what happened?

[evy]

i just found the patch to winmx. what happened on sep 20, 2005????

[Me Here]

On or around Sept 16th, 2005 the makers of WinMX.exe were sent a letter from the RIAA threatening them with litigation if they didnt cease and desist their business.

Frontcode never made any money off of the WinMX program, and although most folks feel they could have easily won this case its more a matter of who had more money.  I am sure you already realize that the RIAA would win that battle...  

So on Sept. 20th, 2005 Frontcode complied and shut down the peer caches that we all use to connect to the Network.  This means that anyone that disconnected could not get back.

Since then, on Sept. 23rd a few groups of dedicated users came up with a solution and we opened our own Peer caches to allow you to connect.

Now we are on a mission to tell the world that WinMX is back and not going anywhere   :twisted:

And if you see any of the RIAA folks on their way to work one day, you can tell em for me 'Nice try, Better luck next time...'

[Lysander]

...They could at least have released their source code to someone else and just not told anyone. "The source of winMX got shared on Kazaa! I dont' konw how it happened!"

Ah, irony. How sweet the feel...

[SamSeeSam]

Mabye that's why they didn't do it in the first place It think it may have revealed some vunerabilities that could kill winmx itself. But it could have been put into greater use had they done so. But think about it, why would they want everybody else to know how they made something? It could affect their other products (I don't know if the have any other, but they must have)

[KM]

the network would be dead if they had released the source to just anyone...

quickmx is proof of the number of people who don't give a damn about the rest of the network and will selfishly destroy it in the attempt to get a couple of files a little quicker (even though it actually makes no difference now as the network is too small for repeated searches to make any difference - they still do it thinking it will magically create more sources)

can you imagine if they could have it flood out a search for every file in the transfers window every 10 seconds? i have no doubt at all that someone would do that, and loads of people would use it purely because of the possibility (no matter how remote) of it making downloads slightly faster

sure if they gave the source code to someone like myself then i could have used it to continue winmx, however if they had said "do you want us to post the source code everywhere or not?" i would have said "no way in hell" - and we are lucky they didn't do so, because the benefits of legitimate programmers being able to improve winmx do not justify allowing those with bad intentions get hold of it

there are many serious flaws which if they were known to the wrong people would be exploited, when frontcode shut down the caches i was able to just let others use my caches and we got past that problem, however if people started using bad clients that flooded out searches or whatever then there is nothing anyone could do to save winmx

[SamSeeSam]

What is quick mx? Some kind of clone of winmx?

[KM]

a program that fucks with winmx to make it flood multiple searches at once instead of the limit of 1 at a time that is built in to winmx (the limit is there for a good reason!)

[SamSeeSam]

Does that crash the primaries because of too many search requests and consequent results?

[KM]

it limits the effectiveness of the network, as it means legitimate searches get ignored so that idiots searches can be processed - of course it they are also queuing up for a load of flooded files with AFS set then they are also continuously causing attacks against random primaries