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Scour is Dead 163

Posted by CmdrTaco from the boy-I'll-say dept.
jathos writes "The Scour Exchange is dead -- see the announcement here. Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?" Scour actually was a reasonably useful tool for finding wierd images. I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects. Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid.
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Scour is Dead More

Scour is Dead

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  • I only have one tray icon, and that's the volume control.

    So you need to right-click, properties, settings, slidethingy-apply to change you resolution? You can also go to far, you know...some of those icons are actually useful.

  • Re:Lack of Money. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They ran out of funding at an accelerated pace due to the file-sharing lawsuits.
  • In the particular case of Scour, they didn't die because of "The Man". They died because of poor management, lack of direction, inflated egos, lack of preparation for the lawsuits, lack of money sense and because they treated their engineers like shit. They had 5 good programmers and completely squandered their talents. They hired dozens of people with questionable titles doing a dubious about of work rather than pay some good money for more engineers. I got to see all of this first hand (and get underpaid in the mean time.)

    The Scour client was written in Dephi. The original was written in C++, but was shelved inexplicably after months of work in favor of the president's Delphi client.

    They have made a series of bad business decisions and a series of bad technological decisions and they are now paying for them.

  • Damnit! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Damnit! Now how am I gonna get my pr0n?

  • One alternative client that was just released is Leechnet [leechnet.com].

    Leechnet focuses on making it easy to trade PORN... (it even has a global rating system for porn-pictures!) ... and thats pretty much all Scour was used for anyway.

    Check it out at:

    http://www.leechnet.com [leechnet.com]

  • Good thing they published the spec (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, at least they published the STP/1.0 spec [scour.com], rather than making us reverse engineer it like we had to do with Napster.

    And actually, I'd been thinking of starting a Scour server daemon... Maybe I'll actually start doing it now.
  • > Gnutella is unusable. Have you considered why its unusable?
    > I would say it's unusable because the leeches outnumber the altruists.

    It also has something to do with the fact that in order to share files with Gnutella, you have to manually configure it. Napster etc have that nifty setup wizard that asks you where your files are, and even offers to scan your disk for you. Sharing still isn't required, but more people do it because it's easy. Others (was it CuteMX?) won't let you download files unless you're sharing something.

    While I absolutely despise ratio systems on FTP servers (I never have anything they need, they're not reliable, etc), I think a ratio system might work on something like Napster. Start every new account off with 5 credits to get them started. Have the server track the balance between connections. A ratio as low as 3 to 1 would probably be generous enough. That's the basic idea... once you have that, all sorts of other possibilities start emerging. You could make things easier on people whose accounts are running low by ranking them higher in the search results. You could adjust the ratio based on any number of things. And so on...
  • I used to work at ditto.com, and while it's no Scour, it's a great tool for finding images from the net. I personally worked on the crawler code with another guy who wrote most of the initial system and got ditto started. It's pretty cool and works well. Use it while you can since it's about to go the way of Scour as well.
  • you could rip it for him, but sigh... where oh WHERE to find a copy of deCSS?
  • Its seems as the only alternative os going to be warez sites, MIRC, and Hotline. Once those start being attacked then I will fear the worst. Even though I never used scour but once, I cant say I was at all impressed. So it came and it went, there are others and there will be more. Long live freedom
  • But they can seek to stop commercial organizations from attempting to do so. It's one thing when it's just hundreds of thousands of faceless users copying files from one to another. It's a whole other thing when a company tries to stand in the middle with hopes of making a dime off of them. Filesharing won't stop, but copyright holders will (and IMHO should) stop others from profiteering off of their works.
  • So what? The file-sharing genie has already been let out. If Napster goes commercial or of Scour goes tits-up, the sighs of relief on the part of record companies will last only as long as it takes someone to write another file-sharing program and post it on the net. The only reason Scour and Napster got a big as they did is that they got alot of press which only increased their popularity, much to the dismay of the record company execs. that shithead Lars Ulrich didn't help their cause any, he just pissed people off and made them want to download more music. Anyway, now the publishers of anything that can be digitized and shared will be forced to play the gopher-game. You know,the one where you whack one on the head and others pop up...
  • Microplanet's Gravity (http:/www.microplanet.com/) makes a far superior newsgroup reader to either version of Agent. Better rules, mass decoding, and very stable. I snagged about 700 megs of miscellaneous binaries in a test of my cablemodem one night with but a few clicks.
  • A new version of Mojo Nation was released yesterday (0.920) which has a new installer. It should be much easier to get running now. It also has much faster download and publishing code.

