Define free? Constant viruses, trauma from seeing killings and executions. Was it worth it? Sure but it wasn’t free
Or dumb songs with swooshes in them lol
Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Learning to torrent is what greatly increased my computer literacy when I was a kid.
Fake system of a down - link song was golden.
Link - he come to town He come to save - the princess Zelda
Duuuude. I just decided to look this up on chatgpt. I had no idea that was NOT system of a down. Sounds exactly like serj lol. I used to crank that shit. Be sure link. He come to town. Come to save! The princess Zelda!
please don’t “Look things up” on chatgpt, use an actual search engine…
🙄
I’m not conducting surgery here, a minor curiosity. Who gives a fuck. Also it has sources. Also if I cared enough about something like this, I’d click them and evaluate them. Also Chatgpt is trained on shit like reddit… AND “GOOGLE”.
Lol, like google?
But I agree, chatgpt is not a search engine. It’s a waste of time using it as one
haha that’s funny. Sorry to break the news though.
Download Worms.exe
I just wanted to play worms
Liero was an amazing contender
Even if somehow a quarter of the songs you downloaded started with “My fellow Americans…”
I once downloaded a 650MB movie in less than 10 minutes. I dont know how that was possible at the time as I had a sub 1 mbit line. I just know I went to the bathroom and came back to a downloaded movie. Always figured it was a bug of some kind on the modem as apparently the cable modem was doing the rate limiting.
It was FREE.
But at what cost?
EVERYTHING!
I did download a car
Still is
My PC got AIDS once from Limewire Lite, true story.
EDIT : it was Kazaa had a lite version, not Limewire. Good days lol.
Step 1. Download Kazaa Lite Step 2. Use Kazaa Lite to download Kazaa Step 3. Profit
the high seas have grown more treacherous, but you still can.
In what way?
many governments will snitch on you if they find you doing it. some countries need a vpn to hide yourself now. and some other smaller bullshit.
The government will snitch on you to who? A foreign government?
usually to the copyright holders so they can sue you. or they cut your internet access.
i said “governments” but really i should be saying “ISPs in some countries”. that might have added some confusion.
Yeah, ISPs are usually under pressure to obey the copyright holders. But VPNs should always be used.
Today it’s harder, not more dangerous.
But also everything is darker.
More treacherous than LimeWire was? I think the fuck not, that boi was filled with Justin_Bieber_Baby.mp3.exe’s
That stuff is so easy to deal with, 1 its fucking obvious its a .exe and second you can just run it in a VM. What, is your PC going to struggle running a VM that only has to run audio or video?
It’s considerably easier to deal with these days so the seas are less treacherous. Even Windows’ default antivirus will catch most of those too.
Misattribution killed Limewire. Downloading a song that turned out to be something different was annoying, but downloaded porn sometimes turned out to be actual CP.
Hey does anyone remember searching for the movie XXX with Vin Diesel? What a fun time…
no one has mentioned SoulSeek yet
in my defense Theres a lot of comments
Specifically nicotine+.
slskd, soularr, lidarr :p
This! Also, I have never found a single incorrect naming there.
And when you downloaded “Yoursong.mp3.exe” you knew you were about to have the best day ever!
(To this day it amazes me how so many people don’t pay attention to file types and keeps them hidden.)
I blame Windows, as it (I believe) hid file extensions of known file types by default. Was it, because it was aesthetically more pleasing? I dunno but it sure was a hazard for the unaware user.
Their entire security model depends on knowing file extensions, but they still hide them. Even if you enable it, there are some extensions that still won’t show, like .lnk (shortcut file). You can absolutely have executable code, and therefore malware in a .lnk file.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Custom icons didn’t help either, since they could just use the default icon for the spoofed file type. Though using a different program that changed the icon would negate that and make any of them obvious.
Also helps to use a method other than double clicking the file to open it, like drag and drop. Which was my usual flow with mp3s anyways because I generally added them to my massive playlist and double clicking risked replacing my playlist (that might have not been saved in forever) with a playlist with just that single song.
I liked it when winamp added the media library. Took me forever to rate my songs, but eventually my “new song flow” was move the new album folder to the artist’s folder in my music folder then tell winamp to rescan for new files, and then import my 3+ star or unrated songs as my playlist, played on shuffle. And occasionally grab a new format plugin if the album was encoded as something new and rescan until the new songs show up. Then give any noise or gag tracks 1 or 2 stars so they don’t make it to my main list after the first listen.
I believe there were also files like “yoursong.mp3 .exe” (not sure how this will render, but lots of spaces before the .exe so it would be hidden by the UI even if extensions weren’t hidden).
Replace your double-quotes with backticks, like this:
yoursong.mp3 .exe.
While it’s super annoying for the tech savvy, and gives a great opportunity to ill willed tech people, I’m sure it was an idiot proofing move. The average user is a not-so-tech-savvy office person, having relatively fuck all knowledge on extensions, and back in the time pretty much all programs got picky when facing an unknown/unsupported extension. Your average Joe/Jolene opened ‘veryimportantspreadsheet.xls’, renamed it to ‘veryimportantspreadsheetnew’ (without the extension), and made it impossible for Excel to open it by double clicking. Then in the best case they triggered an IT support request; in the worst case they reported that the very important spreadsheet got lost/corrupted and data was lost.
And most porn was that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off.
I remember actually searching that one out to see. Strange what you’ll do when you’re a teenager.
Fuck you for triggering that memory.
I can still hear the sounds he made.
Using Limewire to pirate Limewire Pro
And it was GPL, so it wasn’t even copyright infringement.
I have never used Limewire, but if they had distributed binaries that you should pay for, it is a copyright infringement, even if you could technically compile it yourself. There are applications that do this and it’s compatible with GPL license.
AFAIK the GPL does not forbid selling binaries in any way. You have to provide the sources of course.
The GPL explicitly allows redistributing without charge, even if you paid for it. If they didn’t want their program redistributed, they shouldn’t have licensed it under the GPL.
Using LimeWire free to download LimeWire Pro. Classic.
