Kazaa Says No to Australians

**twisterX** · 12-05-2005, 07:24 PM

[news=http://www.slyck.com/newspics/kazaaban.jpg]Just before the stroke midnight in Sydney, Australia, the Kazaa homepage was altered as expected. Yet there are no pop-ups and no changes to the key word filter. Instead, large red letters appear towards the top of the homepage, warning Australians against the use of Kazaa.

Attention Users in Australia: To comply with order of the Federal Court of Australia, pending an appeal in February 2006, use of the Kazaa Media Desktop is not permitted by persons in Australia. If you are in Australia, you must not download or use the Kazaa Media Desktop.

Other than the above warning, it does not appear that Sharman Networks has made any changes to the Kazaa client. But to Australian users, a much different story exists. When an individual with an ".au" IP address attempts to reach Kazaa.com, an inhibitive website appears. The website warns users "Important Notice: The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted."

The rest of the world can see the recognizable Kazaa.com with only the first "Attention" message. All download links and other pages on the site funtion normally. For Australians, the second warning message is all that appears. No site navigation and no download links are available.

With all ".au" IP addresses cut off from the Kazaa.com homepage, Australians are also reporting they cannot connect to the FastTrack network. An update to the main peer cache, which maintains a large portion of supernode IP addresses, has likely been updated to block ".au" IP addresses.

It was expected that Sharman Networks would release a new Kazaa client with 3,000 additional key words added to their existing filter. This does not appear to be the case, at least for now. The banner that Sharman Networks opted for is a far cry from the technical resolution that was anticipated. In all fairness, it's possible the banner may be the start of an extended effort by Sharman Networks.

However judging by the lack of updates in over three years to the Kazaa client, many are questioning whether Sharman Networks even has the technical resources to successfully upgrade their software. The extensive blanket action by Sharman only furthers this speculation.

Source: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1015[/news]