    Burris

  • Could someone mirror that announcement page? my school has completely blocked scour.net and scour.com so I can't even read that announcement.


    -Stype
  • Dammit, meant RIAA/MPAA instead of just RIAA. Never post unless the coffeepot is empty...
  • So you need to right-click, properties, settings, slidethingy-apply to change you resolution?

    Well, yes, if I ever did, but I don't, so no. I'm quite content with 1024x768x32bpp@75Hz. As for control panels, there's devmgmt.msc, control.exe, compmgmt.msc, and so on.

  • May I ask how it is "off topic"? CuteMX is a distrubited filesharing app. Until the ideal one comes, it's good to have one that, to my knowledge, is still up.

    ----
  • I haven't downloaded the second part of Tron yet!!!! I'm going to cry now.

    :(


    ---
  • well..if scour did come out before napster, why was scour in beta? Napster was stable, thats all I can say.
  • Whatever happened to Mojo Nation? Aciel aciel@speakeasy.net

  • Unless YOU do something, the net is GONE. (Score:4)

    by small_dick ( 127697 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @10:56AM (#619469)
    Another insane lawsuit by giant corporations that not only deprives us of our rights might destroys another internet company that is doing nothing more than move humanity out of the dark ages of information monopolies.

    The eff has a article pleading for reform to the archaic copyright laws that are being twisted to destroy your internet freedoms.

  • One alternative client that was just released: Leechnet [leechnet.com].

    It just focuses on porn

  • stop teasing us and release it! *sighs*
  • Speaking of dubious titles, the last company I worked for (which I assume has gone under I can't see them on the internet at all any more) had a great title.

    'VP of Strategic X'

    .
  • I'll tell you why, because you're a big fucknut.
  • don't forget lawyers...

    --

  • It's not altruism, it's culling (Score:5)

    by revbob ( 155074 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @11:14AM (#619475) Homepage Journal
    The reason Gnutella, Scour, and the like were born doomed isn't that people aren't altruistic. Enough of them are -- let's remember that a tiny handful of people responding has kept spam alive all these years. For every 100 greedy Republicans who take but never give, there's one Naderite who opens up a whole pile of files. Even one altruist in 1000 would be enough, given a sensible number of people on the air.

    The reason peer to peer sharing technologies are currently doomed is that, if they're successful, there will be considerably more than a sensible number of people on the air.

    I've been on Gnutella when half the net went there, and let me tell you, it wasn't pretty. Like most people, I had to hang up or get overwhelmed.

    A similar problem has come up in shared VR. If a tenth of the people who signed on to Cybertown [cybertown.com] showed up at the same time, it would be madness. If the net is a "never-ending worldwide conversation", as Judge Steward Dalzell said [epic.org], then a conversation of 10 million or 10,000 people, when you can't tune any of them out, is a conversation in Bedlam.

    The easy problem is how to filter out the noise. The hard problem is trying to figure out what, to a particular user at a particular time, is signal and what is noise. Area of interest culling is only a partial solution. While I might be interested in erotic photographs of large aquatic mammals today, I'm not exclusively interested in Flipper and his friends. I might be interested tomorrow in the polyphonic motets of Lassus.

    An even harder problem is identifying which of a particular set of resources offered that are allegedly within my current areas of interest are of actual interest. I'm not interested at all, for example, in Flipper stills of the Ranger and the stupid kids, and I already have the picture where Flipper stands on his tail. While the file name conventions that have arisen among mp3 file sharers are a step in the right direction (and they picked an easy domain), the conventions are far from universal, and as people have found out, sometimes spoofed and sometimes just ignorantly wrong.

    (I'm tempted to say that a central server that acts like a Library of Congress classification system may be needed, and certainly would be a more useful role for a central server than mere file name storing.)

    And, of course, this must be accomplished without the overhead that makes Gnutella such a pig. And remember, Gnutella hardly tries to accomplish any of this area of interest culling.

    While the developers of Gnutella et al have spent considerable time on networking technology and user interfaces (despite appearances!), they haven't yet taken more than baby steps toward solving the real problem that will make peer-to-peer sink or swim: determining and using areas of interest.

