DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Whenever I download MP3s with Napster, my first choice (when I’m not searching for something so obscure that nobody else on the planet, apparently, has encoded it) is to download from the bozo who claims his bandwidth is 14.4k. Invariably, these guys have OC3s — capable of serving up not just a song, or even a CD, but an entire genre of music in about sixty seconds. For unknown reasons every one of those guys thinks that by hiding their monstrous bandwidth behind the “14.4'' label, nobody will figure out that they’re running Napster one hop away from MAE West on a 72-node Beowolf cluster with trunked gig-E connections to a NetApp filer.

But sometimes I’m wrong, and I find a guy who really is trying to squeeze dozens of megabytes of music through a crackly old analog phone line — miles of corroded copper wire strung haphazardly to a shed behind an abandoned gas station in Tucumcari, NM — where he proudly boots into Napster on a hot-rodded 486 (133MHz DX-4!) with 8 megs of RAM, and a genuine 14.4k modem with a street value of about five cents.