From: Karl Anderson (kra@monkey.org)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 11:24:04 PST
Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> writes:
> It seems however, that Napster suffers from a few design flaws:
> centralism (there is a central database, right?); it seems to produce
> cleartext traffic in certain patterns on a certain port (otherwise the
> protocol wouldn't have been reverse engineered so quickly and it would
> not be so easily detectable/blockable, as recently happening in
> certain university networks striving to conserve bandwidth). Is this
> correct?
The blocking efforts seem to be simple so far - don't resolve the
server address, block connections to the server, block connections to
the default port. The answer is to know of a friendly proxy, of
course.
http://david.weekly.org/code/napster-proxy.php3
Not that that invalidates what you said - it's only a solution to
blocking at the client end, & making napster users find proxies (which
must be hard to detect by definition) should be enough of a win for
those who want to block it. When the above page led me to
<http://proxys4all.cgi.net/>, with a list of open proxies, I thought,
whoa, I'm behind the times, I'd have thought such a collection
wouldn't have been possible since 1995 or so. Then I saw the note at
the top: as fast as they're listed they die, scan your own.
-- Karl Anderson kra@monkey.org <URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kra/>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 29 2000 - 11:00:31 PST