    Rev. Bob "Bob" Crispen

  • MojoNation? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone putting any faith in mojonation? I was surprised to see noone had mentioned it here. I personally haven't used it, but it looks like a good concept (*cough* *cough* so did gnutella), because it _should_ help cut down on leeching.
  • May scour rest in peace. The capitialists just chalked up a kill. Odds are more will follow before they get shut down, if they ever do. Free file sharing is at stake here, and the freedom side doesnt have the backing to do anything about it at the moment.
  • Gnutella, FreeNet, and others need to learn one thing, User Base is good..The only way you get a large user base now days, is to make the program user friendly. That's why napster has done so well, and why scour did so well. IMHO, Scour was much better than napster, Though napster had the larger user base, and scour exchange had a few bugs in it (ok, more than just a few).

  • Until then.. (Score:5)

    by webrunner ( 108849 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:15AM (#619479) Homepage Journal
    CuteMX, by the makers of CuteFTP [cuteftp.com]
    ----
  • Usually, when I need to scour, I grab an abrasive pad, such as a Brillo pad, and maybe some Comet. This also leads into scrubbing, oft followed by a rinse. Just don't eat the Comet - it makes your mouth turn green...

    Comet - it makes you vomit. So buy Comet and vomit today!

  • Yea, me too. I used it to find mp3s, long before that "Nappy" thing came around. The Net was much nicer place back in the good ol' days.
    --
    Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
  • Read this [slashdot.org] previous article on /. about the Sealand data haven.

    They have their own laws and hosting music on Sealand will undoubtably be cheaper than paying off the record labels

    The big question is would they be prepared to do it ?

  • Scour, from the little that I used it, had a much wider amount of material than Napster (Go OpenNap) to include of course the "clipart" (for purposes of this post clipart==pron) It also had a bunch of pictures of people you don't know and most likely don't want to know mpegs that where both legal, semi-legal, and not so legal (My copy of the Crazy video very clearly falls into the last, trailers that I think the studios would rather you have to go to their site to get would be in the second, and the various bits of clipart featuring Kobe Tai are clearly in the first. As I understand it from a article that I read yesterday they mostly went down because the VC would not give them money because of the suits pending due to the not legal content but there was a *lot* of stuff. The only downside was it always seemed slower then napster. Oh well at least we still have opennap now they just need to expand so they can have clipart also.
  • well i host about a thousand songs on Napster.

    i figure that makes up for quite a large number of leeches. you see, it doesn't take that many users to give a sh*t in order for it to work. look at Napster or Gnutella (putting aside it's current almost-unusable state). on Napster, you *CAN* find virtually any recorded music. leeches like you do detract from the system, but there are more than enough non-cynics like me to make up for it.

    i don't understand the purpose for your blatantly destructive opinion, and why it persists despite its incongruity with simple reality.

    pezpunk
    Internet killed the video star,

  • Go get it. $20 at a brick-and-mortar store. It's the highest quality rendering of Tron (short of getting the source files for the 3D rendering and overlaying the humans).
  • Hasn't some other country thought of hosting their own peer to peer file sharing service? In some place like China or Cuba where us copyright laws don't really have too much meaning. Scour exchange was the best source of downloadable simpsons episodes imaginable and I am extremely butthurt over this.
  • It's not that it's difficult to prosecute someone with the user information IRC can give you, but that it simply can't be done on a large scale.

    The case you point out seems like an attempt by the BSA to make examples of a few people. Needless to say, it hasn't been a very effective deterrent; mp3 trading is alive and well on IRC. No organization has pockets deep enough to go after thousands of people trading or serving mp3's, all they can do is make pathetic attempts to scare them.
  • It's close to impossible to forma a legitimate community of file swappers if you make it public. Don't ask me how the Linux community turned out to be so cool :)
  • May scour rest in peace. The capitialists just chalked up a kill. Odds are more will follow before they get shut down, if they ever do. Free file sharing is at stake here, and the freedom side doesnt have the backing to do anything about it at the moment.

    What about the freedom of people to charge for what they spend time and money and sweat to produce? Ever consider THAT freedom?

    I'm a partner in a film company. We're just getting started. I'd like to have the opportunity to recoup some of my investment at some point in the future -- cameras, lighting, actors pay, film stock, script writing, editing rooms, post production, audio dubbing, getting permission for music and/or scoring music, special effects, props, locations, film licenses (try filming on a street without it), etc etc etc cost MUCHO money. So if I'm willing to put the cash that I spend months, even years building up into making a movie, why should you get it for free whether I want you to or not?

    Simon

  • Mojo Nation solves the leeching problem (Score:3)

    by Jim McCoy ( 3961 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @11:40AM (#619490) Homepage
    In Mojo Nation [mojonation.net] users must contribute some service to the system and thereby earn "Mojo" (karma) to exchange for download or relay credits. Everything is market-driven (bitstreams become just a commodity to be passed around) and the market is the best system yet devised to take a bunch of selfish, dishonest/distrustful actors and work towards a collective goal -- the market works.

