Everyone is talking about MP3s. They’re fast, fun, and more importantly free! So what if their legality is sketchy if not non-existent in the first place? What do college students care about copyright laws and the RIAA? Shit, I tell you: shit. For $17 a CD at Rhino for a major label, and $15 and up for indies, those corporate (and not) record executives are fucking us in the proverbial "ass"–and I don’t like it.

They’re raping our wallets and crying out for more. Those sick bastards. Their defense is in the rights of the artist–but its common knowledge that the real money is made on tour via tickets, t-shirts and merchandise. Record companies often take far more than half the profits from record sales–the artists don’t get much, and the consumers get a sore ass and an empty wallet. The buggery must stop, and MP3s have started the revolution.
Almost everyone on this campus is familiar with Napster by now–the small piece of software you download and log into the net so you can share MP3 files. Within two seconds of logging in and typing in a search string, you’re given a list of all the matching MP3s that you can download–for free. Yep, free. No credit cards, checks, money orders, $17.99 rhino/virgin pricetags or anything like that.

You just double-click the file name, and in a few minutes it appears on your desktop, free. Of course, you have to pay for your internet costs, but at Pomona we’re fortunate enough to have an ethernet with fat pipes that costs $50 a year. What a deal.

The legality of MP3s is inconsequential. Telling college students not to download them is probably more ineffective than telling them not to smoke pot or drink underage–even the premeds are into MP3s. I bet if you asked Bill Clinton if he ever downloaded an MP3, he say something asinine like "Once, in college, but I never pressed play." Fuck you, Bill. Be a man and show some backbone for once. Stop being Tipper Gore’s bitch.

Napster isn’t the only way to get MP3s online, though. It is probably the easiest way, and definitely the most popular–but there are other programs that are far more powerful (and safer) to use.

To understand why other programs are better, you have to realize the limitations of Napster, i.e. why it sucks. First, Napster only lets you share MP3s. Great, you can share MP3s. But we all know what people want to share: pornography. And Napster doesn’t support that yet (supposedly, its makers are working on Pornster, an all pornography version, to try and catch up in the market). The inability to share pornography is quickly trivialized when we find out that in order to use Napster, we need to log in to a main server. The Napster works this way: Napster users log into a central napster server which archives who has what MP3s and where.

Sounds cool, right? A big MP3 library at your fingertips. Well, it’s not cool. It’s anything but cool. It means that every Napster transaction and every MP3 you have shared with Napster is recorded on this login server, along with your location (they can tell by your ip address). Big brother is not only watching, he knows what you’re sharing and when you’re sharing it.

Hotline has often been called the "armpit of the internet," and for good reason. It’s a file sharing network, kind of like Napster, but a bit more complicated. When you run Napster, your computer both shares and downloads MP3s. When you run Hotline, you have the option of running either a client (to download/upload files) or a host (to host files). Basically, Hotline lets you turn your computer into a file server (like the Novell servers on ResNet) or access other Hotline servers, depending on what version you run. This means that you’re not just limited to MP3s (though the Hotline network is full of them) but you can share almost any kind of file–most notably, pornography. In fact, Hotline earned its prestigious nickname for this very reason–pornography. The Hotline network is a mecca for pornography, MP3s, VCDs (the movie equivalent of MP3s), and Warez (cracked software). Probably 90% of the files shared on Hotline are about as far from being legal as those fine prospies that were here this weekend.

Aside from the ability to share pornography, Hotline is better than Napster because it is considerably safer. When you run the hotline client, you enter the URLs of "Trackers," which are kind of like web pages that list all the Hotline servers currently online. After you connect to a tracker, you can search its listings for the kinds of servers you want to connect to. Listing "MP3" will give you thousands of possible servers, but searching for a band name, style of music, computer program or style of pornography will narrow your list considerably.

To connect to a server, you just double-click its name. It’s that simple! Usually you’ll see a server agreeement that will claim to be legally binding, and prohibit government employees from entering. Just ignore it; it’s completely illegitmate. Most Hotline servers are run by 14 year-old kids or college freshmen (people like Rodion Steshenko, who was, incidentally, shut down by OIT a few years ago–it’s a bad idea to run a server on this network). Some Hotline servers will be members only, and in that case you’re screwed. Others will require a password you get for signing up for email lists, allAdvantage, or visiting pornography sites–the people who run the server make money off you visiting sites or clicking banners. Once you get the password, though, all the pornography, er, "MP3s," are yours.

The problem with Hotline, though, is that it’s not anonymous. The servers that share files must list themselves at some central place, and the people who visit make a series of connections stemming from that same central place that are as good as any paper trail. Its harder for big brother to see you, but you’re still fairly visible.

So, in steps Gnutella–named after the GNU license and Nutella–that European abomination people put on bread. The Gnutella network was modeled after the internet itself–it doesn’t rely on a centralized connection, but a bunch of parallel ones. Think of it this way: in Hotline you need a direct connection to pass information, but in Gnutella you work on degrees of separation–Dan got the clap from Dave, because he slept with someone, who slept with someone, who slept with someone, who slept with Dave. If the Hotline tracker or the Napster server shuts down, the network fails–but if one machine running Gnutella drops out, the network is unaffected. Since it works by degrees of separation, it’s harder for Big Brother to know where to look.

Like Hotline, Gnutella lets you share any kind of file, meaning free pornography! But even better, is the way Gnutella searches for files. Like I explained earlier, it works on degrees of separation and links–so what other people are searching for passes through your computer. There’s even a feature to monitor what searches are relayed through your machine. With over 14 terabytes (14,000 gigabytes) shared and growing, that means a lot of MP3s. And free pornography.

Terry Wolff and his bumbling OIT staff keep howling about bandwidth usage and increasing costs–but at (allegedly) 80% of our network traffic, general traffic more than doubling over what it was this time last year, and dorm rooms with more than 5GB transferred in a single day, they’ve yet to do a thing. Even if they wanted to, they’d probably have to hire somone new or buy an "MP3 for idiots" book, as they can’t even work the software they already have. So, my friends, leech away. Suck all the MP3s you want. With Gnutella, no one’s watching–not even big brother!

Oh, the A&F folk asked me to use my net resources for something other than trading live recordings of rock and roll musicians (that are endorsed by the artists) and provide you with some cd reviews. So here goes:

Sleater Kinney–All Hands on Me

Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein can play guitar, but not nearly as well as Janet Weiss can play drums. The two finally give up a bit of centerstage and let Janet rock like she can. And she does. Not necessarily the best Sleater Kinney album, but certainly the best drummed as Janet is less caged by her egocentric bandmates.

Modest Mouse–The Moon and Antarctica

Jurassic 5–Quality Control

J5 are now on Interscope records, and with the exception of a few tracks that seem to remniscent of the glam-hop movement and MTV, you can hardly tell. While a few songs clearly sound like classic J5, others are accented with some of the most intricate (and best) beats the cut chemist has laid down yet. 15 solid tracks, and a soundbyte from Sherman Helmsley are gonna make this album hit it big with new and old fans.