re: Blackhole Routing, Piracy, and a legal question...
They call it black hole route(ing)s. Napster may be calling it something else. You decide. I tend to read a little bit between the lines on this one. From wired.com:
wired.com
Printed below for posterity, although it's a better read at the url, for the links.
One question that pops up, and this could be viewed independent of the item above, is this:
Can a carrier be held liable in the eyes of the law for knowingly supporting a service which has been deemed to be unlawful?
A mere tid bit of a brain teaser, for which I think I have an answer, or at least an argument, but I'll throw it out on the board, anyway. Anyone?
FAC
========== From Wired.com, begin:
Napster Takes a Nap, by Christopher Jones
1:40 p.m. Apr. 17, 2000 PDT
Napster addicts in need of a music fix were stifled Monday by the unavailability of the company?s servers.
Starting around 7 a.m. PDT Monday, servers and home pages for Napster, a popular service that allows Internet users to exchange MP3 music files, have been unavailable and disconnecting users.
The problems are likely linked to Napster's hosting service, AboveNet, which has been experiencing difficulties with its backbone connection to Sprint.
"We have an outage between us and Sprint. There is an OC3 down (a circuit between AboveNet and Sprint)," Mike Peyzner, a technician with San Jose, California-based AboveNet, told Wired News.
Peyzner confirmed the service failure occurred at 7 a.m., but could not say when the connection would be re-established.
Just after noon PDT, Napster's servers became available again, but connections are still sporadic.
Napster technician Eddie Kessler, said the failure was caused by an engineer at another ISP (not AboveNet) connected to Sprint which incorrectly changed some traffic routing tables. Kessler expects full service to be re-established in the next few hours.
Napster has been a source of much controversy and litigation recently. The RIAA filed suit last November, and heavy metal legends Metallica piped up last week with a lawsuit of their own.
Both the RIAA and Metallica claim Napster encourages piracy by connecting users? music collections with each other through its servers and software.
The vulnerability of Napster?s servers points to an advantage that distributed software like Gnutella may have in the long run -? no single IP destination controls the operation of the file-sharing.
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