    The digital tokens used are the internet equivalent of the old upload/download ratios of BBS days applied to a distributed, decentralized P2P system. This isn't a "sharing" system, so it doesn't walk through your disk looking for things to give away; instead other users publish data to the system and it gets broken up into pieces, these pieces get RAID-like error correction and then they are sent out to other peers in the system. Downloads can use a swarm approach to pulling in data, taking a small piece from lots of peers (including those who might be on slow connections) rather than trying to shove the whole file down someone's (already overloaded) narrow upstream link.

    Previous releases were a bit unstable, but the new 0.920 release that is available for download [mojonation.net] has a much better installer and significantly faster publishing and downloads. Check it out!

  • you could rip it for him, but sigh... where oh WHERE to find a copy of deCSS?

    And why would he want to do something illegal like that?

    Simon
  • Why bother with bombing, when the USgov can just "persuade" British Telecom (or whoever provides Sealand's internet connectivity) to pull the plug. Sealand can have all the data they want, but they do the rest of the world no good if we have to sail out there with a stack of discs to get it.
  • From a technical point of view, a moral point of view or what?
  • Yes, you can still trade MP3s, but for me Scour's main draw was the incredible amount of video available. As far as I know, there exists no other large p2p community that shares video files (and no I don't count the barely-usable gnutella).

    I downloaded over 3GB of Simpsons episodes from Scour in just one week. Try doing that on the web and all you'll do is run into 404 after 404.

    • _____

    • ToiletDuk (58% Slashdot Pure)
  • Scour may be dead but their backend indexing technology may not be. The companies assets are being bid on by several companies including listen.com. [scour.com] One asset a company has is it's "intellectual property" which includes it's source code, so if another company buys it (listen?), maybe we'll see something yet. :)
  • Again, this makes the wrongheaded assumtion that all filesharing going on is illegal. Maybe we people should start punishing the act of piracy, rather than tools that could possibly be used for it.
  • Obviously, slashdotters do, since they moan about the passing of Scour and Napster, and the lack of scalability of Gnutella...

  • Ugh (Score:1)

    by Pupp3tM ( 182264 )
    Not that I'm a big fan of file sharing, but just as an excercise I was working on a Qt client for Scour. Oh well, maybe I'll find something else to do...
  • (sob sob sob) (uncontrolable crying)
    b-b-b-but.... i can't afford all the porn i consume.... what am I to do? (BOOOHOOOO)

    :(
  • Umm. You got it backwards. Napster is in beta. Scour was out of beta a long time ago. Scour used to be web based where you'd download a file through their little program. It was too annoying so they developed scour exchange.
  • Yeah, that's right. Never. Never, never, never. For my MP3s, I find an FTP site with an operator generous enough to give leech. If that's impossible, then I find a good ratio and start transferring. I've dabbled around with Gnutella, but I've only used it for downloading. I can't stand the interface, and all I ever see is junk, junk, junk (and that's after filtering out flatplanet.net, all the porn, metallica, nelson, warrant, et cetera).

  • Overrated tripe (Score:5)

    by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:38AM (#619502) Homepage Journal

    The capitialists just chalked up a kill.

    WTF do capitalists have to do with this? The victims were capitalists too. The problem is specifically with assholes, some of which happen to be capitalists.


    ---
  • > ... I'm a leech. That's human nature ...

    That must mean that non-leeches aren't human. What are they? My theory is ALIENS!
  • Gnutella is a dead end. The brute-force method it employs of connecting people up is simply too expensive. It takes too long to connect and too long to do a search. The only viable future for peer-ro-peer file sharing is a more intelligent approach such as freenet, Publius, or something like that. Perhaps the death of Scour and the probable near-future death of Napster (at least in the form we know it) will spur on the development of these or other good solutions to the file-sharing problem.

  • I'll forecast it before it comes out ... x-box is dead.

    I love my PS2.
    -d9
  • - to share files that may be of interest to others. So, human nature equals leech nature? I think not.

    I don't think true altruism ever exists. Even when you are giving, you are receiving too.

    You put up files on the net so that your name will be credited, so that your "reputation" will be built up. This is your payment. There are enough people with low self-esteem to carry the weight of running the servers. These people value the time and work setting up a server less than they value a little respect.
    -

  • ...the fact of the matter is that it was in beta and it sucked...

