses to connect to.
https://hotline.fandom.com/wiki/Clients
The closest spiritual successor, I suppose, would be SoulSeek.
I don’t recall Napster.com being an issue but P2P sharing sites (limewire etc) was definitely huge. And even bigger, was people setting up local file shares to allow fellow classmates to download files off your desktop.
I think our entire campus ran off of a T3 line (45 Mbps) which was stupid fast back in the day to connect to public internet.
Off topic: what ever happened to “Internet2”. There was a ton of talk about this back around this time.
Also brings back memories of movies like Swordfish that made being into computers cool, even though in hindsight these movies were super cheesy.
I later shared this on Napster after digitising from the phono in on my cyrix 333MHz PC.
I often wonder if that exact MP3 file still exists somewhere
Where are you seeing it?! They did do the song live a lot after that, but mine was from the first ever time they did it in public.
I think mark and lard did high pitched harmonies in the background if memory serves
I witnessed the dawn of the MP3 as a piracy tool and hence a cultural phenomenon. Without that post, there would be no Apple Music, no iTunes, no iPod, no Napster, none of it.
It was perplexing to find a business model that could support independant artists.
I have no idea what this means in terms of numbers, but the fact that streaming video is so common today and was virtually non-existent back then means the bandwidth consumption of the average household is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater now.
It's just another streaming service now, but I don't know anyone who uses it.