Anyone remember Hotline Server

[djefferis]

Circa 1999-2000’ish

Kind of a mix of Napster and the old AOL Warez groups all in one. P2P file sharing mostly - but was some interesting stuff on their ahead of its time.

Found a bunch of files on an old computer I had forgotten about this weekend - mainly concert bootlegs and such we’d post and share. But also found a lot of files from a very early server by a musician I re-discovered the past few years. He actually had someone post a server for sharing stuff including some of his early stuff on there. Just so weird to realize 20+ years later he’s still going strong despite remaining independent for the most part.

 

[BobbyFK]

Never heard of it. Back in the day I was more into Bearshare, LimeWire, the pirate bay etc.....

 

[djefferis]

Forgot about LimeWire for a minute - yea that basically ended the Hotline run.

I think the good folks at Norton Security developed this stuff to sell their product to ever parent in America as god knows 99.9% of the security threats were initially downloaded by some teenage kid looking for free music, videos or porn.

 

[jjgold]

Some guys got caught and lost everything

Never ever pirate

 

[quantumleap]

The file sharing one I used the most around that time was Kazaa.

 

[BobbyFK]

Some guys got caught and lost everything

Never ever pirate

If you're the ones uploading the content, I know you can get in major trouble but I think downloading depending on what the content is might not be as bad. They would have to cast a wide net to catch everyone that does it

 

[djefferis]

Used to make some serious money on Hotwire in the day.

Offered “free” access to download movies and various music - all you had to do was click through the sign up banner for the sponsor who paid $20 a customer - some bank called x.com.

Wonder whatever happened to the guys that ran our sponsor - one of them seemed to be pretty sharp actually and talked a lot about freedom of the internet and how the future would look.

 

[aikman.tr]

I remember old wagerline .com