Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

https://www.iowastatedaily.com/napster-com-banned-at-some-universities-for-clogging-networks/article_23a8a315-cccc-5e15-9fdc-19145e034d3b.html

by marcodiego • 5 years ago

180 180 5 years ago

iowastatedaily.com

deusum• 5 years ago

Back then we were moving a terabyte a week on one Hotline Server alone. Napster was already way way more popular (and accessible).

jonstewart• 5 years ago

Ah, Hotline… 1998…

iJohnDoe2• 5 years ago

Fond memories of Hotline too.

Is there a replacement or equivalent for Hotline today?

romanhn• 5 years ago

Curious if any P2P networks existed before Hotline. I recall using it briefly before Napster burst onto the scene, and always considered it to be the pioneer.

amatecha3• 5 years ago

I'm so happy to see so many people mention Hotline in here! Aahhh the good ol' days :) Indeed, when Napster came along, it wasn't too surprising to me .. that is, other than the true p2p nature of it, rather than server/client/tracker. That was indeed awesome. But there was also a bit less accountability so you got a lot of sketchy/crappy stuff, whereas hl servers (and users) had somewhat of a reputation to uphold (IMO).

cblconfederate6• 5 years ago

Ah yeah. I thought that today everyone would run their own hotline server. Instead we have facebook

Svperstar• 5 years ago

I tried really hard to get into Hotline, I still remember the "welcome to Hotline" girl. Every hotline server I tried was either terrible or so full it was impossible to connect or use. Never had a good experience with it. Guess I wasn't in the loop enough.

codegeek• 5 years ago

Yes piracy is bad and all but as a college student, Napster was such as life saver. You could literally download any song you wanted to listen to. I also remember another application called Kazaa that was popular as well (circa 2000-2002ish)

umvi• 5 years ago

And Limewire. I remember using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro

peterburkimsher4• 5 years ago

On Windows, Audiogalaxy.

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.

firstplacelast• 5 years ago

The guy that made Kazaa went on to co-found Skype.

twodave• 5 years ago

Also this same guy managed to acquire the rights for Subspace from VIE. It was rebranded as Continuum. I started playing Subspace as a teenager on v1.34 and continued to enjoy it through college thanks in large part to Priit’s efforts. I still log in every year or so and many of the same folks still play. It wasn’t just saving a game, but a community.

iszomer2• 5 years ago

Saw plenty of DirectConnect usage while attending college..

johnebgd• 5 years ago

Internet 2 backbone campuses with DC++ were an amazing mix.

marcodiego8• 5 years ago

I don't like the use of the term "piracy". Piracy is taking a vessel. Common crimes committed by pirates are homicide, kidnapping, rape... It is all very different from copying a file to someone.

Of course, "the industry" doesn't care equating one with another.

bdcravens• 5 years ago

The term "pirate radio" came from signals being broadcast from ships without a license. When they moved inland, the term stuck around.

TheFreim• 5 years ago

I don't like this sort of argument against using the term "piracy". Words change meaning over time, what you're saying is like saying that we shouldn't call people "nice" because it used to mean something different (formerly an insult, apparently). When I hear "piracy" having grown up with computers the first thing that comes to my mind is not pirates taking control or a vessel on the high seas, but rather what pops in to my head is the pirate bay and other sites I've known over the years.

eythian• 5 years ago

Meaning "one who takes another's work without permission" first recorded 1701

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.

barney54• 5 years ago

Those were glorious days. To go from buying CDs to being able to find and download almost any song you could think of was amazing.

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.

PebblesRox• 5 years ago

Reminds me of the time I saw a bookshelf in the bedroom of my brother's friend. Half were books I loved and half were books I'd never heard of. I got some new favorite authors out of that discovery :)

iszomer2• 5 years ago

Remember the days of Wrapster?

chihuahua• 5 years ago

Those were exciting times. I had dialup internet access back then. I spent a day hanging out with a friend who had a cable modem, downloading music all day long.

torben-friis2• 5 years ago

There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information.

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.

ianlevesque• 5 years ago

Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.

grensley• 5 years ago

"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company.

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.

analog312• 5 years ago

Granted what I'm talking about is far below the level of the major music labels, but I still buy music on CD. Then I rip it to my network drive when I get home. The reason is that my family is into music that's way off the mainstream, and we've asked the musicians directly: "Which way of buying your music nets you the most actual money?" The answer is still buying their CD.

I'm a musician myself but have no interest in recording or selling music.

RealityVoid• 5 years ago

I think it's ripe for it yet again.

