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Plus, there is no official support for non-Windows platforms.

The eMule client itself is not official. If you want official, look at eDonkey Basic for Linux. Or just use mldonkey like everyone else does.

Seriously only internet newbies, grandmas & grandpas installed the Kazza Media Desktop. All other installed Kazza Lite (No Adware!) or eDonkey.

Later all eDonkey users switched to Overnet and later on to eMule and BitTorrent

An open source P2P application is more safe in use than a closed source application because clever people can read and understand the code.

Oh I forgot:
1) Idea
2-6) see above
7) ???
8) No Profit
9) Sued by RIAA/MPAA...

Paradoxically, BitTorrent's architecture means that the more popular the file is the faster it downloads - because more people are pitching in. Better yet, it's a virtuous cycle. Users download and share at the same time; as soon as someone receives even a single piece of Fokkers, his computer immediately begins offering it to others. The more files you're willing to share, the faster any individual torrent downloads to your computer.

Congradulations! You've just reinvented a hash-based filesharing network. You're not the first, though:

* Gnutella (BASE32 SHA1)
* eDonkey/Overnet (Tiger Tree Hash)
* KaZaA (KZHash)
* Freenet (CHK)
* Mnet (?)

Mnet even does the full .torrent block hashing thing. Most of these networks deploy swarming, too.

The coolest thing is magnet-uri's. I've even written a redirector for SHA1 links here.

Edonkey and the network have U.S. origins - http://www.edonkey2000.com/contact.html

Although Emule, which I think is now the most popular client, has German origins.

now, as far as speed, like many people have mentioned, it can be slow. I'm sure I'm over simplifying, but think of ed2k the same as BitTorrent, only instead of the queueing of bandwidth being for only one single file, it is for your entire list of files. It can take quite a long time to complete downloads, but knowing that you're going to get a nice, uncorrupted file makes it worthwhile.

eMule, the open source variant, contains many enhancements over the standard eDonkey client, and there are numerous mods in circulation. this can include Fakelist databases, ip to country checking, and the ability to tweak your bandwidth usage. there is also a web-based and mobile (cell phone) client built in so you can monitor your eMule from anywhere.

It should be noted that there is a Legal Content Database hosted by the project, containing links to freeware/shareware and public domain stuff.

Don't forget edonkey and emule clients!

You forgot:

- BitTorrent
- Shareaza (gnutella2)
- eDonkey2000
- FTP - with IPs traded amongst friends/etc. (a crude P2P, in a sense)
- as well as a slew of others I'm not aware of, I'm sure.

All this knowledge simply from being online for a couple years. Imagine what a hardcore file trader is aware of.

eDonkey has everything you'll ever need, especially if you go browsing at ShareReactor

Hrmm... if only such a thing existed and was compatable with another major client's network.

Way to shoot yourself in the foot, RIAA.

Overnet (formerly eDonkey)
Games, Software, Keygens, Cracks, anything you can think of, just a little slow at beginning of download, but after awhile, downloads from over 100 sources at a time.

DC++
Games, Software, Keygens, Cracks, anything you can think of, just a little harder to use and overall slower, unless you use the 1stleg hublist (http://www.1stleg.com/PublicHubList.config)

Soulseek
Mainly for music. Search for artists, select lots of tracks, leave on overnight and PRESTO! Instant GIGABYTES of music.

BitTorrent
Use other sites to search for files, and download with this software.


That's all I can think of right now, but that should get you started.

.. I'll still get most of my music with SoulSeek, Kazaa, WinMX and Overnet, and buy the rest from second hand CD shops.

Anyone with me on this?

Both Overnet and eDonkey have Linux clients, and they are two of the best P2P networks out there.

Linux:Windows::Overnet:Kazaa

I've made the 720x540 stream availableon edonkey/overnet. It's got lots of info about who did it inside it, so I figure the authors won't feel cheated on copyright. It's so tedious anyway, I doubt that it'll be wildly popular, but the fact that it can be done at all is interesting to see.
I haven't gotten the python modules right for bittorrent on RH9 or I'd set that up, too.

This is also known as guilty until proven innocent, for those of us that may show up as a false-positive on the illegal P2P scale.

Even more interesting, as mentioned in the News.com article, is a related story from yesterday morning that I missed. It seems the Republicans are getting it right... or at least are trying to. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas is seeking to regulate how digital rights management (DRM) is incorporated into consumer products. Also, the proposed bill would require that a copyright holder gets permission from a judge before receiving the name of any alleged illegal P2P user.

