My cable modem was on the fritz over the last few days. Comcast came out today and found out that:
- Another crew had installed an amplifier on the line in my neighborhood.
- The amplifier I had was no longer necessary -- in fact, it was overloading the signal on the cable modem.
- My cable line had a (fairly old) block on it, making us all wonder how the modem ever worked.
Anyway, after they left, I found the response to be a tad sluggish. I pulled out a network analysis program... and found that my line was being barraged with requests from Gnutella (think Napster) clients.
This pissed me off. There's no way I could block them, either. So I decided to write a program to accept their requests and send garbage back. Then I discovered that Gnutella has this "server discovery" feature -- a server can say, hey, you might try this other server over here, it probably has good stuff, too. At the suggestion of some guys on IRC, I implemented this feature -- except my version returns the addresses for the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America. I'm sure they'll be interested.
Moral of the story: don't steal my bandwidth.
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