__Admin__• 5 years ago

We are busy keeping it! Join us in groups like data horders and snahp.it forums.

marcodiego8• 5 years ago

Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.

peterburkimsher4• 5 years ago

I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song.

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.

dnfghdfgh• 5 years ago

The content you readily have access to now is far far more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use.

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)

VortexDream• 5 years ago

The tools around Usenet are amazing and easily blow any legal offering out of the water. I don't currently use it, but when I did years ago, it was fairly easy to setup a completely automated system to download any shows/movies I'm interested in at the right quality level and make them available to me within minutes of release. I still miss it and with the increase of competing services I've gravitated more towards piracy than I have since my Usenet days.

dunce9242021• 5 years ago

and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.

because you don't actually "have" the files.

silisili• 5 years ago

I agree. Thinking about it, probably to do with discovery. In those days, the idea of just mindlessly flipping through content didn't really exist, except on TV or radio. So we had to ask for recs, google for top charts and new albums, etc to know what to find, specifically.

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.

thunderbong• 5 years ago

I too feel the same way.

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.

fsckboy• 5 years ago

what was that service in the post-Napster world, it was sort of exclusive, very well curated (so to speak), you needed an invite to join, even music industry insiders used it, described by Trent Reznor as the "world's greatest record store"... till it got shut down.

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...

lupire• 5 years ago

It's because going from 100 songs to 10K is more of an experience than going from 10K to 1M. A human can only listen to a limited number of songs.

Also, you were 20years younger and so were more enthralled by novelty.

dleslie• 5 years ago

The only music services that I find provides a similar experience to the discovery experience within Napster are Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Both encourage you to "snoop" at other users' collections, and provide an enormous range of independent and esoteric music.

hellbannedguy2• 5 years ago

Napster, and The Pirate Bay, were my best years on the internet.

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.

rcpt• 5 years ago

Silk Road tho

sillysaurusx3• 5 years ago

It's because you were younger. It happens to everyone.

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.

BitAstronaut• 5 years ago

They have never downloaded a video off Napster or Limewire and realized it's actually... well, not the video they wanted.

hellbannedguy2• 5 years ago

We were stealing, and it felt good at the time.

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?

cblconfederate6• 5 years ago

respectfully disagree. i remember also things before the internet of 2000, like TV, but not fondly at all. and in my mind somewhere around 2004 things strayed from the linear progress i had in mind for the future of the internet.

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

varenc• 5 years ago

Modern forms of pirating still exist give you far more control over how you use the content. I’ll pirate something I’ve bought just so I can fix the subtitle syncing issues that for some reason plague streaming services.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

> ... to digital abundance.

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.

nitrogen3• 5 years ago

No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster.

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.

mustacheemperor• 5 years ago

What.CD is another unparalleled archive that is now gone for good. Rips of old beat tapes from the 90s, obscure electronica releases, all kinds of stuff that it seems won’t ever be found anywhere else.

r3trohack3r• 5 years ago

Torrent Roulette (rebranded to Taboo and disabled download by default) scratched this exact itch for me:

https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo

worrycue• 5 years ago

I wonder if we can go back to that and still compensate artists.

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.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

You got a brief, glorious whiff of what a world without artificial scarcity is like. We'll get another whiff when someone invents Star Trek style replicators, before they are also outlawed by the moneyed interests who benefit from lack of abundance.

still_grokking• 5 years ago

We have already "Star Trek style replicators", at least for information. They're called "digital computers".

But humanity isn't ready to handle that it seems.

ihusasmiiu2• 5 years ago

I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.

Scoundreller2• 5 years ago

Going to need some sauce on those private trackers, thx.

cblconfederate6• 5 years ago

far more doesnt mean far more wide range. With P2P you could browse a server for the popular, as well as a bunch of things you d never heard. And it wasnt just music, just about anything , specifically very obscure stuff. anarchist material was something often uploaded. It was like you could see the whole jungle. Google is instead a zoo.

(Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)

juangacovas• 5 years ago

You reminded me The Eye [1], an archive of stuff like that including old software and an overwhelming bunch of non-mainstream and abandoned things

[1] https://the-eye.eu/

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc)

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.

PicassoCTs• 5 years ago

There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.

TheJoeMan• 5 years ago

“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate”

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

iJohnDoe2• 5 years ago

I was like, “Is Napster still a thing?” Then I saw 2000.

LeoPanthera2• 5 years ago

Napster is still a thing as a brand, it's what RealNetworks' Rhapsody streaming service was renamed to when it was spun out of Real.

