Well, sort of maybe. When I got back from Seattle I seemed to have no bandwidth, my net connection was slower than a modem. An hour or so of investigation led me to the web server’s access log, where I discovered everyone and his brother downloading music from my supposedly private collection of mp3’s. A little more digging and I discover a set of web pages with hundreds of links to free music downloads, including MANY to my server. I’m not sure how they got the links – I’ve been using Andromeda to stream the mp3 files to my work machine and to my living room media box. I’m not aware of any hacks to Andromeda, though it’s entirely possible they exist. It’s also possible it was simply an issue of the google spider indexing my music directories and someone having the patience to google my domain for mp3 files, off the cuff I’m not sure if andromeda protects about that, and I know for a fact that I stupidly did not create a robots.txt file to exclude the music directory from spiders. So…one way or another this was probably my fault, it still sucked though. The worst thing is the fear that the RIAA knows of this and a subpena is on its way even as I type. I don’t know for how long I was exposed in this way; I do know I had been having intermittent bandwidth and particularly latency problems prior to christmas, so its possible and even likely that this has been going on for months. ugh. Anyway a quick change on the permissions of the music directory and the would be pirates are now getting 404 errors (you should see my logs). If you’re from the RIAA and you’re investigating, trust me, I didn’t do this on purpose, and I own legitimate copies of the music I’ve transcoded and stored on my server. Please go away and pick on someone else 😉

An interesting aside – Pink Floyd was the overwhelming choice of the pirates, like 80% of them were grabbing Pink Floyd, particularly older stuff like Umma Gumma and A Momentary Lapse of Reason. At least they have interesting and refined taste.