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tiple clients, each user would have "plausible deniability," Song wrote in March 2000: "You can't sue anyone for offering illegal files when only a few encrypted blocks are available" at each computer. Even if they accepted that reasoning, Napster executives were more worried about Napster than about its users. And like linking the servers, they decided it would have exposed the company by showing that it knew too much about where songs were and that it had total power over the transactions. So Napster didn't adopt segmented downloading. Instead, it went after iMesh with a cloak-and-dagger.

The matter took on some urgency after Napster VP Bill Bales heard that AltaVista, one of the first big Internet search engines, was looking to get into music downloading by buying iMesh. That worried Shawn, who wondered if AltaVista's deep-pocketed parent, CMGI, might merge it with its own music start-up. Ritter went to work hacking the iMesh system, and he found some potentially useful problems. Among other things, the network put too much trust in its clients. Once a part of the system, a user could hunt for songs-or a lot of other things, including other users' passwords. "iMesh is a wannabe hacker's dream," Ritter told Shawn.

Recruiter Jessie Garrehy, meanwhile, had nominated AltaVista's head of search technology, Don Dodge, for a job at Napster. Ritter went to dinner with Dodge to discuss the position and brought a hidden agenda: to kill any chance iMesh had of being acquired. Over dinner, Ritter casually ran through the state of Napster's competition, taking care to drop in a mention of the security problem at iMesh. Dodge took it all in, and AltaVista soon walked away from iMesh. Just to be on the safe side, Ritter sent the holes he had found to his former colleagues at BindView in Boston. He suggested that BindView issue a security advisory, which might have scared away both iMesh users and potential corporate acquirers. BindView's Benny Czarny, noting Ritter's conflict of interest, wrote back: "I do not find that ethical." The security alert was never issued.

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CONCERNED ABOUT THE THREATS from Gnutella, iMesh, and others, Napster tried again and again to link its servers properly. Shawn was getting anxious both about others gaining ground and about the slow pace of

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