Sublight, AFAIK Kazaa Lite is logging on to the supernodes as Kazaa. Therefore to NetRatings it would appear as a regular Kazaa user. So it would still be counted.
Catsix, I think your onto something. The casual user will be scared away but the more determined/tech savvy user will find another way of acquiring files. Perhaps the RIAA realizes it can’t win and wants only to stop the casual people?
There are other ways to share files. And you don’t need to be a super-genius to do it.
Take my own application, UnaChat, which I have written to avoid the mess of IRC and other chat programs. It is a full-fledged client-server and peer-to-peer system that includes, among its many features, the ability (not implemented yet) to transfer files AND to encrypt all messsages and data streams on the fly to prevent chat from being monitored by corporate IT weenies, and to protect the security of logfiles. The only thing an observer sees is data traffic from port/IP to port/IP. And since I made UnaChat work on any Port it wants to to be firewall friendly, I can sit it on Port 80 and it looks at first monitoring like standard web traffic.
It’s still a work very much in progress, but it’s been tested with as many as 9 simultaneous people on three continents. And the thing is - I’m not some elite uber hacker like some of my friends like Dr Theopolus. I’m just a gal with some decent programming skills (OK, at 2,000,000+ lines of code lifetime I’ll hazard I’m in the top 1% here…but on the RoD Board I’m practically a nobody). If I can get as far as I have, then I imagine someone can do something a whole lot more secure and better than I can ever come up with. File sharing will always be there for the people who have skills and lack of moral issues with sharing and/or distributing copyright violations.
And that is what Anthracite is doing all by herself. (I don’t mean this as a slight against your skills, just to illustrate a point.)
Wonder what else could be done if it were several geeks banded together to build up a well hidden and encrypted means to enable the sharing of all types of information through TCP traffic?
Add in a few more geeks who are encryption and/or networking experts to Anthracite’s coding skills, and no longer do you have Kazaa, you have something way harder for the RIAA to spy on. Most of the geeks (not sure whether this covers Anthracite or not) are absolutely thrilled if their current means of beating the system lasts a year or two, during which time they’re already working on the next way to get around the prying eyes of RIAA, the MPAA, or the IT weenies in their own company.
It’s never going to stop.
It’s already been done. Anthracite’s program sounds a lot similar in function to the one Nullsoft had on their web site for less than a day.
There are at least three other large networks designed for “freedom of information”, which are used by political dissidents in areas like China and the Middle East (as well as by paranoid kooks around the rest of the world), but whose encryption and anonymity also suggests that the RIAA will be worrying about them in the future.