A ringtone is simply a computer program stored on the cell phone's memory chip. This program's purpose is to tell the microprocessor what the phone's speaker system should do when an incoming call is detected.

Ringtone-capable phones already have a range of notes stored in memory. The ringtone program only has to tell the microprocessor which of these notes to play, in which order and at what speed. By adjusting these variables, the microprocessor can play an infinite number of sounds.

In order to enable a ringtone on your phone, you just have to get the appropriate program into the phone's memory. It's actually pretty easy to do this.

The first step in adding a ringtone to your phone is finding one you like. This means checking out one of the dozens of ringtone sites on the Internet and picking a good one that's compatible with your phone model. Some sites charge for the use of their ringtones, to cover song royalties, among other things, and some sites provide tones for free.

Once you've found a ringtone you like, you just have to get it into your phone. There are a number of different ways to do this, depending on your particular phone model:

• Load the ringtone into the phone from a computer

• Send the program to the phone over the airwaves

• Type the program into the phone directly

A popular method is to send the new ringtone to your phone over the air. The basic idea is to send the phone a special sort of text message that contains the program for the ringtone, In most phones, this is done using either Short Message Service or Enhanced Messaging Service technology.

Nokia originally developed Short Message Service (SMS) to send short text messages between phones. Later, Nokia and Intel created smart messaging, a special protocol for sending functional, non-text information. Basically, an SMS message is coded to allow the phone to recognize it as a graphic, ringtone, etc.

During a live performance in July 1989, at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut, the recording of the song "Girl You Know It's True" began to skip. The line "Girl, you know it's" began to repeat over and over. Fans attending the concert didn't seem to notice or even care, but critics did notice and questioned Rob and Fab in their concert reviews. That was pretty much the end. A huge scandal followed, including lawsuits, and the loss of Milli Vanilli's Grammy.

Blame It on the Rain

This was their last Billboard Hot 100 number one hit before the scandal broke out. Here's the video:

In order to restore their career, Farian agreed in 1997 to produce a new Milli Vanilli album with Morvan and Pilatus on vocals. This led up to the 1998 Milli Vanilli album Back and in Attack.

Pilatus encountered personal problems during the production of the new album. He turned to drugs and a life of crime, and wound up serving three months in jail. Farian paid for Pilatus to attend drug rehabilitation, and also bought plane tickets for him to fly back to Germany. On the eve of the new album's promotional tour in April 1998, Pilatus was found dead in a Frankfurt hotel after ingesting a mixture of pills and alcohol, according to the Associated Press.

WinMX, if properly configured, can share almost any type of file. Files over 2GB will not be shared, and must be split into chunks smaller than 2GB. Although there is no limit to the number of files a user can share on the network, when a list of a specific user's files is requested (by the browse function) only a limited amount will be shown. However, all the shared files will be visible to a general search by filename.

In September of 2005, the original developer received a cease and desist letter from the RIAA demanding that they either implement filters to make it impossible for users to download copyrighted material from WinMX, or shut down. The decision was made to drop the service and cease any further development. Later that same month, users were able to download a working software patch for WinMX from two websites. These patches work by modifying the DNS lookup WinMX uses to find peer caches. When WinMX tries to find the original peer caches, it is instead directed to look up one of the new caches set up by the community.

Most of the software that was made by third party developers were for use in the chat rooms. They include bots, clients to host rooms and plugins. Bots were used in the chat rooms to either make it more lively, introduce games or to moderate users.

Installing Limewire Basic is fairly straightforward. You'll have to get past a bunch of skull and crossbones warnings about the perils of P2P. The only thing that's loaded is the program and Java runtime environment. If you decide to uninstall Limewire, there will be some Java files left behind, and the Java runtime environment will also remain.

Limewire Basic intentionally limits the number of files found during searches. This (of course) was done to get you to purchase Limewire Pro. The interface is fairly easy to use and ads are pretty low key.

Limewire serves as a media librarian for your PC. It displays music by artist, title, and other tags. The program also previews and plays music files and uses Windows Media Player to show video. It has a connection monitor where you can monitor incoming searches of your shared folder, as well as track files being uploaded from you by others. Limewire can also launch pages in a browser other than Internet Explorer.

