Morpheus Locks Out Users
 

"(CNET) - StreamCast Networks' Morpheus--a file-swapping service that many have said would be impossible for courts to shut down--shut out most of its users Tuesday, citing "technical problems." Computer users trying to log on to the service were greeted with a message telling them to upgrade their software to connect, although no newer version of the software was available. The outage immediately sparked a huge increase in traffic on alternative file-swapping services, such as Gnutella. "

A result of the "falling out"?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ocks_out_users

Wired has a good story with fresh info about the situation, including comments from Streamcast Networks chairman Steven Griffen.

It is now clear that Kazaa (aka Consumer Empowerment) played a dirty trick on Streamcast by not informing them about the coming upgrade which knocked the Morpoheus users off the FastTrack network.

Check the story, well worth reading! :tu:

- tg ;)

i think it has more to do with back room deals, license arrangements and bad feelings between consumer empowerment/sharman and streamcast than any kind of misunderstanding. especially the bad feelings part. i mean, why hasn't streamcast released v2 and broken away from from the pure fasttrack protocol? could it be that consumer empowerment threatened to cut them off if they did?

i think the whole thing has been about the tail wagging the dog, that the little-licensee morpheus got so much bigger than the parent - and then made demands. the result is the licensor saying "we don't want you to do this, if you go ahead and make this update we'll shut you out". does anyone actually believe that the codes were changed overnight and morpheus didn't know about it before hand? i think it's much more likely that it's been a threat for a long time and that threat has kept morph from releasing v2.

something happened recently that brought it to a head. in this high stakes game morpheus pushed a bit too hard perhaps and fasttrack pushed back. harder.

we'll get the update, it's probably been ready for months, but it won't connect to the fasttrack network which is what this has been about all along i think.

morpheus version 2.0 has to use gnutella now. that and perhaps an entirely new network are all that'll be left of the original morpheus, if the parties can't work things out in the next few weeks.

it's going to be like starting from scratch last april - after napster was killed - all over again. new network, new protocols, new problems. oh boy.

- js.

Have their been any discussions about what the Morpheus people might do if they implement Gnutella? There's always worry I think among the gnutella people that a client that spits out garbage that was readable only by that client would completely fuck up the whole network and all the other clients. So anyone who develops for gnutella has to be careful and work with everyone else so that the network doesn't get screwed up that way.

I'm a bit concerened that morpheus won't do that at all; and the influx of new users sending out proprietary garbage in their search terms would destroy the network for everyone else.

I don't know that much about this; just a worst-case-scenario rant.

we'll probably watch a repeat of the situation that occured with xolox, the first gnutella based application that allowed multi-sourced downloading. the "pressure" that app placed on the system (according to bearshare, for what that's worth) caused many in the gnutella camp to seriously consider locking it out of the network. it was news to me (but unfortunately not surprising) that this could be done in the first place.

what comes out of it all is the realisation that those of us who thought all these networks were centralised were right all along, in spite of the lies we were told by the companies, and that's the worst possible news file sharing advocates can receive.

it turns out that these networks couldn't be easier to shut down. just change a few lines of code at the server and it's napster part II. won't the riaa be happy about that?

- js.

JS, you've brought up very good points on your last 2 posts. I'm sure a lot user's first reaction to the message about Morpheus being too old was, "WTF, I'm completely cut off from Morpheus!"
And then the realization of the happy smiles on the RIAA's faces is apparently. This is what they have been asking and demanding all along. Morpheus just proved that they could be shut down in a snap.

Morpheus should've release verion 2.0 well before this to keep this information from being well known and proven. They had to have known this was going to happen. It would've kept the rumors of Morpheus being more of a centralized server as a rumor. Their court arguments have just lost one leg to stand on.

ok, so riddle me this, you clever people: why did Grokster come up with the exact same difficulties (failure to connect, demanding an upgrade be installed etc.) at exactly the same time?

...and it's worth noting that, although they apparently did have an upgrade ready to go, it took me two days to actually get it to d/l, and about 4 tries to install it....and finally I connected about an hour ago with the stats showing 700,000+ users online (more than I've ever seen, for whatever that's worth)....and immediately got in 8 or 10 fast d/l's....all in all, somewhat of an improvement over the old Grokster...

...so the upshot is, I don't know I'm going forwards or backwards...is this progress or not?:dz:

<Rod Steward, Rod Sterling or whatever his name is impression>Welcome to the Twlight zone<end impression>

This is all getting very strange......................:er:

An open battle between Streamcast and Kazaa/Sharman has begun...

From Music City website:



- tg ;)

"Our goal is to create the software that lets you create the network ..."

and a worthy goal it is too. so, will we ever see it?

these guys haven't scripted an original line that i can see. so far it's been nothing but the relabled work of others. first kazaa, now gnucleus. they do pick good apps tho.

- js.

....and before Kazaa it was of course OpenNap. Just before switching over to Kazaa's software they run 40 high-end OpenNap servers linked to form the biggest OpenNap network that was available at the time.

- tg ;)

Have you seen what it does when you hover the mouse over the tray icon? :doh:

how could i forget? those were the days alright. what a network! when i think of alll the tunes i neglected to look for last year, it drives me crazy...:FB:

- js.