SITE BYTE
                 _____________PRATIK KANJILAL

Napster Is Just The Beginning

All right, so the judge pulled the plug on Napster. But just as the vinyl Ubermenschen were popping the champagne corks along with pusillanimous groups like Metallica, there came news that the battle had just been joined, not won. With Napster sitting on its hands, a whole slew of operators who have been far more careful about legal issues have stepped up to the crease. A few of them may go down to injunctions, but the majority will survive and set the standards for sharing resources over the Net. CuteMX.com, a search and personal server facility promoted by GlobalScape, the people behind the Net’s most popular FTP client, has taken its service offline while it contemplates its navel on the Napster case, but it is definitely the odd man out. In fact, there are so many sharing sites out there that there’s a new name for the genre: ‘viral peer-to-peer sites’.

For the second time since the commercialisation of music, the industry is set to lose. The first time, about a hundred years ago, it was unable to explain to the courts why the sale of Edison’s wax recordings would hurt the sale of sheet music, which was then a major money-spinner. The most interesting among the services poised to fill Napsterspace is Gnutella, best approached from http://gnutella.wego.com. It’s killer app: there is no company to sue. In the best tradition of the open source movement, Gnutella is just a product, a bit of software that absolutely anyone can own. To sue successfully, you’d have to go after everyone who has a copy.

Scour.net, which supports sharing of images, video and audio, lets users track people with similar tastes and forge their own communities. IMesh.com is a search service connected with a downloader. AppleSoup.com, which is getting ready to go online (you can sign up in advance on the site), has deftly side-stepped legal issues by giving control over content to its owners. Like in the case of Gnutella, there will be no one to sue except millions of users. The company was founded with $2.5 million in seed capital in January by Bill Bales and Adrian Scott, two of the first investors in Napster, and it is backed by some of the weightiest citizens of Silicon Valley.

Sabeer Takes The Heat
If you got sold for $40 by Sabeer Bhatia to Microsoft and are regularly getting missives in your Hotmail inbox from people you don’t know called Carla, Cara, MarieDear or CassieBabe, you’re not alone. There are an estimated million victims of an inadvertent data spill that is the result of the way Hotmail handles the login process. Look in your location window once you’re logged in, and you’ll see your username in there. If the mail or newsletter you’re reading contains an ad served by a marketing agency, it will have picked up this login name. Then, the agency just has to scan all the lines in its log which contain the word ‘Hotmail’ and pick out the usernames. Since this is a violation of privacy, major agencies like DoubleClick and Engage have installed software that strips these lines from its logs. But somewhere down the line, an unscrupulous agency seems to have picked them up, burned them onto CDs and sold them to spammers. Since sleaze peddlers are known to be the most inveterate spammers in cyberspace, the prevalence of mail from CassieBabe in your inbox is explained.
Hotmail is expected to deal with this bug by the end of August. If they’re successful, a million people will heave a sigh of relief.

Gutenberg Online
Almost ten years after the Gutenberg revolution went digital, the man himself is finally online. The Gottingen copy of his Bible is up at www.GutenbergDigital.de
/gudi/eframes/index.htm. Not very easy reading, because it is written in that peculiarly churchy flavour of Latin, but recommended reading for anyone who is interested in the progression of the written word from illuminated manuscript through moveable type to the Web page.

( The writer can be reached on pratik@crosswinds.net)

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