    Reminds me of a certain web browser. Why is it that scour sucked because it was buggy and in beta form, but mozilla is great because it's buggy and in beta form?

    The same goes for Transmeta CPUs. Their chips are outperformed by lower clocked Pentiums and they're actually pretty average energywise - but wait.. Linus works for them so they must be great no?

    Don't you just hate double standards...

  • I miss my SX so much. I've downloaded so many GB of stuff (mp3,mpegs)... I can't believe it has been shutted down.

    File sharing is good as long as everyone is connected to the same server so everyone can see all the files shared. Using unofficial servers (such as those listed in MyNapster) is a bad experience because only a handful of ppl is using that particular server.

    I think someone should hack the server code and make all servers connected together and share the user list.
  • I think the next generation file sharing protocol should use decentralized servers similar to IRC networks. Everyone should be able to run their own server. Each server has its own list of online users and servers will update their user list every few minutes to all other servers, therefore all clients are able to see every online user. Server has to report to a directory server (similar to GameSpy) and obtain updated server list from it.
  • I don't know about you, but I don't upload files on Gnutella : I'm a leech.

    Well, I don't use Gnutella, but as far as Napster goes, I do allow people to download from me frequently. Why you ask? Well, I have some rare stuff that is hard to find. I guess I have always been of the mind that if I had a big problem searching and trying to find this music, then it is good for me to help people by allowing them to get it from me.

    A lot of the music I get would be in the more international or obscure categories, everything from Molotov to Plastilina Mosh to Tarkan to the Minibosses. I have been unable to find some of the music I like in stores anywhere (my Plastilina Mosh CD's were purchased in Mexico) so I figure I might as well help expose someone else to the music I like so it can become more popular. Maybe then I can hear other rare music that I like that I can't find in the stores.

    So yes, there are the majority of people that are leeching, and that's fine. But, there are some of us that actually like to share and do good deeds for other people.

  • The simple fact is that Peer-to-peer file sharing is a doomed concept, because it relies on the altruism of the average human being.

    How is peer to peer any different than client-server? Non-commercial web sites also rely on altruism on the part of the person paying for the server. Do you think they're dead too? No, because some people have things that they want to say. Whether they build upon peer-to-peer or not, is completely irrelevant.


    ---
  • The idea of groups of people sharing files is the one used behind Paranoia (link in my sig). Use it for groups of friends, or groups of people sharing a common interest, who can then talk and exchange files over Paranoia.

    Major updates (generic access lists and distributed karma/trust calculations) coming next week...

    Mike.

  • "Guess we'll have to wait for that multi media peer to peer system until Gnutella is solid."

    I'm quite surprised I've seen no mention of Freenet [sourceforge.net] in this dicussion. Freenet uses intelligent routing to find and remember the most efficient routes. Freenet also boasts intelligent file sharing (the most accessed files are mirrored all over). Couple that with the inability of one hostile group or person to remove files from the network and you have a kickass file sharing mechanism IMO. Very cool project... -Pato

  • Specifically, assholes who are big names in the music industry and have lots of money to throw at the American government. :-P Although Scour died due to a bad business plan, which is what sometimes happens in the free market.


    -RickHunter
  • With all of these peer to peer file sharing services going under, where is the evolution going to go from here? This is something i've though about lately, and not really done much research on just yet...

    The problem that i see with these companies like Napster and Scour, is the fact that they have their own client-end software that each user must use to connect to their central "network" in order to share their files. What we need is a way to share files without connecting to a central netowrk (similar to gnutella), and also take it one step further, and eliminate the need for for a client-end application as well.

    example : Virtual Private Networking. It's built into the operating systems that are installed on the majority of home PCs out there. (sorry for not providing a better example, because i doubt windows in the OS of the majority of people who are reading this)... I don't think it would be too difficult for someone to set up a similar (BETTER!) protocol, or work with VPN to make some improvements here and there.

    Then again, i could just be talking out of my ass, since i don't know much about VPN... A friend of mine set up a VPN server, which i've connected into, and it works just peachy...

    it was just one of those thoughts that come to you in the middle of the night...
  • When I need an image for my own "devious projects," I usually start with Corbis Images [corbis.com]. It has a huge selection and the samples are frequently good enough for my purposes. I use Photoshop to remove the Corbis mark and have what I need. Of course, this is only good for purposes where violating copyright isn't an issue, such as making a joke image to email to a friend, creating a mockup web page to show to a client, etc. I wouldn't recommend doing this for something that would get noticed.
  • "Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?"