There isn't much in the way of online support for Limewire Basic. You have to upgrade to Limewire Pro to e-mail a developer or get live online support. However, the freely available FAQ and downloadable PDF version of the user manual should get you through any rough spots. There's also a user forum and that's probably the best place to get answers to your questions.

Some Things to Look Out For

Copyright laws protect original works. Individuals who reproduce, distribute copies, or receive copies other than their own, without the consent of the owners, may be in violation of these laws. You should never copy - or allow anyone to copy from you - anything that is not produced for free public distribution. Be very careful about this. The music industry has been especially aggressive with copyright enforcement. Make sure you have the legal right to download or upload material before proceeding. If in doubt, get legal advice.

Setup Limewire very carefully. Make sure you don't accidentally open your entire system to the outside world. Lock things down tight. Be careful to only share certain folders, and that these shared folders don't contain anything you don't want others to have access to. This can't be stressed enough. Once something gets out on the 'net, it goes everywhere and stays forever.

The creation of legal music downloads came about because of complaints from artists and musicians. They argued that they owned their music, and it therefore should not be available for free downloading. They have a valid point. Besides the time and energy that goes into producing music, there are distribution and marketing costs involved. Musicians and recording companies rightfully expect to be compensated.

As a result, music download websites began popping up online. iTunes and Napster are two popular services. iTunes charges a nominal fee per song, while Napster charges a monthly subscription fee. There are also more than a hundred of sites that offer music downloads.

You can find legal music downloads in several ways. It is advisable that you go through reputable and well known sites. Shop around the 'net, ask friends for recommendations. Be sure to deal only with reputable sites. You don't want to run afoul of copyright laws.

Here's a list of some music download sites:

Installing Limewire Basic is fairly straightforward. You'll have to get past a bunch of skull and crossbones warnings about the perils of P2P. The only thing that's loaded is the program and Java runtime environment. If you decide to uninstall Limewire, there will be some Java files left behind, and the Java runtime environment will also remain.

Limewire Basic intentionally limits the number of files found during searches. This (of course) was done to get you to purchase Limewire Pro. The interface is fairly easy to use and ads are pretty low key.

Limewire serves as a media librarian for your PC. It displays music by artist, title, and other tags. The program also previews and plays music files and uses Windows Media Player to show video. It has a connection monitor where you can monitor incoming searches of your shared folder, as well as track files being uploaded from you by others. Limewire can also launch pages in a browser other than Internet Explorer.

There isn't much in the way of online support for Limewire Basic. You have to upgrade to Limewire Pro to e-mail a developer or get live online support. However, the freely available FAQ and downloadable PDF version of the user manual should get you through any rough spots. There's also a user forum and that's probably the best place to get answers to your questions.

Some Things to Look Out For

Copyright laws protect original works. Individuals who reproduce, distribute copies, or receive copies other than their own, without the consent of the owners, may be in violation of these laws. You should never copy - or allow anyone to copy from you - anything that is not produced for free public distribution. Be very careful about this. The music industry has been especially aggressive with copyright enforcement. Make sure you have the legal right to download or upload material before proceeding. If in doubt, get legal advice.

Setup Limewire very carefully. Make sure you don't accidentally open your entire system to the outside world. Lock things down tight. Be careful to only share certain folders, and that these shared folders don't contain anything you don't want others to have access to. This can't be stressed enough. Once something gets out on the 'net, it goes everywhere and stays forever.

Peer-to-peer networks can be classified by what they can be used for:

• file sharing

• video and audio media

• discussion forums

One of the goals of P2P is that all clients provide bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. As new machines are connected and demand increases, the total capacity of the system also increases. The distributed nature of true peer-to-peer networks means that there is no single point of failure. This increases reliability and allows the network to continue operating in case one or several nodes go offline.

A P2P overlay network consists of all the participating nodes. There are links between any two nodes that know each other. In other words, if a peer knows the location of another peer in the network, then there is a path between them in the overlay network. There are two classifications, depending on link structure - unstructured or structured.

An unstructured P2P network is formed when overlay links are established arbitrarily. As new peers join the network, existing links of another node are copied. The new node will build it's own links over time. When a peer wants to find a desired piece of data, the query is sent to every available node to find peers that share the files. Flooding a network in this way causes a high amount of signaling traffic, resulting in poor search efficiency.

