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

180 points| marcodiego | 4 years ago |iowastatedaily.com

180 comments

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[+] kace91|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] sandworm101|4 years ago|reply
>> ... 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.

[+] ianlevesque|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] dnfghdfgh|4 years ago|reply
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)

[+] ryandrake|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] ihusasmiiu|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] silisili|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] dleslie|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] varenc|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] sillysaurusx|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] dunce9242021|4 years ago|reply
> and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.

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

[+] marcodiego|4 years ago|reply
Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.
[+] fsckboy|4 years ago|reply
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...

[+] thunderbong|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] TheJoeMan|4 years ago|reply
“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

[+] PicassoCTs|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
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?)

[+] __Admin__|4 years ago|reply
We are busy keeping it! Join us in groups like data horders and snahp.it forums.
[+] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] lupire|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] steelframe|4 years ago|reply
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).

[+] madaxe_again|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] peterburkimsher|4 years ago|reply
Do you now work in blockchain (a descendant of P2P) or cybersecurity? That would be the best vindication :)
[+] searealist|4 years ago|reply
This has something to do with your university being conservative?
[+] poulsbohemian|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mpol|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] no_time|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] kkodaxeroo|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] barney54|4 years ago|reply
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|4 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] iszomer|4 years ago|reply
Remember the days of Wrapster?
[+] veg|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] interestica|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] LeoPanthera|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] hnrodey|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] davidmr|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] pope_meat|4 years ago|reply
The internet at the turn of the century was something special.

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

[+] codegeek|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] Borrible|4 years ago|reply
'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|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mdturnerphys|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] deusum|4 years ago|reply
Back then we were moving a terabyte a week on one Hotline Server alone. Napster was already way way more popular (and accessible).
[+] chihuahua|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] alberth|4 years ago|reply
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.

[+] easytiger|4 years ago|reply
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