Weird Al Yankovic - Oops I’m Pregnant Again (REAL).mp3
It was remarkable how much fake Weird Al music there was. Someone maintained a helpful “Not Al” list.
Misattribution killed Limewire. Downloading a song that turned out to be something different was annoying, but downloaded porn sometimes turned out to be actual CP.
Soulseek is an ad-free, spyware free, just plain free file sharing network for Windows, Mac and Linux. Our rooms, search engine and search correlation system make it easy for you to find people with similar interests, and make new discoveries!
Soulseek is very good to grab rare music and other stuff difficult to find on mainstream medias/markets
It’s good that Soulseek exists, but it’s way more finicky than LimeWire was and it’s significantly less user friendly
I’ve literally never had a problem with it.
I downloaded Nicotine, made an account, selected the folder for media, then searched for the movie I wanted and hit download. It puts the movie in the folder I selected and then once it’s downloaded i put it on my movie drive.
Frostwire is still available and it actually works better than Limewire ever did.
It was FREE.
But at what cost?
EVERYTHING!
I did download a car
Am I right in thinking that limewire and kazaa were like proto-BitTorrent ? P2P file sharing
Was Napster the original too?
Napster was the first dedicated p2p file sharing program IIRC. Peer-to-peer was done before then using DCC (direct client connection) on IRC servers, but it was hardly the same experience. Limewire and other BitTorrent software took off after the music industry killed Napster.
The brand was brought back a while later, and it was legitimate if I recall, but by that time nobody cared. BitTorrent had taken center stage, and iTunes had become a thing. The latter eclipsed BitTorrent (for music) because it was dead nuts reliable, and unlike BitTorrent, using it wouldn’t get your Internet cut off. And it was wired into the iPod ecosystem, so for most people it was a very easy choice.
Funny how, despite corporate trying it’s hardest to kill it, we’ve only managed to get better, more organized and safer with file sharing (and perhaps because of them, in many ways).
It was Metallica.
Edit: Metallica killed Napster, the others didn’t want a lawsuit, Kim Dotcom… Yeah that’s a saga
YES!!! I just want to take the normies with me.
Including NIMDA!
In 2001 my Uni’s entire campus network was shut down for 3 days to clean up a massive NIMDA infection. Wild times.
Before torrenting kicked off, this was one of the only ways you could ever get anything. And it was great!
You never hung out on IRC warez channels getting stuff by DCC or by trading dodgy FTP servers? Young whippersnapper!
Dc++ as well
Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
And when you downloaded “Yoursong.mp3.exe” you knew you were about to have the best day ever!
(To this day it amazes me how so many people don’t pay attention to file types and keeps them hidden.)
And most porn was that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off.
Fuck you for triggering that memory.
I can still hear the sounds he made.I remember actually searching that one out to see. Strange what you’ll do when you’re a teenager.
I blame Windows, as it (I believe) hid file extensions of known file types by default. Was it, because it was aesthetically more pleasing? I dunno but it sure was a hazard for the unaware user.
Their entire security model depends on knowing file extensions, but they still hide them. Even if you enable it, there are some extensions that still won’t show, like .lnk (shortcut file). You can absolutely have executable code, and therefore malware in a .lnk file.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Custom icons didn’t help either, since they could just use the default icon for the spoofed file type. Though using a different program that changed the icon would negate that and make any of them obvious.
Also helps to use a method other than double clicking the file to open it, like drag and drop. Which was my usual flow with mp3s anyways because I generally added them to my massive playlist and double clicking risked replacing my playlist (that might have not been saved in forever) with a playlist with just that single song.
I liked it when winamp added the media library. Took me forever to rate my songs, but eventually my “new song flow” was move the new album folder to the artist’s folder in my music folder then tell winamp to rescan for new files, and then import my 3+ star or unrated songs as my playlist, played on shuffle. And occasionally grab a new format plugin if the album was encoded as something new and rescan until the new songs show up. Then give any noise or gag tracks 1 or 2 stars so they don’t make it to my main list after the first listen.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Replace your double-quotes with backticks, like this:
yoursong.mp3 .exe.
While it’s super annoying for the tech savvy, and gives a great opportunity to ill willed tech people, I’m sure it was an idiot proofing move. The average user is a not-so-tech-savvy office person, having relatively fuck all knowledge on extensions, and back in the time pretty much all programs got picky when facing an unknown/unsupported extension. Your average Joe/Jolene opened ‘veryimportantspreadsheet.xls’, renamed it to ‘veryimportantspreadsheetnew’ (without the extension), and made it impossible for Excel to open it by double clicking. Then in the best case they triggered an IT support request; in the worst case they reported that the very important spreadsheet got lost/corrupted and data was lost.
Using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro
And it was GPL, so it wasn’t even copyright infringement.
I have never used Limewire, but if they had distributed binaries that you should pay for, it is a copyright infringement, even if you could technically compile it yourself. There are applications that do this and it’s compatible with GPL license.
AFAIK the GPL does not forbid selling binaries in any way. You have to provide the sources of course.
The GPL explicitly allows redistributing without charge, even if you paid for it. If they didn’t want their program redistributed, they shouldn’t have licensed it under the GPL.
These sorts of programs still exist. I use Nictotine, which is based on Medusa, but basically works like a better version of the old MP3 download programs. Good for finding obscure artists.
Soulseek is basically the same thing too, and still works.
Using LimeWire free to download LimeWire Pro. Classic.
