Can Napster be Stopped? No! Music & MP36/5/2000; 7:15:15 AM April 17, 2000: Well, to pick nits, yes, Napster itself can be stopped, as it depends on central servers. Maybe you can't stop it but you can make it as hard to use as it is to find FTP servers with warez, which for someone who is not "in the loop" is quite hard. Gnutella, on the other hand, is virtually provably impossible to block. If the protocol becomes encrypted or compressed, then the data it sends will look just like any other encrypted or compressed data, and the only other clue will be the traffic pattern, which I doubt will remain unique to Gnutella as others come up with perfectly legitimate uses for that protocol, like massive distributed processing.Update: Napster Takes a Nap: "Starting around 7 a.m. PDT Monday, servers and home pages for Napster, a popular service that allows Internet users to exchange MP3 music files, have been unavailable and disconnecting users." Napster's so easy to block it can even happen accidentally Thanks to Lawrence Lee for e-mailing me this link.