Behind the P2P: Where are They Now?
Posted on March 28, 2007, under Networking, P2P.
When writing the article yesterday about backup solutions, I cleaned out a whole bunch of old software from my archives. A lot of old P2P applications that I guess I was holding onto for historical purposes. I was very intrigued with where these companies/software projects were these days. In an shameless rip from VH1’s Behind The Music and Where Are They Now I sent to find out.
Original Naspter: Ahh Napster… single handedly taking the MP3 format off of the IRC and FTP servers and into a easy to use desktop application. The surge started in college dorm rooms and soon was being use by every teenager in the United States. Just looking at the website from those days takes me back. Napster put Shawn Fanning on Time Magazine and in court rooms. Napster has shifted through many hands over the years, and is still alove and kicking and recently struck a deal with AT&T.
WinMX: Remember WinMX? Amongst the original Napster days when Shawn Fanning was on the MTV music awards in a Metallica TShirt. Long before the Bit torrent days, WinMX was one of the fastest ways to download you music and warez. Located at the now defunct www.winmx.com domain. So where is it now? Well, gone! Along with it’s FrontCode parent as well. From Wikipedia:
On September 13, 2005, Frontcode Technologies received a threatening letter from the RIAA demanding that they either implement filters to make it impossible for users to download copyrighted material from WinMX, or shut down. On September 21, 2005 the network and the WinMX homepage were officially confirmed as offline.
Grokster: Grokster, another P2P application from the good old days is interesting. The website, now in control of the studios, “logs you IP Address”and warns you about file trading on the Internet. As if this is suppose to scare you. Visiting a website is not illegal, and every website you visit logs your IP Address… they are called server logs. Anyway, Grokster was shutdown as well:
On 27 September 2006, Judge Steven Wilson of the United States District Court for the Central District of California granted summary judgment to the Plaintiffs as to StreamCast’s liability. The court rejected StreamCast’s argument that the Plaintiff need show specific instances of infringement resulting from StreamCast’s acts, holding that “Plaintiff need prove only that StreamCast distributed the product with the intent to encourage infringement.”
OpenNap: OpenNap was and still is an open source version of the original Napster server. During the whole shutting down of Napster, OpenNap servers were popping up everywhere. I really enjoyed this project, being a developer and all. I remember sifting through the source code, and learning the Napster protocol with it’s big endian - little endian ways. It was kind of cool to see similar work to what Shawn Fanning wrote way back in the day. You know Shawn’s got a copy of the original source just lying around, would love to see what that code looks like. The project is located at SourceForge but looks like it hasn’t been updated since September of 2001.
BearShare: Still seems to be around, but it has gone through it’s fair share of legal battles as well. According to Wikipedia “Since BearShare 6, the program is malware-free and cannot be used anymore to download arbitrary files. Instead, BearShare offers paid music downloads in the DRMed WMA format as well as free content in MP3 format. The free MP3 content is shared by users and is automatically verified by BearShare not to infringe. This verification is done using an acoustic filter.”
Kazaa: Kazaa was kind of the new found hope after Naspter was shutdown. Everyone migrated to Kazaa, and file trading continued. Kazaa was loaded with malware back in the day. Shareman networks settled a series of legal suits over the years. Kazaa is still offered in the 3.25 version, but copyrighted materials are no longer available on the service… not a surprise. Some of the founders and developers have moved onto other ventures.
Limewire: - Limewire was a fairly popular service, and is now open source. They even have their own blog. The service still appears to be functioning, not sure on the state of copyrighted materials.
Looking back is kind of funny now. Bit Torrent long passes any of the old methods of file sharing in speed, performance, reliability, etc. I wonder where Bit Torrent will be in five years, and if it will still be the king of P2P. It’s also kind of interesting to think that P2P applications brought spyware and adware into the mass circulation, because most of the “free” P2P applications would bundle this junk in just to make a dollar or two. I guess they didn’t make enough to cover the lawyer fees.
Well, hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane. If you have one on the list I forgot, and failed to mention let me know in the comments. And as always, I do not condone or encourage the downloading of illegal or copyrighted works - Smokey the Bear Says: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires”.
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