    What it illustrates is that, given intellectual property issues, is that it is very difficult for one company to own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. A company which had the inclination and resources to exert reasonable editorial controls over the content - say an AOL or a distributed version of Geocities or some similar notion - could certainly operate a PTP network in a similar manner to how non PTP communities with regulation of content and checks against IP infringement are operated.

    In terms of open PTP networks, what one company, or a consortium, can do is to promote open standards and design recommendations in order to facilitate a global network of file-sharing (and in the case of my company's WebWorld project, also processor-sharing a'la SETI@Home). A modular design to allow to plug-in other protocols is also probably a good idea, since we don't yet know what standards may emerge and survive ;-)

    The centralized notion leaves a single company vulnerable to control abuses, whereas by providing a technology and not a service one gives the responsibility over to the members of the network. However, it is unclear why services like Napster have not yet succeeded in the argument that like an unedited BBS they are just a repository, not a publishing/editorial board with a responsibility to prevent abuse. (If someone knows the details of this legal area, please post.)

  • Re:Birth And Death (Score:4)

    by jbarnett ( 127033 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:53AM (#619544) Homepage
    Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.

    Yea that is a really good idea, I could see it now:

    "Hey, what is the deal with this trash can it won't accept any more trash"

    "I don't know, lets have a look here, hrm yes, it appears to be full, to it's max capacitcy. Since it is complete full, anything attempted to be placed inside just rolls off the top, that would explain why that used coffee filter just rolled onto the floor"

    "Yea, that is a logically explaination of why there is a 2 foot ring of coffee grounds baked into the carpet around this trash can."

    "I think it is defective."

    "Why So?"

    "I had one of these at my last job, a trash can that is. I would fill it with stuff during the day and when I would come back the next day it was COMPLETELY empty and that white liner thing was replaced with a new or assumed to be new one"

    "Yes, I remember at my prevoius job, at night I always ponder when I left that the trash was full but in the morning it was emptied. This trash can has been full for 2 weeks, it is obviously broken."

    "Oh I also should note, I think there is a problem with the phone system. The phones just keeps RINGING AND RINGING and doesn't stop!"

    "Yea, this place sucks, this guy claiming to be some magical "bill collector" keep coming up to me with this yellow peice of paper trying to talk to me. I got confused and huddled into a little ball on the floor, it scared me. This place is creepy"


  • The chaff is finally being weeded out.. Scour SUCKED. I hope the whole website tanks, it used to be usable, but as soon as they hooked up with i-drive, it went straight to hell.
  • Easy, slick professional looking file sharing is dead, and it only makes sense. While a few people I'm sure used napster/scour for legal purposes, most of the users did not.

    There will always be FTP/Usenet/IRC (and others) to share your files, but did any body really expect that deep down a company would be allowed to facilitate the quick and easy exchange of illegal materials?

    The only reason why it lasted so long was because the triditional corporate/legal institutions did not understand the technology (and to a point, still don't) enough to break things up.

    The best analogy I can think of is if somebody set up a 'trade your tapes' shop right next door to Sam Goody in the mall with a rack of duel decks installed that you could use for free. It would take a while for people to figure out if it was legal or not, but eventually it would be shut down. That doesn't mean people would'nt still be trading tapes with their freinds, it just means that there would be no central location to do it.

  • Great Alternative (Score:4)

    by snugglebuggle ( 255389 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @10:21AM (#619551)
    One of the best file systems that I've found is VNN at vnn2000.com [vnn2000.com]. Not only can you share and search for any kind of file but you can password protect and retrieve your own files. I find it really useful when I'm away from my computer... I can access my files anywhere.. and really easily too!

  • Birth And Death (Score:3)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:16AM (#619553) Journal
    Wow, I actually saw the entire birth and death of scour.

    Can Someone tell me why a search engine needs 60+ employees? I could understand with yahoo or something. But Scour could have been done with 5 good programmers and spare time.


