The battle against “false files” or flooding P2P networks with bogus material is a long and attritionous fight. In fact, it’s been fought with such ferocity that people are willing to protect long abandoned networks such as WinMX. In addition to no longer being developed and its population reduced, WinMX diehards continue to inflate the value of this P2P relic.

WinMX’s day came to a screeching halt soon after the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) delivered ‘cease and desist’ letters to several leading commercial P2P developers in September of 2005. As a recipient of one of these letters, Frontcode Technologies, the talent behind WinMX, decided to abandon the project.

The abandonment of this client also eliminated the WinMX.com domain, which hosted several network gateways. Network gateways, or cache servers, maintain the IP addresses of thousands of individuals connected to the WinMX network. The WinMX client communicates with this server during initial startup, obtaining and connecting to IP addresses of network members. Remove these servers and the network comes crumbling down.

The collapse of the WinMX network proved temporary, as within days, fans of the network resurrected it by establishing rudimentary cache servers. Groups such as WinMXworld.com and Vladd44.com soon became more sophisticated with their resurrection techniques, and life on WinMX seemed whole again

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1214