It's just another streaming service now, but I don't know anyone who uses it.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

Oh God. Anyone remember "Napster Bad"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE

LeoPanthera2• 5 years ago

I was working in IT at a large British university when Spotify launched, and we had to block certain ports because early versions of Spotify used a peer to peer swarm to reduce the load on their servers, and it was so popular with students that it was completely jamming up the network.

4lun• 5 years ago

I remember hitting something like this in my student halls. Internet provider aggressively throttled any p2p traffic.

I had to use a VPN to get Spotify to play smoothly and not repeatedly buffer when playing a song.

sn_master• 5 years ago

afaik Skype also was using peer-to-peer until Microsoft bought them.

marcodiego8• 5 years ago

I wonder if Skype would have survived had they used an open protocol.

gridder• 5 years ago

Napster chat was pretty neat as well. Pure nostalgia

steelframe• 5 years ago

When I was an undergraduate student at a conservative university back circa 2001 I had the Napster binary in my home directory because I was curious about how it worked and was doing some packet analysis in my spare time. About halfway into the semester I tried logging into my account on a lab computer to do an assignment only to get an access denied.

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).

peterburkimsher4• 5 years ago

Do you now work in blockchain (a descendant of P2P) or cybersecurity? That would be the best vindication :)

mcfedr• 5 years ago

Maybe inspired to be a competent sysadmin

searealist• 5 years ago

This has something to do with your university being conservative?

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

I’ve fond memories of repeatedly escaping punishment for breaking into the school’s network, because it was too embarrassing to them to admit that a 14 year old had owned them.

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.

archontes• 5 years ago

I had a similar experience at 12...

To their credit, my punishment was brilliant. I was removed from computer class and placed in gym.

veg• 5 years ago

Napster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head.

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.

marcodiego8• 5 years ago

I think p2p was so successful that the music industry had to change. They had to be more convenient or would lose all the control on media distribution. Users of modern streaming services owe a lot to p2p users of early.

Evidence: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/...

geoduck14• 5 years ago

Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof.

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

ativzzz• 5 years ago

sounds like bitcoin mining without making money

nitrogen3• 5 years ago

SETI@home: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home

That was distributed computation, but all the data was coordinated and stored centrally.

utahsaint365• 5 years ago

Without blank CDs and burners, Napster wouldn’t have happened.

tim--• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if that's true. It's more likely that without MP3 players, Napster wouldn't exist.

interestica• 5 years ago

McMaster University, 2001. Ontario, Canada. The school took a novel approach to combat this. "Rez-x" was a file sharing system that was limited to the school's subnet. It didn't prevent you from using Napster, but by providing p2p access on the local (fast!) network, people just used it instead. So, rather than blocking the main pipe, they just gave a way more appealing local option (in a time where dialup was still somewhat common).

Terr_• 5 years ago

Back in the day I remember tweaking and repackaging a Gnutella client which was preset to restricted its traffic to the university LAN.

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.)

pope_meat• 5 years ago

The internet at the turn of the century was something special.

What we have now, I don't know, feels inauthentic.

kkodaxeroo3• 5 years ago

Facebook is now using Facebook News to publish positive uplifting articles about how Facebook is a force for good in the world! In other words, pure propaganda.

kkodaxeroo3• 5 years ago

Project Amplify.

https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-is-using-news-feed-to-promo...

eterpstra• 5 years ago

I don't know why this is #1 on HN right now, but i just came here to say I was a sophomore at ISU in 2000. Go Cyclones.

Borrible• 5 years ago

'Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from.

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.

jedberg• 5 years ago

UC Berkeley used packet shaping to make Napster slow as molasses if you were downloading from someone outside the UC network (or Stanford because we had a direct connection to them). So you basically kept retrying till you found someone who was on a UC network connection and then noted their username so you could hit them up again next time.

Scoundreller2• 5 years ago

Now those vendors that perfected traffic shaping for university p2p control sell the tech to oppressive regimes. Win win!

https://masaar.net/en/sandvine-the-surveillance-octopus-in-t...

ianai• 5 years ago

I wonder if this was posted to suggest a path out of the current toxic social media.

sorenjan• 5 years ago

If it weren't for Napster and DC++, I would've bought a Minidisc player instead of an iPod.

musesum• 5 years ago

One private study on a campus network found that the distribution of titles followed a power law. A handful of songs capturing most of the volume, and then hundreds of songs with only 1 or 2 shares.

