Actually, I go to open Napster for the first time in a while, and it does an Auto-Upgrade. First time its happened, but I don;t think anything of it. I reboot as per procedure. I reopen Napster and get a message saying that *********** has been BANNED. They provide a link to this page as an explanation.
So, I’m unable to use Napster servers (still can use Opennap, MyNapster, and IFNap servers). Funny, I didn’t think taht case had been closed yet. Who knows whats gonna happen.
The real kick in the nuts is that I own all of Metallica’s albums and have never downloaded any of their songs. The beta of Napster I had always reshared my songs everytime I reopened it, even if I defaulted the file share to a empty folder. I certainly didn’t always bother to re-empty my library, and probably had Metallica songs uploaded from me. Ironically the new version of Napster works just fine and I can unshare all the important folders now. Heh, I guess I feel special now .
We’ll see if I can uninstall and get a new Napster name.
Sorry, Omniscient. That happened to about 10 of my friends…and you can’t use Napster again, even under a new name, unless you switch computers, because your computer ID number (IPO? IPS? Sorry I am computer illiterate) is the same. It sucks…and it appears that Dr. Dre is next.
Metallica lost a lot of fans when they did that…I have been recieving anti-Metallica mail with websites and cartoons all week from my pissed-off friends.
In other news, are you single? Attached? How old are you? Educational background? Hometown?
Your title sent a shiver down my spine. In the waning decades of apartheid, the South African government could declare someone ‘banned’ – which took away many of their rights, and prohibited them to be seen in public in a group of more than 5(?) people. It was an administrative decision, and could be renewed at the end of three years, just as easily as it was imposed. Chilling. I recall reading the account of a white Afrikaaner lady whose Christian beliefs made her dare to speak of the black population as equals. the impact of those three words, she said, were inestimable.
Fortunately, your options against Napster are less limited.
I would NOT suggest submitting the form they offer. It gives Metallica explicit permission to sue you, which may invert elements of the burden of proof in court. While you did not illegally download, they can argue that you made your legal MP3’s (illegally) available to others, and should have known that you did this.
You may be able to reinstall. It depends on your Internet Service Provider. Most won’t give you a fixed IP unless you pay extra for it. Most maintain a pool of internal IPs (e.g. one for each dialup modem) or use an internal NAT/router that reassigns your IP every time you dial in. If you have any problems during registration (or later sessions) just redial. Your work IP may be a fixed IP, however.
BTW, next time you install, make sure to answer “No” when the program asks “Do you want Napster to search for MP3s?”
KP, as you’ll read Napster installed a Trojan Horse in the “update” and you can’t get rid of it by un-installing or editing your registries. The act of installing that Trojan Horse is some GD fodder itself. Tons of ugliness in this dilemma. Makes me feel bad, I’m not a supporter of stealing software or anything usually, but this one was very underhanded. Maybe someone will feel like starting a new thread in GD about it.
One interesting tidbit. In the “new” version of Napster it is very clearly stated that the folder you select to save files to will be shared. While my problem was thinking that my “save” folder, and my “shared” folder were deal with seperately. Perhaps it was not just a poorly explained process. Also on the whole, the new version has a excellent interface for customizing Napster compared to the older version.
The first thing I tried was un-installing and signing up under a new name, that obviously didn’t work. Those patches worked nicely.
Sara, at risk of breaking my cool demeanor, and turning this into a dating service…I’ll bite. You’ve got me curious
Very Single, Very Eligible, 24 yo, BS in Aeronautical Engineering, Chicago
Its only fair that you share too, but watch out, some of the other girls sound like they’re going to get catty after what I read in that SDMB men and women pages.
Ummm, Napster. Yup, that sucks. Hope I don’t get kicked off.
Ok, moving on to the important stuff:
Aeronautical Engineering? I love it when you talk dirty to me, baby. Say it one more time, but slowly…
Ohhh Baby! Very single, very eligible…too bad you live very far away from me.
I’m 19, from Baltimore, also single and eligible, and working on a degree in English and Sociology, planning on going to law school. And I do lots of volunteer work.
Alas, I think you might find me too young and too distant, but anytime you visit Baltimore, feel free to look me up. Or e-mail me. Just keep whispering sweet nothings like *aeronautical engineering" * while you do it.
That B-more thing is a damn shame…but you never know when business may call. And no, 19 isn’t too young, drop by chat sometime and you’ll see I’m not too mature for anything. Wait…that sounds bad. Ah, fuck it.
OK, shameless flirting aside, I can’t hijack my own serious thread any longer.