  • Lack of Money. (Score:3)

    by NetJunkie ( 56134 ) <jason.nash@CHICAGOgmail.com minus city> on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:17AM (#619556)
    I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding. There are plenty of these stories around right now.
  • I think it is typical of human nature to be willing to share that which is in excess of personal need. Obviously, giving a homeless person your rent money so they can buy dinner would be a great gesture, but in the grand scheme of things, it is probably doing more harm than good. The same kind of thing happens if I am intent on altruistically sharing files at the same time as I am maxing my connection out. Not only do I slow myself down, but I end up making all the transfers slower... So I agree, obviously the ideal solution tries to minimize interference with optimal performance for the owner of the machine, for everyone's benefit.
  • Being able to determine what is signal and what is noise within P2P networks (or any information system for that matter) is a non-trivial problem. Some efforts to make sense of everything are actually starting to become useful and get applied to these problems. RDF/XML (esp. the Dublin Core) is beginning to deliver some of the most basic claims made by the "Metadata uber alles!" crowd (which is one reason our metadata in Mojo Nation is XML based) and there are a few really sharp people out there who have been working on the distributed trust management necessary to pull off the rest of this trick. Raph Levien has some really good things to say about distributed trust metrics at Avagato [advagoto.org] that people interested in these sorts of issues should take a look at.

    jim

  • Re:PPTP (Score:2)

    by jafac ( 1449 )
    what if that's what my employer has set up?
  • "I don't see it as getting shut down due to file sharing. I see it as getting shut down due to lack of funding. They weren't making money....they couldn't get another round of funding"

    Exactly how much funding is a small company with lawsuits being driven by industry behemoths hanging above it going to get?



    --

  • Re:Peer-to-Peer will never make it (Score:4)

    by ichimunki ( 194887 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:58AM (#619573)
    This is only "interesting" if you buy this particular brand of pessimism. I'm a completely different sort of pessimist. I believe that anything like Scour, Napster, or Usenet is largely doomed because the majority of the leeches and non-leeches are so dang stupid, that any content out there is likely to be 95% worthless because it is so banal. OTOH, altruism is not something about which we need to be concerned. Look at how many binaries are faithfully pumped into the Usenet world. Look at Free Software. Look at the United Way. Listen to those damn Salvation Army bells this holiday season. Even dark-hearted selfish louts like myself are glad to use up spare bandwidth (if we have any, that is) -- especially at times when our connection would otherwise be sitting idle or turned off-- to share files that may be of interest to others. So, human nature equals leech nature? I think not.
  • They are going to kill that poor bastard.

    All they have to do is say that he's harboring terrorists or something, and it will be raining cruise missiles.

    Of course, he won't have to really be harboring terrorists. Just data, copyrighted by large contributors to the last presidential election.

    For something that small, it could just be annihilated in a wink, in the middle of the night. No witnesses, and all evidence at the bottom of the atlantic.

    Don't expect them to last either.
  • "clipart", you could just be looking for say, a specific kink, and find it?
  • Ummm, what about IRC? Just about all the mp3's I've gotten have come from there.
    ---
  • VPN sounds interesting.

    Is there a PPTP implementation for BSD? (er- Mac OS X)

  • Clitart (Score:5)

    by g8oz ( 144003 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:18AM (#619580)

    I used it regularly to find clipart for my own devious projects

    "Clipart", eh? Is that what you call it?

  • Golden Age of Music Sharing is over (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was bound to happen and we were all waiting for it. Napster is going commerical, Scour is dead, CuteMX has folded long time ago, Gnutella is a victim of its own popularity (doesn't scale) and what are we left with??? Online music is going back to it's roots; to various warez ftp sites. Unless something else (Freedom maybe) comes along.

  • Peer-to-Peer will never make it (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16, 2000 @09:19AM (#619585)
    Thats right, you heard me. The simple fact is that Peer-to-peer file sharing is a doomed concept, because it relies on the altruism of the average human being. I don't know about you, but I don't upload files on Gnutella : I'm a leech. That's human nature, and thats why Gnutella does and always will suck.

    Posted anonymously because otherwise everyone will think I am Karma-whoring/Trolling/whatever. Just an honest opinion.

  • Oh, please. File sharing is hardly in danger. People shared pirated files long before Scour came along. It may become a little less easy, but you'll still get to download all the mp3s you want. The RIAA can rack up as many kills as it damn well pleases. No one is going to be stop file sharing.
  • Putting aside the MPAA, RIAA, and the right or wrong of copyrights, what was the real use of this software? Was there very much "legal" material on it? Or was it mostly a Napster work-alike for downloading MP3s ripped from CD?

    I'd never heard of Scour Exchange until now so I'm just wondering.
  • Sorry, but that won't work. You don't get Mojo for publishing content. Mojo is exchanged for resources, not data. You are consuming others resources when you put data on their machine, so you must pay them Mojo.

    You get Mojo for providing resources. To do that you need to share your bandwidth/computer by running a block server, content tracker, or relay server.

    Burris

  • Napster + ability to share any file - quality control + heavily Flash-rendered home website - proper software development ethics (get it out of the alpha stage!) = Scour.

