How did people get caught on Kazaa a few years back ExAcTlY

I don't know if this question has been directly asked and/or answered before. This question has been in the back of my head for a while now and I felt like asking.

What sparked the question was seeing this college chick on MSNBC getting busted for downloading mp3s off of Kazaa 6 years ago. She got a big fine, and being a poor college chick, she started crying, which was sensationalized to the extreme. You know how it goes.

But being a guy who has never used Kazaa before, what the hell was it and why was it so insecure? I'm thinking it was a website like Napster and logged ip addresses.

Kazaa is/was a very popular P2P client along the lines of Napster. It was also a piece of junk. I don't know how she got busted, but I know the RIAA took a big interest in Kazaa and thats why its mostly dead these days. Although really, if you're still using Kazaa these days you should be fined.

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Originally Posted by sexydingo

Kazaa is/was a very popular P2P client along the lines of Napster. It was also a piece of junk. I don't know how she got busted, but I know the RIAA took a big interest in Kazaa and thats why its mostly dead these days. Although really, if you're still using Kazaa these days you should be fined.

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I think you'll pay the price when you download a tonne of useless garbage followed by a virus :lol:

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Originally Posted by sear

I think you'll pay the price when you download a tonne of useless garbage followed by a virus :lol:

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Ugh, yea. So many fake files and viruses. It really was junk.

Nope, kazaa was nothing like Napster, there was no centralised website so from that viewpoint it was much more secure.

The insecurity came from the fact that you had to advertise what you were sharing. The result was that the chances of any one particular individual being caught were pretty low, but once an individual was spotted subsequent identification was fairly easy.

Also, it appeared at first to have clean files with hash checking, which is what made it so popular. Also, most people either used kazaa or some other system, but not both. Unfortunately the hash checking proved to be inadequate, and once people started mixing p2p clients this inadequacy allowed massive corruption of the data stream, giving the appearance of fake files (they were usually incomplete downloads from other p2p clients).

I had an idea to develop a system which would employ full hash checking, the intention being that it might be possible to include it as an add-on to the K-lite project. Fortunately bittorrent came along before I had gone too far down that route.

oh i think i remember downloading kazaa now. it was couple years ago, and i remember a shit load of popups. it was kind of like limewire, but (to me) more complicated.