What Napster has spawned

It's been nearly two years since Napster was sued to death. But if you think free music from the Internet went the way of dial telephones and eight-track tape decks, think again.

The new Napsters have names like Qtraxmax, iMesh, Morpheus and KaZaA. They are helping people download more music than Napster ever moved. People are still not paying for it, either.

But all that free music comes at a price:

• The same programs teens use to grab hits from Jennifer Lopez or Britney Spears may find pornographic movie clips starring their look-alikes. Porn is pervasive on the Napster replacements.

• The new Napsters can spread computer viruses. The first such virus, called the Mandragore worm, was discovered about two years ago. Experts say virals spread via file-sharing could be the wave of the future.

• Some Napster replacements — notably KaZaA, the most popular — are fitted with "spyware," which gathers information about a computer and its users. The information is then sold, often to companies responsible for spam e-mail.

One spyware company, Brilliant Digital Entertainment, revealed to the government last year that its software has been installed on the millions of computers running KaZaA. The company will have access to the unused computing power of those machines. Brilliant planned to rent all that untapped power to the highest bidder, once the network is switched on.

Napster was the first program of its kind and was used by millions to get free music. Napster created a "peer-to-peer network" by letting people look at music that is stored on other computers that happen to be online.

That is different from the way a Web site works. Web sites are like radio stations. Thousands can be tuned in but hear only what the station is broadcasting, or download what the Web site has available.

"While I doubt it was the intended consequence," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., "killing Napster created problems of even greater magnitude."

Waxman led a congressional committee in 2001 that looked at file-sharing programs.

"Few parents know that their children can be bombarded with pornography when they use file-sharing programs," he said.

It is more controlled at Web sites, one in which a credit card is needed. There are no controls on file sharing, not even accidental ones. Everything is free and available to anyone.

Parental filtering programs such as Net Nanny or CyberPatrol don't do much good because they're designed to keep kids away from Web sites, and file-sharing programs aren't sites.

Filtering programs are more of an on-off switch for file sharing.

"With Norton Internet Security, parents can configure it so their children can't use a particular program," said Anson Lee, product manager for Norton Internet Security, one of the leading products that protects computers from viruses and hackers and offers a degree of parental control.

Parents can pick and choose which programs their kids are allowed to run. They might shut off Solitaire if it gets in the way of homework. They might switch off KaZaA in the same way.

But Lee said parents may put too much stock in filtering software. He said the best control may come from parental scrutiny.

The Napster replacements haven't become a way for hackers to get inside your computer and cause trouble, but that day could be coming.

Avert, a commercial anti-virus SWAT team based in Beaverton, Ore., discovered the first file-sharing virus about two years ago.

Vincent Gulloto, Avert vice president, said there are a couple dozen viruses designed to spread through file-sharing programs.

None of them has caused any serious harm, he said, but that could change.

"We see this as one vector that virus writers may use to spread viruses in a big way," he said.

Viruses spread over the new networks by disguising themselves as things they aren't. The Duload virus a year ago spread by claiming to be copies of a Pamela Anderson/Tommy Lee home sex video, an Alicia Silverstone nude photograph and a game called "Kama Sutra Tetris."

Some KaZaA users, who didn't read the electronic fine print as they registered, were irked a year ago when they learned their KaZaA program included a component that could lasso some of the number-crunching power their computer wasn't using and rent it out to others without warning them first.

Distributed computing networks take enormous problems and break them into millions of small, manageable pieces. Today's PCs have far more computing power than what is needed to download hip-hop or porn. Each of the millions of computers running KaZaA would use spare power to work on a small problem, then send the solution back to assemble a final answer.

Brilliant Digital would lease the network to the highest bidder, meaning that your computer could be used to make money for someone else.

KaZaA doesn't stop there. It also installs components that gather information from the computers where it's installed and report it to direct marketing firms — the outfits responsible for junk e-mail, or spam.

These sorts of programs are held in contempt by many computer users and are known collectively as "spyware."

Since all this became known, hackers developed a program called KaZaA Lite that uses the original KaZaA's network to search for music and other files, but doesn't install its spyware.

Despite spyware, file-sharing programs remain popular. KaZaA was the most popular Windows program at CNet's Download.com for most of last year. Millions got free copies there every week. Other file-sharing programs were listed among the most popular downloads available at the site, which is an Internet clearinghouse of free software.