GoGo LoGo Volume 2, Issue 18
August 17 - August 30, 2000
Low Cash Adventures
Bryce Edmonds



Every month, Bryce comes up with a new way to enjoy himself without spending a lot of dough.

STEAL THIS MUSIC

Okay. So this was supposed to be an edition of Low Cash designed to help you find free music. It was going to be about free tunes of all kinds from concerts to whatever, but the damn Internet took over. When I got into it, the anarchistic haven for stickin' it to the man (or woman) just had too much to offer. When techies put their heads to it they can be pretty fucking devious. What follows are some of the ways that you can get all the stuff you want from the Internet. Mostly it's music, but some of the sites are multi-use. The latter half of the list is geared more for those with a modicum of tech knowledge but stick with it and the rewards are great. A sug-gestion to keep this all in the Low Cash neighborhood: go to Radio Shack (or some place similar) and pick up the con-nection that allows you to hook your PC to your stereo. That way you can make tapes of what you download if you want. You could burn the stuff right on a CD but that's an investment that probably requires you live in an entirely different 'hood. Or maybe you get a group of peo-ple together and share a CD burner. Now wouldn't that be a step in the right direc-tionÉ

Napster. com I won't say much about these guys. They now have a CEO

yes, CEO

who is an expert in copyright law. They will be charging soon, I guarantee it. Like Scour below, they have investors

beaucoup bucks

and they won't be happy to see it flushed down the net toilet. They are the granddaddy, or at least the one to go pub-lic with the phenomenon, so check out their stuff. Do it quick, though. The are on the hot seat and things are gonna change.

Napigator. com This is a "navigator to tap servers and Internet audio" and just helps you make downloading quicker and easier. However, getting the hang of working it may not warrant the effort. You'll have to decide based upon your own level of comfort with things technological.

Scour. com The scoop on scour. com is this: they are in litigation also. Being a site with one locatable system makes scour one of the vulnerable ones. So if you want some-thing from them get it now before they are gone or start charging. You'll need a Windows based system running '95 or newer, at least 3MB of hard disk space and 16MB RAM, and Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later. There is a Unix version and Linux is one the way, but other then that you have to build your own. They provide some source informa-tion to help you on your way with that. Currently there are 56,926 scour users and 3,435,474 sharable files. They have music (including radio) and movies avail-able.

Spinfrenzy. com More for the teenyboppers, Spinfrenzy also allows for finding music and video. There is a disturbing marketing edge to this site and it lists possibilities for investors somewhat prominently so don't think this site will be free for long. They'll have to get you somewhere along the line either by charging outright or selling your info to other marketers.

CuteMX. com Ditto on CuteMX. They are one arm of a company with many Internet applica-

tions, and they're probably afraid of being sued and losing all those venture capital dollars. They are already limiting public access to their site in "response" to the Napster issue. However, they do have a lot of good stuff and good variety so lets hope that something good happens here. I doubt it, but anything's possible.

>From here on out we're talking about the Internet the way it was in the good ol' days. That also means that we're talking a bit less user friendly so read the direc-tions and take some time to learn the lowdown so you don't just end up frus-trated.

Gnutella. wego. com Gnutella is for sharing files. Doesn't have to be music, but it could be. The folks at Gnutella claim that their site would sur-vive nuclear war along with the roaches. Why? Because there is no central agency responsible for it. Once you have Gnutella then you are the server, so to speak. If you get shut down there are plenty of other servers out there

in the-ory at least. Let's see what happens but in the mean time it is a great resource.

Freenet. sourceforge. net Freenet is very similar to Gnutella in that it is a decentralized system to share infor-mation of any type. Freenet claims to be better than Gnutella because their system is "intelligent"

it was designed as an artificial intelligence project after all. A great tutorial on keeping the Internet free is available on their site on the Features of Freenet page. A few examples: "Information will be distributed through-out the Freenet network in such a way that it is difficult to determine where information is being stored." "It will be virtually impossible to forcibly remove a piece of information from Freenet." These folks seem serious about keeping the wild web free and their system seems solid.

Opennap. sourceforge. net I guess they don't need sleep at Source Forge because they've been busy. (Take some time to investigate. They've got some wild stuff on their site.) According to the web page "OpenNap extends the Napster protocol to allow sharing of any media type, and the ability to link servers together." Basically taking Napster and allowing it to be more Freenet-esque. This page is also useful as a resource for finding tons of other sharing sites and ways to manipulate the existing proto-cols.

Happy listening and perhaps next time I'll get into the free concerts and all that. In the mean time I got a wide world of music for the picking.




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