Peter Sinclair: Napster mauled by its betrayed

By PETER SINCLAIR

Napster is experiencing the full fury of its betrayed users after selling out to Bertelsmann.

Pausing only to spit on the still-twitching corpse, they are vanishing into the thickets of untraceable music - Gnutella, FreeNet and Audio-Gnome.

As a goodbye present, some are leaving behind them an increasing number of viruses disguised as MP3's, enough to make some newbies regret they ever downloaded Napster software in the first place.

You hear about it but you don't really believe it until it happens to you, or someone close to you. It goes something like this: your 12-year-old son is just reaching that age when rap metallers Limp Bizkit become irresistibly cool.

You pop out one sunny Saturday morning to do a little shopping and he makes a beeline for the computer and fires up Napster - for the giant owner of BMG records is allowing the shackled file-sharer to operate as before while it ponders which business model will best separate you from your money.

He navigates past the self-serving music-industry PR-speak which now dominates Napster's homepage (Will Napster continue to offer a free service? Yes! We are committed to creating a system in which users can choose to participate without paying any money however, for a small membership fee we feel that we can facilitate an enhanced service that you will find even more valuable ... !) and proceeds with his downloads, then heads out the door.

You return and reboot the computer, which says: "Invalid system disk. Replace the disk, and then press any key."

This means someone has left a floppy in the A-drive. Except that, in this case, the A-drive is empty.

You call a geek. A directory search shows that 99 per cent of the drive is empty of data, apart from a directory called pi1176n that is inaccessible. It contains one file that has a filename of hearts & spades & diamonds, also inaccessible. A virus scan finds nothing and takes the blink of an eye, because everything is gone except for a gobbledegook filename and volume-label.

You've lost the lot.

"I wouldn't call this nasty little program clever, but it is very effective," says the geek. "Most users would have had to send their machines to the shop to recover the drive.

"The file wasn't large, but it was simple and to the point, did the damage and left just enough to confuse an inexperienced user plus a lot of mid-range boffins too, for that matter."

This is a true story - it happened to one of my best friends.

A search through Napster's site shows several files available, including teen favourites Eminem and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with short filenames which end in "pi11761."

These are the faux-files, the ones to watch for: they may be executable programs converted by Wrapster to fool Napster into thinking they are in MP3 format (the Wrapster conversion allows only short filenames).

Although the Wrapster developers appear to have become bored with the whole thing and moved into other areas, their chaotic creation lives on.

Arjen de Landgraaf, virus expert at CoLogic, says that this sort of shrink-wrapped virus has become increasingly destructive and more general over the last couple of months as Napster's popularity has surged and the prepubescent set has discovered Wrapster.

Napster, as originally conceived, was based entirely upon that idealism which characterised the early internet - on qualities like trust, altruism and an unfocused benevolence towards the world.

Fearlessly, its users allow complete strangers to access their hard drives for no reward other than an unspoken and unenforceable hope that one day the stranger will do the same for somebody else.

Their music has been a gift in the purest sense.

This "go thou and do likewise" philosophy may have worked for Jesus and for Napster, but will it work for Bertelsmann?

Viruses were never a problem in Nazareth.

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Links:

http://forum.napster.com

Gnutella

Audio Gnome

Napster

Eminem

Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Wrapster

CoLogic

Economist

Florida Margin of Victory Campaign

E-mail: petersinclair@email.com