It was perplexing to find a business model that could support independant artists.

mdturnerphys• 5 years ago

I have one memory of Napster. My senior year of HS, 2000-2001, one of my teachers told me I could skip an assignment in exchange for helping her install it on her (school-owned) computer. It would make a better story if the class was Ethics, but it was pretty close--World Religions.

eredengrin• 5 years ago

I love the layers of irony here...The natural assumption to make here is it would be ironic for an ethics teacher to be using napster, but in fact the real irony (imo) is that it is in fact a very interesting ethical question when it comes to pirating. Not something I intend to discuss here but it is something interesting I think about semi-frequently.

poulsbohemian• 5 years ago

I vaguely recall there was some kind of chat built in to Napster and it was the era when people did sometimes turn off their computers and/or where in some countries they paid by the minute for internet. I recall getting a message from a German on the other side of the world that I was able to read and respond to because I just happen to speak German letting me know he was headed to bed but that he'd leave his computer on so I could finish grabbing my files. Those are the kind of quirky interactions I miss about the good old days. Likewise, the chats and email exchanges in the early 90s before this web thing came along. There were relatively few people on the internet, so the signal to noise was strong and it was easy to connect with experts.

no_time• 5 years ago

μTorrent had(has?) a chat feature as well. Quite sad that on public trackers like mininova it was basically the place where everyone would write SEED PLS and not much else.

mpol• 5 years ago

Ah, yes, chatting on Napster :) It was just IRC with DC, while the GUI was mostly built around the DC.

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.

kkodaxeroo3• 5 years ago

And here you are on Hacker News, chatting with thousands of the smartest people in the world. This is the kind of quirky interaction you should be enjoying Right Now.

bitwize• 5 years ago

Whippersnappers! I remember the post to the homepage of the emulation group Damaged Cybernetics, that said "We are investigating the use of MPEG Layer III compression for music piracy."

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.

davidmr• 5 years ago

Many long years ago now in a past life, I was a network security guy for a big research university. Overall, that was a pretty fun job: universities make for a target rich environment. The downside was we that we were responsible for handling DMCA complaints to the university (this was a relatively new law and p2p sharing was just starting to become mainstream).

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.

martyvis• 5 years ago

Back in the early 2000s we were consulting to a lot of universities and other organisations seeking solutions for this. We were helping them deploy middle boxes such as those from Packetshaper, F5 and the like. And because universities had a "no censorship" expectation from academics and students, what the IT administrators liked was the ability to detect and shape the traffic that was considered hogging bandwidth needlessly. That way they weren't blocking Napster, LimeWire, and the like but just slowing it down so that miscreants went home and used their own ISP connection rather than the organisation.

cblconfederate6• 5 years ago

I wonder when the current digital behemoths will be disrupted by pirates again

hnrodey• 5 years ago

Circa 2002, Penn State limited each on-campus student connection to (my memory is fuzzy so don't hold me to exact numbers) 1.5GB combined upload and download per week. But, anything transferred within the Penn State network did not count towards the cap. This is where I should say that Penn State has 12+ campuses spread throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania so we could transfer stuff between Erie, PA and State College, PA for no penalty.

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.

ipunchghosts• 5 years ago

Fuck I remember this!!!! There was dc hub off campus in 2003 because they had shut them down internally. It was a genius solution. The hub was dc.kicks-ass.net! You connected to this url to get the file lists and then no penalties to transfer the data in between dorms!

vessel• 5 years ago

Was this the birth of i2hub?

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.

easytiger2• 5 years ago

I recall circa 1999? Tape recording a live performance of Britney Spears, "Hit Me Baby One More Time" from the Mark & Lard BBC radio 1 show by the UK indie band Travis.

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

crtasm4• 5 years ago

I can see a 128 mp3 that says it's from Radio1's Live Lounge, would that be it? or if that's a different show perhaps it got mistitled along the way.

easytiger2• 5 years ago

Yea i think that was the section of the show, they did it up till mid 2000s.

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

alberth2• 5 years ago

I was at college during this time. My roommate was downloading various Linux distributions and the campus IT department came to our room asking why we were using so much bandwidth and to please stop.

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.

pc86• 5 years ago

This was just a bit before my time, but I was in early HS. I still remember being curious and looking up what it would cost to have a single T3 line installed, and it was tens of thousands of dollars.

alberth2• 5 years ago

You’re not alone. I did the same and recall the cost being similar to what you mentioned.

Also brings back memories of movies like Swordfish that made being into computers cool, even though in hindsight these movies were super cheesy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordfish_(film)

cratermoon3• 5 years ago

I'm betting that all of the bandwidth consumed by Napster downloads would look laughably small today. Anyone have some numbers to run?

rrrrrrrrrrrryan2• 5 years ago

Most of the music on Napster was 128 kbps. Apple TV+ streams video at 40 Mbps.

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.

Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

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