Of course, DRM goes against everything I believe in, but any kind of regulation of how this technology is deployed is a step in the right direction. Allowing the marketplace to intelligently decide what amount (if any) of copy protection is reasonable is a Good Thing.

Edonkey already does this. If you know the hash of the file you are looking for, you are guaranteed to get that file. The RIAA/MPAA can pollute the network all they want, but if you have a reliable hash then everything is all good.

It won't work well with all P2P networks. A prime example is the eDonkey network which uses a hash of each file as an identifier, not a filename/size identifier. You can rename the file to anything and the hash won't change. eMule Project is another great eDonkey network client and is open source.

This is too little, too late, unless you're stuck on Kazaa.

This thought occurred to me last night while doing some kazaa downloading. Maybe a better P2p capture system would involve each client downloading 1 frame per movie, and sharing that with the world. The clients could assemble the movie from a distributed network, much like a frame server does in premiere.

eDonkey does something similar for the files that it downloads. It divides the file into 9mb chunks and when you have one complete chunk, that part is shared on the network. It works really nicely for large files like movies and ISOs. eDonkey also has this neat feature of having urls that stores the file's hash value. So if you share a file, and wan't people to download that particullar file, you just publish the url on a web page. There are whole sites devoted to edonkey links. ShareReactor and FileNexus are the two most common such sites. Check them out and see the power of this system! The eDonkey network is based on servers and anyone can set up one. The maker of eDonkey has now come up with a serverless P2P system called OverNet that is based on the same edonkey protocols for file transfers and link sharing

If you wan't to use edonkey, then get the open source eMule client. It is an edonkey clone with better features and it is open source. It has a lot of mods for various types of addon features. I personally use the eMule Plus MOD. It even has a web server that you can use to control the client remotely!

have fun filling up that hard drive...

oh, and you'll probably need on of these soon

How bout someone with the full images put them up on a Distributed P2P network like Overnet or eDonkey2000 so we can take the load off of the mirrors and help proove that P2P is usefull for something other than piracy.

OK, first off there is a little knack to searching on eDonkey. You first have to make sure that your firewall will accept connections through ports 4662-4663 (and forwarding to the machine running the donkey)... most of this info is on the eDonkey site.

When it is up and running, you can do a search when you are connected to a server (a good idea is to get an updated serverlist, one of the places I go to is The Donkey Network). If there aren't any of the files there, then click the 'Extend Search' button that pops up to the left of the search button... to do more searches, click the button then press and hold down the enter key for less than a second, do more short bursts to let any server search results get through.

A lot of the files will be dependant on what people are sharing, and the more blue the colour, the more people have the same file. A great place I've recently found that lists certain Sci-Fi files is Varelse's Sharepool, and another site for other links is ShareReactor.

A lot of the server work (updating lists, etc) has been automated in Overnet, but I haven't been using it at all yet. As I said in the first post, it takes a little more work to learn eDonkey, but I've found the quality of files that are being shared far superior to the FastTrack network (esp. for very large files). There are times that I can't find stuff on the Donkey network, so Kazaa still comes in handy.

Quite a few albums are available for 'previewing' if you look in the right place.

--

I think Kazaa will die like Napster or AudioGalaxy did. Don't use Kazaa. Please try edonkey2000 network. It's free, it's available not only for Windows, and you don't need to watch any commercials.

This is already being done by eDonkey2000. EDonkey is a distributed peer-to-peer file sharing systems where you download small blocks of each file from many different clients, thereby speeding up the transfer, and there are already 32-bit CRC checks done on each block, so if I'm receiving a file from 5 different clients at once, and one of them is attempting to "poison" the file by injecting bad blocks, my client automatically compares the CRC of the blocks I'm receiving from the poisoning client and knows they are bad, and rejects them. If one client sends me too many bad blocks, my client will automatically disconnect from them and look elsewhere for the file. It really is a superior system and works for any type of file, but especially well on large files such as ISOs and DIVX movies. Try it out.

You're absolutley right. It's actually already done. Edonkey2000 already does this (site such as: ShareReactor and FileNexus have long lists of high-quality material, all of which is proven to be real. Also for other p2p systems like KaZa there are tools that can make hashes. Of course there are sites that list good hashes.

I think that the problem lies in identifying whether a file on a P2P network is legit or not.

The obvious solution would be to make a list of these legitimate files. However, obviously these sites would then become the companies' main targets.