Omniscient:
Sorry, I was misled by the terms of the letter metallica sent napster (law is a hobby of mine) which specified banning users and IP’s. Thanks for the info.
As far as I can tell from the one working link, the Napster issue was simply a key that was not deleted in the registry. This is not a trojan – a trojan has to ‘do something’, while a Key is just data.
Relying on the win95 uninstall or program-supplied ‘unwise’ or .isu info rarely cleans out all the keys, for any commercial program. this is considered a ‘feature’, not a bug, because the most common reason for reinstalling (according to the software makers) is to correct a corrupt file or other program screw-up. The registration info is not deleted, to make the re-install easier.
There are programs that will monitor a program install and make an independent list of stuff to clean up later. I’ve used some from 95-99, but frankly, they weren’t worth it. (I won’t go into the technical reasons) I find that it’s extremely easy to simply use the ‘find’ function in regedit to search for (and delete) any keys that contain the program name or folder (I do a second, more cautious, pass to delete some keys with the manufacturer’s name. However, since you’ll only have one program made by napster, caution is not required here)
Why am I telling you all this? Well to warn you that this technique, applied to almost any time-limited ‘demo’ program will allow the unscrupulous to use it indefinitely. And we wouldn’t want that, would we? Not with those full-feature demos!
The registry is a wondeful tool to play with (but make sure you back it up before you make any changes) It makes a lot of seemingly impossible things possible, because it’s just ‘security through obscurity’ - a way to keep Die fingerpoken Mittgrabben out of the Sparkspitzen Maschinen. Don’t let it intimidate you
KP, I suggest you read the repaired second link in the follow up post. It addresses most of what you mentioned.
I’m not up to speed, and I really need to learn how to better manage my system and registy (if not just for better memory management), but as long as I have surplus resources, and am to damn lazy to read up on it I’ll probably just rely on little patches like these.
Anyways, the point is that Napster used some more advanced and/or deceptive methods of hiding the key/Trojan horse in your system to prevent you from re-installing a new version.
My eight year old nephew got banned for, get ready for this, downloading Metallica’s cover of the Inspector Gadget theme song!
Speaking of Napster --I use a CD ripper to do backups of my albums, and sometimes I get lazy and don’t rename the resulting files. Curiously, somebody uploaded from my system a file called (by default), Unknown Artist, Unknown Title. I hope that guy likes bizzaro soundtracks from bad and obscure spaghetti westerns!
I just signed up again and got back on. I didn’t have to admit to anything. Maybe it’s my service provider, AltaVista, which is a generic free ISP, that shares computers with other brands. The next time you dial in, you get a different IP# and your old one is reused by someone from Lycos or Freelane. How would they trace that without falsely accusing sombody?
Thanks for the link. It seems to be a persistent ID key.
It seems to be limited to the beta versions. (Betas aren’t ‘regular software’, and the license usually spells out that it will expire, may be auto-upgraded, etc.)
Possibly Napster was playing fast and loose, possibly not. I try to reserve the word ‘trojan’ for programs that do far more nefarious things, like spying, deleting data, or affecting other programs . The Napster dongle just affected Napster, so I consider it an annoyance, not an invasion.
That doesn’t mean it’s good of gourse, but compare it to the 400+ programs that use Aureate or Radiate – monitoring programs that are not announced, that continue to run even if you uninstall the software, and which ‘spy’ on you and report back for market tracking. They have also repeatedly been caught lying about what their software does
A friend of mine got Radiate on his system when he downloaded a paid upgrade (Eudora Pro 4.22 to v4.3). Many people who load trial versions don’t realize that Aureate and Radiate don’t shut down even if you buy the registered version - they stay on your system forever, unless you use a third party removal program like OptOut (from Steve Gibson of GRC)
You can look up Aureate and Radiate in any search engine for the full horror story. Personally I’m waiting for Steve Gibson’s Project-X. He’s knowlegable and reliable, and his website grc.com is full of step-by-step computer security tips and valuable free software that fills gaping holes in the commercial offerings.
Yes, I, the sweet and innocent Brunetter, have been banned by Napster. This blows my mind since I couldn’t care less about Metallica. My husband, however, did download some of their songs and since we share an MP3 list, I was doing the crime - illegally sharing these songs via Napster. I am so pissed. The entire debate about whether downloading these files is ethical or not is one that I have quite strong opinions on … won’t get into it here, but maybe someone will feel inspired to fire it up on GD. Long story short, I will probably try the link that Omni provided, although I am a little worried about messing with my registry, so I guess I’d best wait till my technician-husband comes home. That’ll also give me a chance to ride his butt about getting me banned. Hope to hell he got banned too! Grr!
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Not your fault, either.
