I broke away from the Internet completely for about a month or so, and, when leaving, Morpheus was, without a doubt, the most used file-sharing program by myself and ohers on the net - bar none. MP3s, movies, applications - whatever I wanted, Morpheus was the first place I went to get it from. Then the news - my mates told me that they were having trouble connecting to Morpheus, saying they couldn't even access the network at all. The next day, I was told that a new version of Morpheus had been released. "Great" I thought, - "Music City had finally got off their asses and released Morpheus 2.0". Well, no, actually, they hadn't. "It's called Morpheus Preview Edition" they told me. "It's well shit now. It takes too long to connect, and I can't find the files that I want half the time". Damn I thought. What's going on with Morpheus now?
A month later, I managed to get back on the net and find out what all the fuss was about for myself. And, let me tell you, a lot had happened in that month. I'm not 100% sure about all the information I'm about to give to you, but here's the deal nonetheless:

Morpheus was planning to release Morpheus 2.0 which allowed users to simultaneously connect to the Gnutella network, as well as the Fasttrack network (which consists of KaZaA and Grokster). But then, the Morpheus client came under an attack of some sort (Denial of Service if that means anything to you peeps out there) which caused all users using the Morpheus client unable to connect to the network - thus, disabling them from downloading any files. At the time, no-one had any idea who were launching these attacks - a lot of speculation claimed that it was from the RIAA and other organisations that wanted to stop the distribution of MP3s, movies etc. that were available of Morpheus. Another story claimed that Morpheus themselves had launched the attack for reasons explained in the article below.

This was taken from MegaGames.com:

"Following 2 days during which the Morpheus site was down, an official announcement from Steve Griffin, StreamCast/Morpheus CEO claims:
"This week MusicCity and Morpheus users suffered dual attacks. First, early this week MusicCity's servers were hit by a massive Denial of Service attack. Soon thereafter, Morpheus users found that a separate attack had been launched on their computers and their Morpheus software programs."
The reasons behind the attack are not yet clear but many possible scenarios have surfaced.
A popular interpretation of the hacks claims that MusicCity themselves, riding on the recent vulnerability stories, carried out this "attack" in order to discredit the FastTrack network and find their way out of it. Rumours of Morpheus leaving the troubled network and moving to Gnutella had already been spreading and such an attack would offer a great excuse.
MusicCity is officially denying any involvement and in an official statement claims
"Lastly, we want to address some of the misinformation we've seen recently. There have been many comments that we caused these problems intentionally. Let me assure you that we would NEVER treat the Morpheus users in this fashion. Others have said we would re-launch with a paid subscription model, again, not true."

Another scenario claims that the RIAA is behind the attacks. In this way the credibility of the most popular filesharing program would be shaken and as an added bonus the FastTrack network would also be hit. Although such an act is not inconsistent to the RIAA's M.O., proving such a scenario is extremely difficult and no proof is likely to be found."

Dazzled by the situation they were in, Music City decided to release their "Preview Edition" of their client as their previous version was now rendered useless. The surprising thing was - this version didn't actually connect users to the Fasktrack network (or whatever its known as now). What was going on...?

Then some more news starting to filter through:

"KaZaA BV founder and FastTrack creator Niklas Zennstrom issued a statement saying "MusicCity (also known as StreamCast Networks) has failed to pay any amounts due to KaZaA BV under the parties' license agreement. As a result of MusicCity's breach, KaZaA BV did not provide version 1.5 to MusicCity. KaZaA has also terminated MusicCity's license."
What this means is that the failure to connect experienced by Morpheus users, was probably due to KaZaA not supplying the new software to MusicCity.
Why would KaZaA deny access to millions of users? Doesn't any filesharing network wholly depend on the number of its users? How much does MusicCity owe KaZaA?
and here's another question, if KaZaA get advertising revenue and rent money from Morpheus for the use of the network, why should we feel sorry for them and accept spyware?

KaZaA also admited to Newsbytes that "advertising traffic generated by users of the competing Morpheus software was redirected to its own servers last week."
But both these statements from KaZaA do not explain what Morpheus called dual attacks. KaZaA issued yet another statement claiming that: "We understand from public accounts that (Morpheus) also speaks of an attack in the same timeframe. Sharman Networks did not initiate, or have any connection to this attack. As far as the possibility of KaZaA being involved in any modification of a users PC without the users knowledge the statement reads None of this was of our doing.... We have no ability to affect the operations of other licensees."

So in one statement KaZaA deny any involvement to Morpheus' network troubles and in another they claim that they had something to do with it.
For the time being then we have to believe the unlikely story that someone attacked the Morpheus web site while almost simultaneously KaZaA were denying Morpheus users access to the FastTrack network and receiving redirected advertisements from Morpheus...

To add insult to injury KaZaA are also offering a little migration application which offers Morpheus users the opportunity to import their settings and partial downloads to KaZaA."

So what does this all mean? Well, basically, Morpheus's new version of its client is solely a Gnutella client and is  no longer part of the network it once was - hence, the files that you could once find on Morpheus, you may no longer find. It appeared that attacks on the Morpheus client were from KaZaA themselves, but there was another attack within the same timeframe as this one which altered the registry settings of the Morpheus users (doing exactly what, I'm not sure). This, however, KaZaA denied undertaking.

I then read another article from somewhere (yes, I've been doing the rounds quite a bit) which said that the Morpheus Preview Edition wasn't a client built from new code. There's another Gnutella client on the Internet known as Gnucleus which Music City took the code  from and altered it to their own needs. I then took a trip to the Gnucleus website and found this news on the site to see what was the truth in this:

"I had a feeling this would happen, Morpheus was moving in the direction of Gnutella and the only reasonable way of getting there quickly was by using established code. As long as they post their source code and credit us in the program I don't have a problem with this, give the GPL the props it deserves. I don't even know what to think, I wish they contacted me or any of the other Gnutella developers or protocol maintainers before doing this.

Gnucleus is a honest, well written client. Please don't let this action by StreamCast tarnish your impression of us. We will continue as usual working on the next version of Gnucleus. Thanks for your support."

So it did appear that the new Morpheus client WAS in fact a clone of Gnucleus's client. If you want to see the resemblance of the two clients, check these two screenshots out:

This major change to Music City lead to a major change to the amount of users on each file-sharing network. KaZaA's population on the, what now is known as, StreamCast Network (I think), has rocketed to well over a million users (up from around 500,000). The Gnutella network has also seen a massive rise in the amount of users on their network, as well as iMesh reaping the benefits of the changes. It seems the file-sharing community as a whole has benefited massively.

So......what does all this mean to you? Well, Morpheus - the client it was - is now dead. It is a shame, as this client was the favourite Napster Alternative for all. But DON'T WORRY PEEPS!. If you still want to use Morpheus the way it was - and not the way it is now - then the closest thing to getting it back is to use KaZaA - the, what now will be known as, Morpheus alternative (and are really rubbing it in their faces by having THIS (see picture) on their site). It always has been the same underlying client that Morpheus was and does connect to the network Morpheus once did. The review of KaZaA is up on the site. However, if KaZaA doesn't take your fancy, you could also try Grokster, which is also built on FastTrack technology and, therefore, connects to the same network.

A quick note about KaZaA and Grokster however - they DO contained Spyware. There are hacked versions available on the net however in which these clients have had the spyware removed.

Well.........I hope that clears the situation up for everyone. My head is still spinning from this major change, but this hiccup in the File-Sharing world does seem to have in fact benefited everyone but Music City. Morpheus, once the most popular file-sharing program on the net, has been thrown off its throne and replaced by KaZaA. Let the file-sharing revolution continue... - Rish