Free music is surprisingly easy to come by, even music by famous bands. Sometimes you can only listen to a song while you're online, but with the ever-growing popularity of broadband this is really no longer a problem. Sites provide free online music by almost any band you can think of. However, most people want to download songs and burn their own customized CDs. So how do we do that without violating copyright law?

The best way to avoid problems is to visit sites that sell music for a fee. Some will charge by the song, while others charge a monthly subscription. The correct choice depends on your preferences. If you plan to download a lot of music on a regular basis, the subscription route is the way to go. However, if you only pull enough songs to burn a couple of CDs and don't plan to do this often, then try the by-the-song approach.

What about P2P technologies, like Limewire and Winmx? The actual software is not a problem, but anything you download using these products will still be subject to copyright law. But there are some gray areas to consider. What if you already own a CD and it gets damaged. Is it illegal to download the exact same songs to create a replacement? Since you have already paid for the music, some would argue that you already own it and therefore this practice would not be illegal. Others disagree, claiming that if P2P were not available, you would have to pay for a new replacement CD at a music store.

A ringtone is simply a computer program stored on the cell phone's memory chip. This program's purpose is to tell the microprocessor what the phone's speaker system should do when an incoming call is detected.

Ringtone-capable phones already have a range of notes stored in memory. The ringtone program only has to tell the microprocessor which of these notes to play, in which order and at what speed. By adjusting these variables, the microprocessor can play an infinite number of sounds.

In order to enable a ringtone on your phone, you just have to get the appropriate program into the phone's memory. It's actually pretty easy to do this.

The first step in adding a ringtone to your phone is finding one you like. This means checking out one of the dozens of ringtone sites on the Internet and picking a good one that's compatible with your phone model. Some sites charge for the use of their ringtones, to cover song royalties, among other things, and some sites provide tones for free.

Once you've found a ringtone you like, you just have to get it into your phone. There are a number of different ways to do this, depending on your particular phone model:

• Load the ringtone into the phone from a computer

• Send the program to the phone over the airwaves

• Type the program into the phone directly

A popular method is to send the new ringtone to your phone over the air. The basic idea is to send the phone a special sort of text message that contains the program for the ringtone, In most phones, this is done using either Short Message Service or Enhanced Messaging Service technology.

Nokia originally developed Short Message Service (SMS) to send short text messages between phones. Later, Nokia and Intel created smart messaging, a special protocol for sending functional, non-text information. Basically, an SMS message is coded to allow the phone to recognize it as a graphic, ringtone, etc.

The creation of legal music downloads came about because of complaints from artists and musicians. They argued that they owned their music, and it therefore should not be available for free downloading. They have a valid point. Besides the time and energy that goes into producing music, there are distribution and marketing costs involved. Musicians and recording companies rightfully expect to be compensated.

As a result, music download websites began popping up online. iTunes and Napster are two popular services. iTunes charges a nominal fee per song, while Napster charges a monthly subscription fee. There are also more than a hundred of sites that offer music downloads.

The creation of legal music downloads came about because of complaints from artists and musicians. They argued that they owned their music, and it therefore should not be available for free downloading. They have a valid point. Besides the time and energy that goes into producing music, there are distribution and marketing costs involved. Musicians and recording companies rightfully expect to be compensated.

As a result, music download websites began popping up online. iTunes and Napster are two popular services. iTunes charges a nominal fee per song, while Napster charges a monthly subscription fee. There are also more than a hundred of sites that offer music downloads.

A ringtone is simply a computer program stored on the cell phone's memory chip. This program's purpose is to tell the microprocessor what the phone's speaker system should do when an incoming call is detected.

Ringtone-capable phones already have a range of notes stored in memory. The ringtone program only has to tell the microprocessor which of these notes to play, in which order and at what speed. By adjusting these variables, the microprocessor can play an infinite number of sounds.

In order to enable a ringtone on your phone, you just have to get the appropriate program into the phone's memory. It's actually pretty easy to do this.

The first step in adding a ringtone to your phone is finding one you like. This means checking out one of the dozens of ringtone sites on the Internet and picking a good one that's compatible with your phone model. Some sites charge for the use of their ringtones, to cover song royalties, among other things, and some sites provide tones for free.

