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.
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.
I remember actually searching that one out to see. Strange what you’ll do when you’re a teenager.
Fuck you for triggering that memory.
I can still hear the sounds he made.
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.
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.
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.
Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
I once downloaded a 650MB movie in less than 10 minutes. I dont know how that was possible at the time as I had a sub 1 mbit line. I just know I went to the bathroom and came back to a downloaded movie. Always figured it was a bug of some kind on the modem as apparently the cable modem was doing the rate limiting.
Using LimeWire free to download LimeWire Pro. Classic.
SongYouWanted.mp3.txt.rar.zip.lnk.exe
Quality: 5 stars but it’s a 128mb MP3
For sure. You weren’t gonna hear the difference on your $2 headphones or the speakers connected to your monitor anyway.
Plus, file size was king. My first mp3 player (dlink dmp 90) had 16MB of internal memory and used those original SD cards for more (up to 32MB, but who could afford that?).
So 128kbps offered a really great compromise because it was still better than FM.
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was so early that most folks didn’t have the bandwidth and CPU speed to deal with decent-quality video yet, so it initially only did MP3s. I think some folks forget about it because they didn’t get into the piracy scene until they could get TV shows/movies/software etc.
No, the real problem was that Napster had central servers that could easily be taken down via litigation. Limewire was fully P2P so there was no single point of failure.
That’s why Napster went away (possibly before people late to the party had a chance to use it), but it didn’t stop it from being “the OG.”
I vividly remember spending twenty minutes downloading a single song over my 56k modem 🥲
I still have a few folders of music from Napster.
That belongs in a museum!
So do I.
We all on here pretending Napster wasn’t the OG? The transition to kazaa was painful.
Napster was feature poor though. CuteMX was much, much better and out while Napster was still running, but it closed down after Napster lost the court case. Feature set was closer to Kazaa, including filters and being able to browse a user’s shares.
They even had “Don’t Worry, be Happy” by Bob Marley.
Limewire was the rotten version of Kazaa, Kazaa lite and Bearshare. Loads of viruses and mallware. By the time Limewire was there, torrents were already so much better, but usenet has always been, and still are far superior. I pay €9,50 for usenet and download anything I want. No more streaming services, just fully automated movie and series downloads with Radarr and Sonarr. It runs on my NAS, so every morning I have new episodes downloaded, repaired, extracted, renamed and placed in the right series folders. I have more rights, better quality, no ads, better service, subtitles, log of what I watched with Kodi, I can stream what I want to watch from my NAS from all around the world.
Fuck me i haven’t thought of bearshare in 10 years
10? Only 10? Last time I used it was at least 20 years ago. I’m almost 38, I used it when I was 16. We’re old dude
Any former WinMX heads in the house?
Yes! Got a lot of mislabeled songs I ended up really liking and expanded my tastes quite a bit. Fun times
/salute. The old dev of WinMX has continued. Check out Tixati, DarkMX, and Fopnu.
Came here to mention soulseek
FUCK, YEAH!!!
Still used today for FLACs
I was using Soulseek in 2005 just before Boards of Canada put out The Campfire Headphase, and I must have grabbed a fake because the version I heard sounded nothing like them and I didn’t care for it. Many years later I would realize my mistake, and the real thing is my favorite album of theirs, but I still wonder what that fakeout album actually was.
BoC!!! 🩵🥂
Meh mule/donkey network ftw back then!
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).
YES!!! I just want to take the normies with me.
It was Metallica.
Edit: Metallica killed Napster, the others didn’t want a lawsuit, Kim Dotcom… Yeah that’s a saga
