Sharman Networks manage the Fastrack Network on which the Kazaa music downloading program operates. Kazaa is the most popular way to download music in the world – the modern Napster replacement. It isn’t the very best system, but it’s the most heavily used which means it’s also the best place to go for hard-to-find files, which means that I use it a lot too.

Sort of. Kazaa is packed with spamware that it loads onto your computer – the hated Gator program, and ads you have to look at and so on. Until recently, there was an altenative that myself and all true hardcore geeks used, called Kazaa Lite. Kazaa lite was a hacked version of Kazaa which got rid of all the badness, but gave users access to the same network of music sharing (i.e. Fasttrack Network. Confused yet?). In the last few weeks however, Sharman networks has been making a lot of noise about turning music downloading into a legitimate service “in co-operation” with the music industry. Presumably as part of this campaign, they went out and got all the downloading sites for Kazaa Lite shut down. I’m not sure how one would go about doing that, but they did. Hardcore downloading geeks worldwide wept and trembled. Kazaa Lite was dead. We’d all have to find some other service to use, because inviting all that spamware onto our systems was, as the British used to say before cracking down on a colony, not to be borne.

Kazaa Lite is reborn. It isn’t imeadiatley easy to get a hold of (and it doesn’t work on Win98 anymore) but a brand new version has been released. The trouble is that Sharman networks may still be actively looking to kill it. The following posts make an interesting record of the struggle of the Yankee Geeks (sharman) vs. the Reb Geeks (kazaa lite and freinds):

link to the posts

(note that there are various links to the new version(s) of K-lite in the posts)