Once you've found a ringtone you like, you just have to get it into your phone. There are a number of different ways to do this, depending on your particular phone model:

• Load the ringtone into the phone from a computer

• Send the program to the phone over the airwaves

• Type the program into the phone directly

A popular method is to send the new ringtone to your phone over the air. The basic idea is to send the phone a special sort of text message that contains the program for the ringtone, In most phones, this is done using either Short Message Service or Enhanced Messaging Service technology.

Nokia originally developed Short Message Service (SMS) to send short text messages between phones. Later, Nokia and Intel created smart messaging, a special protocol for sending functional, non-text information. Basically, an SMS message is coded to allow the phone to recognize it as a graphic, ringtone, etc.

During a live performance in July 1989, at the Lake Compounce theme park in Bristol, Connecticut, the recording of the song "Girl You Know It's True" began to skip. The line "Girl, you know it's" began to repeat over and over. Fans attending the concert didn't seem to notice or even care, but critics did notice and questioned Rob and Fab in their concert reviews. That was pretty much the end. A huge scandal followed, including lawsuits, and the loss of Milli Vanilli's Grammy.

Blame It on the Rain

This was their last Billboard Hot 100 number one hit before the scandal broke out. Here's the video:

In order to restore their career, Farian agreed in 1997 to produce a new Milli Vanilli album with Morvan and Pilatus on vocals. This led up to the 1998 Milli Vanilli album Back and in Attack.

Pilatus encountered personal problems during the production of the new album. He turned to drugs and a life of crime, and wound up serving three months in jail. Farian paid for Pilatus to attend drug rehabilitation, and also bought plane tickets for him to fly back to Germany. On the eve of the new album's promotional tour in April 1998, Pilatus was found dead in a Frankfurt hotel after ingesting a mixture of pills and alcohol, according to the Associated Press.

Installing Limewire Basic is fairly straightforward. You'll have to get past a bunch of skull and crossbones warnings about the perils of P2P. The only thing that's loaded is the program and Java runtime environment. If you decide to uninstall Limewire, there will be some Java files left behind, and the Java runtime environment will also remain.

Limewire Basic intentionally limits the number of files found during searches. This (of course) was done to get you to purchase Limewire Pro. The interface is fairly easy to use and ads are pretty low key.

Limewire serves as a media librarian for your PC. It displays music by artist, title, and other tags. The program also previews and plays music files and uses Windows Media Player to show video. It has a connection monitor where you can monitor incoming searches of your shared folder, as well as track files being uploaded from you by others. Limewire can also launch pages in a browser other than Internet Explorer.

There isn't much in the way of online support for Limewire Basic. You have to upgrade to Limewire Pro to e-mail a developer or get live online support. However, the freely available FAQ and downloadable PDF version of the user manual should get you through any rough spots. There's also a user forum and that's probably the best place to get answers to your questions.

Some Things to Look Out For

Copyright laws protect original works. Individuals who reproduce, distribute copies, or receive copies other than their own, without the consent of the owners, may be in violation of these laws. You should never copy - or allow anyone to copy from you - anything that is not produced for free public distribution. Be very careful about this. The music industry has been especially aggressive with copyright enforcement. Make sure you have the legal right to download or upload material before proceeding. If in doubt, get legal advice.

Setup Limewire very carefully. Make sure you don't accidentally open your entire system to the outside world. Lock things down tight. Be careful to only share certain folders, and that these shared folders don't contain anything you don't want others to have access to. This can't be stressed enough. Once something gets out on the 'net, it goes everywhere and stays forever.

WinMX, if properly configured, can share almost any type of file. Files over 2GB will not be shared, and must be split into chunks smaller than 2GB. Although there is no limit to the number of files a user can share on the network, when a list of a specific user's files is requested (by the browse function) only a limited amount will be shown. However, all the shared files will be visible to a general search by filename.

In September of 2005, the original developer received a cease and desist letter from the RIAA demanding that they either implement filters to make it impossible for users to download copyrighted material from WinMX, or shut down. The decision was made to drop the service and cease any further development. Later that same month, users were able to download a working software patch for WinMX from two websites. These patches work by modifying the DNS lookup WinMX uses to find peer caches. When WinMX tries to find the original peer caches, it is instead directed to look up one of the new caches set up by the community.

