Dozens of hustlers have leaped into the Napster void with a rebellious informal network called OpenNap, designed to let rogue servers step in and provide the lists of music and Internet addresses of participating pirates that is what Napster does now.
This second wave of digital shoplifters uses software called Napigator (www.napigator.com) that scans the Internet for servers containing the same sort of lists that Napster was built upon. Users pick a server and the software runs Napster’s own search software and links the user to the new band of rogue servers. The toothpaste is definitely out of the tube.
Bad spell
It’s GnuteLLa, sucker
Uncounted music addicts who have heard in the wake of Napster’s devastating court loss that there is a judgeproof MP3 sharing system called Gnutella have mistakenly logged on to gnutela.com. Don’t do that! Misspelling Gnutella (it has two l’s, not one) can be hazardous to your mental health.
Web-savvy sellers of music have booby-trapped gnutela.com with one of those horrid browser repeaters that grabs control of your computer and loads page after page against your will, taking each new window to a different music sales site. This can so bog down your computer as to force you to lose anything you were working on in the background before you typed in that nasty URL. The proper Gnutella address is www.gnutella.wego.com. Since it is a peer-to-peer service rather than a Napster-style server, many say Gnutella is neither immoral, intoxicating or fattening. Well, eventually the courts may disagree.
Three strikes?
The Boies club
Speaking of spilled toothpaste and victims of courtroom reversals, it seems fair to mention that Napster’s losing attorney was the self-same David Boies who got whupped in the Florida courts as chief of Al Gore’s effort to get the recounts that might have made the world safe for Democrats.
A three-peat of reversals may face the ace lawyer, with the business-friendly Bush administration reviewing the Justice Department’s anti-Microsoft challenges that were led by Boies. The other post-Napster irony is that Joel Klein, the antitrust chief who hired Boies to lead the Microsoft prosecution, now is an executive at Bertelsmann, the recording giant that became the only major label owner to partner with Napster.
Healium?
Umbrella, heal thyself
Failures in the plastic resins used to hold together fabrics and also computer circuits may no longer cause PCs and Macs to fail because of a breakthrough at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that amounts to a self-healing material. The trick was to build capsules the size of human hair and filled with glue. When the resin starts to crack, the gluey hairs pop and ooze, thus healing the material. Do they do pants?
