Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 350 posts

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#121

Post by nostrademons »

brabel wrote: post #50
bawolff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think so. KaZaa was somewhat famous for implementing that feature using the non-cryptographically secure UUHash algorithm (instead of something like sha1) for better performance, which allowed trolls to insert fake file parts into your downloads.

I found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut down... https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above: "While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-downl…

Napster used a centralized server for indexing but downloads were peer-to-peer. This is what made Napster so awesome on college campuses: you could find anything, but if you chose a local peer, the actual download would happen over the college LAN at godly speeds.

Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to all connected peers, which would broadcast it to all peers that hadn't seen it yet, until somebody responded with the file and their IP and you could download directly from them. Interestingly Ethereum uses basically the same algorithm for block distribution, with some optimizations that were first published by RTM, who was one of the founders of YCombinator.

Kazaa's innovation was to split the peer space into "ordinary nodes" and "superpeers", with the observation that not all bandwidth links were equal. It would enlist hosts on high-bandwidth connections to form quasi-centralized indexing nodes to organize the network topology for all the low-bandwidth consumer nodes. It's a similar principle to how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin, or how L2s on Ethereum operate. This also made it easier to shutdown than Gnutella though, because being a superpeer made you a legal target for the RIAA.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#122

Post by internet101010 »

echelon wrote: post #82
skydhash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate it. GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.

> GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably. GenAI is just a tool. Creating unique art with unique perspectives is going to be more accessible to more people. Not everyone will put the work in, but there's a new opportunity in a world full of opportunity cost.

Yep. Imagine you are a producer that doesn't sing very well but knows exactly what you want. There are TTS VSTs that allow for custom models. You can change the key, length, modulation, etc. by just dragging the mouse along the word(s) and it integrates into your DAW like any other instrument.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#123

Post by tithe »

nostrademons wrote: post #121
brabel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut down... https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above: "While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-downl…

Napster used a centralized server for indexing but downloads were peer-to-peer. This is what made Napster so awesome on college campuses: you could find anything, but if you chose a local peer, the actual download would happen over the college LAN at godly speeds. Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to all connected peers, which would broadc…

Fun fact: Kazaa's inventors (and their P2P architecture) would later go on to build "Sky peer-to-peer" AKA Skype.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#124

Post by wiseowise »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #40

And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into…

> And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube.

Boo hoo. Let me play a song on tinniest violin in the world for them.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#126

Post by wrl »

echelon wrote: post #41
HeatrayEnjoyer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists to begin with. We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction, but instead we're automating art and interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story. G…

It's not a conscious choice. It's the fact that the convolutions that create human visual and auditory pleasure are simple signals relative to logic and reasoning. Nature itself is somehow shaped such that it is easier to create beautiful patterns than it is to engineer complex logical deductions. It is a fundamental aspect of physics and reality. Beauty is just simple patterns. We figured out that art is simple math…

> We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and law and planning not so much.

Simple math... but mostly a ton of existing human-generated art. Don't act like generative AI isn't standing on a lot of collective shoulders.

> Engineering and law and planning not so much.

Maybe OpenAI should have trained it on that first? Simple math, right?

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#127

Post by andai »

_fat_santa wrote: post #100

Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time scam that got me into it. I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the tast…

How is that a scam? You received, as promised, the ability to download infinite games for free :)

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#128

Post by andai »

ww520 wrote: post #98

Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol, an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.

That's what Limewire used right? Is that network still a thing? Last I checked it was, but full of bots that return fake files named after your exact search query.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#129

Post by jorvi »

nvarsj wrote: post #29
mmh0000 wrote: post #15

Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…

> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.

> In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.

Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#130

Post by ethbr1 »

echelon wrote: post #82
skydhash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate it. GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.

> GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably. GenAI is just a tool. Creating unique art with unique perspectives is going to be more accessible to more people. Not everyone will put the work in, but there's a new opportunity in a world full of opportunity cost.

I'd make the argument that the nature of tools drives much of mass/low-cost art (that is, the majority).

Very few people have the training and complete skill set to fully customize everything.

Consequently, the further you get away from "doing the thing" (e.g. playing an instrument) to "operating the tool that does the thing" (e.g. writing music for a player piano), the stronger impression the tool leaves on your work.

See also the corralling of c64 demos into hardware limitations. Or early electronic music vs 80s+.

Post reply on HN