Most of the software that was made by third party developers were for use in the chat rooms. They include bots, clients to host rooms and plugins. Bots were used in the chat rooms to either make it more lively, introduce games or to moderate users.

Free music is surprisingly easy to come by, even music by famous bands. Sometimes you can only listen to a song while you're online, but with the ever-growing popularity of broadband this is really no longer a problem. Sites provide free online music by almost any band you can think of. However, most people want to download songs and burn their own customized CDs. So how do we do that without violating copyright law?

The best way to avoid problems is to visit sites that sell music for a fee. Some will charge by the song, while others charge a monthly subscription. The correct choice depends on your preferences. If you plan to download a lot of music on a regular basis, the subscription route is the way to go. However, if you only pull enough songs to burn a couple of CDs and don't plan to do this often, then try the by-the-song approach.

What about P2P technologies, like Limewire and Winmx? The actual software is not a problem, but anything you download using these products will still be subject to copyright law. But there are some gray areas to consider. What if you already own a CD and it gets damaged. Is it illegal to download the exact same songs to create a replacement? Since you have already paid for the music, some would argue that you already own it and therefore this practice would not be illegal. Others disagree, claiming that if P2P were not available, you would have to pay for a new replacement CD at a music store.

A ringtone is simply a computer program stored on the cell phone's memory chip. This program's purpose is to tell the microprocessor what the phone's speaker system should do when an incoming call is detected.

Ringtone-capable phones already have a range of notes stored in memory. The ringtone program only has to tell the microprocessor which of these notes to play, in which order and at what speed. By adjusting these variables, the microprocessor can play an infinite number of sounds.

In order to enable a ringtone on your phone, you just have to get the appropriate program into the phone's memory. It's actually pretty easy to do this.

The first step in adding a ringtone to your phone is finding one you like. This means checking out one of the dozens of ringtone sites on the Internet and picking a good one that's compatible with your phone model. Some sites charge for the use of their ringtones, to cover song royalties, among other things, and some sites provide tones for free.

Once you've found a ringtone you like, you just have to get it into your phone. There are a number of different ways to do this, depending on your particular phone model:

• Load the ringtone into the phone from a computer

• Send the program to the phone over the airwaves

• Type the program into the phone directly

A popular method is to send the new ringtone to your phone over the air. The basic idea is to send the phone a special sort of text message that contains the program for the ringtone, In most phones, this is done using either Short Message Service or Enhanced Messaging Service technology.

Nokia originally developed Short Message Service (SMS) to send short text messages between phones. Later, Nokia and Intel created smart messaging, a special protocol for sending functional, non-text information. Basically, an SMS message is coded to allow the phone to recognize it as a graphic, ringtone, etc.

Peer-to-peer networks can be classified by what they can be used for:

• file sharing

• video and audio media

• discussion forums

One of the goals of P2P is that all clients provide bandwidth, storage space, and computing power. As new machines are connected and demand increases, the total capacity of the system also increases. The distributed nature of true peer-to-peer networks means that there is no single point of failure. This increases reliability and allows the network to continue operating in case one or several nodes go offline.

A P2P overlay network consists of all the participating nodes. There are links between any two nodes that know each other. In other words, if a peer knows the location of another peer in the network, then there is a path between them in the overlay network. There are two classifications, depending on link structure - unstructured or structured.

An unstructured P2P network is formed when overlay links are established arbitrarily. As new peers join the network, existing links of another node are copied. The new node will build it's own links over time. When a peer wants to find a desired piece of data, the query is sent to every available node to find peers that share the files. Flooding a network in this way causes a high amount of signaling traffic, resulting in poor search efficiency.

The creation of legal music downloads came about because of complaints from artists and musicians. They argued that they owned their music, and it therefore should not be available for free downloading. They have a valid point. Besides the time and energy that goes into producing music, there are distribution and marketing costs involved. Musicians and recording companies rightfully expect to be compensated.

As a result, music download websites began popping up online. iTunes and Napster are two popular services. iTunes charges a nominal fee per song, while Napster charges a monthly subscription fee. There are also more than a hundred of sites that offer music downloads.