    Totally. Look, just because Scour sucked, doesn't mean the base concept of peer-to-peer graphics sharing does. The use of Flash is one of my pet peeves - I have no need for it, and I'll stick to Quicktime.

    What needs to happen is those complaining about the demise of Scour should take the lessons from its debacle and reengineer an open source replacement. Critical needs would be the use of repeater stations/nodes, some kind of level authentication (based on file offerings - someone with no sharing gets rated as level one, someone who has shared 1 file per 100 received is level two, someone who shares files and is a repeater station/node with 95 percent uptime is level three, a level three with 99.9 percent uptime and good bandwidth upload is level four. And no flash. None.

    If you're at level one, you get to see banner ads (no popups or you're dropped) from someone at level three or four. If you're at level two, you can turn off banner ads. If you're at level three or four, you can offer banner ads - picked from the source through the repeaters to requestor (source gets 1/4 ads if also level 3 or four, repeaters share 3/4 ads along the chain, with closest repeater first in queue. This allows for a viable business model - it costs to serve up large graphics, but it's totally free if you just submit some every so often. Repeaters (level 3 or 4) get to vote (polling method) to blacklist someone from level 2 back down to level 1 if faked images (e.g. ads, pr0n, mislabelled/categorized) for 90 days. This keeps the spamsters/adsters out of the system. Blacklist applies to either entire domain or IP or IP gateway - again, repeaters need a 90 percent vote of all voting repeaters to do this.

  • Let me use this opportunity .. (Score:5)

    by Eloquence ( 144160 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @10:39AM (#619597)
    .. for some blatant self-promotion.

    infoAnarchy [infoanarchy.org] reports on the many, many alternatives to Scour & Napster, be it distributed or centralized. It uses the K5 [kuro5hin.org] site engine, meaning anyone can submit stories and moderate submissions.

    In our Resources [infoanarchy.org] section, you can get an overview of the many available file sharing tools. Here's the ones I would recommend:

    • One of the best alternative feature-wise is Filetopia [filetopia.com] (its userbase is relatively small).
    • And for MP3s, Songspy [songspy.com] is quite powerful.
    • If you like Napster, get Napigator [napigator.com]. It allows you to connect to OpenNap servers where any file type can be shared (and which are not concerned by any changes in Napster's business model).
    • A good alternative to the Windows Napster client is FileNavigator [filenaviga...argetblank].
    • Recently reborn: CuteMX [cutemx.com], has a lot of features but requires IE.
    • Somewhat closer to Gnutella, with distributed servers: DirectConnect [neo-modus.com]
    • Distributed, anonymous, encrypted: Blocks [kripto.org]

    But again, please come visit us at iA [infoanarchy.org] to find out about the best new tools. We know our stuff.

    File sharing will never die.

    --

  • damn (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Damnit, this means it's back to playing whack-a-mole for an hour while trying to find some decent free porn.
  • The title of the posting is "Scour is dead", the body says "Scour Exchange is dead" and the press release says:
    We asked for and received the bankruptcy court's permission to shut down Scour Exchange to facilitate a resolution of the massive copyright infringement lawsuit pending against Scour.
    and
    Scour's other services are still up and running and available at www.scour.com, so enjoy!

    Does this mean that Scour is bankrupt and the search engine is dead, or is it somehow "partially bankrupt" and able to continue with the search engine?
    --

  • MN solves the leeching problem (Score:4)

    by burris ( 122191 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @10:45AM (#619603)
    There are certain systems that are designed to handle leeches and other associated problems with peer to peer systems. The most notable is Mojo Nation [mojonation.net]. It is basically a barter system for computing resources, especially bandwidth and to a lesser extent disk space and CPU.

    In order to download, search, or even upload, you must compensate your peers with Mojo, which represents the the resources of theirs you are consuming. To earn Mojo you must contribute your own resources to the network by setting the software to resell your own computing resources. It also features redundancy so servers can disappear without data disappearing. It's really cool, check it out.

    Burris

  • Newsgroups. Download Forte Free Agent if you're running Windows (If you're in Linux the software you'll need is already there) and set it up to use your ISP's news server.

    Not that I do any of that sort of thing. I only use Newsgroups to keep up to date on Quake mods and the latest info on getting my USB Orb drive to run under Linux...
  • MyNapster [mynapster.com] uses the Napster protocol but also allows you to search for pictures, videos, etc...
    --
    DigitalContent PAC [weblogs.com]
  • Where am I supposed to get my porn clips and movies now??!

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