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The original iteration of Spotify scanned the local filesystem and shared content on the peer-to-peer network. That was enough to ban it from my work and home n
by mcculley 6y ago
The original iteration of Spotify scanned the local filesystem and shared content on the peer-to-peer network. That was enough to ban it from my work and home networks and personal devices. I am not interested in whatever Spotify is currently doing. They are not trustworthy as an organization.
- tpmx 6y agoIt did those two separate things. It did not share your local files via P2P. It scanned the filesystem to find local media files to present for playback. It used P2P to legally share locally cached parts of DRM:ed Spotify tracks to other users in order to lower Spotify's bandwidth costs. Did you also ban Skype?
- mcculley 6y agoIt did indeed share local files. That was part of how they were able to handle the network load. If it found a file with a matching hash of something it had licensed, it shared it. Check out https://launch.co/blog/did-you-know-spotify-uses-peer-to-peer-networking.html https://launch.co/blog/did-you-know-spotify-uses-peer-to-pee... It was well known at the time. How do you know it was not sharing other files it found?
- tpmx 6y agoThat blog post does not back up your incorrect statement.
- mcculley 6y agoI was running fs_usage against the Spotify process in 2013. It was reading local files and sending data out to untrusted peers. It's okay that you think that is okay. I don't allow that on my machine.
- tpmx 6y agoExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
- mcculley 6y agoThat is not an extraordinary claim. Everybody knew that Spotify was scanning the filesystem. Some trusted that it was careful about what it uploaded. People with security concerns did not.
- tpmx 6y agoI'm out. Good luck.
- NavinF 6y agoThen strace spotify and post the log to HN. It would get a lot more votes than the silly petition that this thread is about.
- mcculley 6y agoSpotify stopped doing P2P once it got big enough. I don't care what it is doing now. I already banished it from my devices and networks. Nobody needs pop music that badly.
- NavinF 6y agoSo they only do this for files that are already present on Spotify's server with a matching hash? That's not particularly interesting
- codetrotter 6y ago> shared content on the peer-to-peer network Making use of of peer to peer protocols to distribute content is something I wish more companies did. P2P lowers the barrier to entry for new players in a domain, because it allows us to bring a product to the consumers with potentially drastically lower cost of operating, because we can provide service to our users without the massive bandwidth costs to our business. This is good for the consumer too. So don’t be mad at companies that use P2P technology. Be in favor of it. And demand better terms from your ISP instead. So that the internet can continue to allow for innovation and competition, instead of further centralizing all of the power to only the biggest companies and slowing down innovation and hurting competition.
- mcculley 6y agoI understand that it was good for the network. But the Spotify app was scanning directories other than its own (e.g., it scanned ~/Music on macOS looking in your iTunes library). It could have through negligence or malfeasance shared any file on the machine.