I think that we can borrow an idea from a file-sharing network called eDonkey where there exist websites that provide a list of fake/bad files. If the P2P developers could provide a way to tag/mark/block these fake files, I doubt that the companies can go after them for doing so. Imagine them saying:

"We wish to sue you for trying to prevent other users from downloading this file."

Of course, there are some issues that may arise from this, such as:
- the difficulty of maintaining such a listing
- someone always has to download and check the bad file (which is not much of a problem in the broadband age)
- the companies can perpetually create fakes with similar name patterns, thus vexing the users even more (again, the issue here is: when does it stop?)

What do you think? Can anyone come up with a better way to identify legitimate files (or rather , identifying fake files)?

Here: edonkey + ShareReactor's Adult DVD rips. Now you're up to date (unless you're a masochist and prefer the old festering pits of IRC/usenet/FTP).

Gnutella and FastTrack are more suited for small & medium-sized files. eDonkey -- specifically its Forced Partial File Sharing feature -- excels at distributing large files.

Oh yeah... buy the DVD if you like it... and if you don't mind the 'nonsescript' charge showing up on your card (because there's no fucking anonymous digital cash alternative, and there'll probably never will be because "the terrorists could use it to kill your children"). Pornstars need to eat too(!)... at least until such a point in the future where tech allows you to direct your own virtual pr0n stars. :)

--

IT'S A SHAME!

These lamers at Napster bought the site http://www.edonkey.com and advise the visitors to download NeoNapster.

The original edonkey url is http://www.edonkey2000.com. If you prefer, get Kazaalite at http://www.kazaalite.nl.

I think I will be really be happy when I'll ear that Napster has died.

--

So as I said, I do see this as one of the problems to be solved, although I feel it's of lesser importance. There are many ways of doing this. One of them is previewing - when downloading an audio or video file, when you're about 100k into it (100-200k if it's video), do a preview and see what you're getting. With this looping stuff you have to go farther than 100k however - preview one fourth to one third of the way into the audio files. Many Gnutella clients have a preview feature, as does Fasttrack (Kazaa).

Another method is to ban IP's and IP ranges spreading this. This is already being done - it's only a minor fix because they will always get around it, but it will help somewhat, they won't be able to have big servers spewing this stuff 24/7

The real way to fix this however is hashes. Which are already ubiquitous - they already exist and are known on Gnutella (Shareaza, Gnucleus, Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire), Fasttrack (Kazaa) and Edonkey2000. On Gnutella (Shareaza) and Edonkey2000, you can click through or cut and paste these URI's (URLs) to files from web sites (or Usenet, IRC, e-mail, instant messengers, whatever) and start searching and downloading the files - for FastTrack (Kazaa), it is a little bit more time-consuming and complex, but worth it if you're going to be downloading a large file. The hash technology is already there, the key now is finding a trusted source for hashes which are both good and whose data is findable and downloadable on p2p networks, and for those sources to survive. I guess I'll detail how this is currently working with the various p2p networks, why not?

There are four major p2p networks - Gnutella, Fasttrack, Edonkey and Freenet. Freenet is a publishing network, the others are all file sharing networks, which is what we're concerned with. Gnutella and Fasttrack are the two largest networks. Edonkey2000 specializes somewhat in large files however, so if it's 100MB+ files you're after, Edonkey2000 is on par, and perhaps better in some ways currently, than Gnutella and FastTrack. Edonkey2000 and FastTrack are closed networks - closed source server/clients and closed protocol networks. Gnutella is open, the protocol is open, and robust open source server/clients like Gnutizen exist for it. This gives Gnutella advantages, such as a choice of multiple clients for virtually every platform, as well as other advantages. Of all the file sharing p2p networks, Gnutella is my favorite and I believe Gnutella is the future of p2p. I think competition amongst p2p networks is healthy however as every can steal everyone elses best features and innovations.

Gnutella files are hashed for HUGE with an implementation called sha1. You can read about the technical aspects here if you wish to. These hashes are useful for finding additional sources for found files so that one can resume downloads or download from multiple sources with integrity. Actually there's one caveat to that - if you are downloading from an honest client, it will tell you a truthful hash of it's data. A client could give a fake hash and then send other data - but you would have to directly download from the rogue. How clients deal with this is even more complex - Gnucleus downloads overlapping chunks - it downloads 1-2000 from one source and 1950-3950 from another - if 1950-2000 do not match from both sources, it marks both chunks as possibly bad. You can read more details about this in Gnutella documentation and discussion groups.

Aside from this usage, these hashes can be used externally as well. Currently, Shareaza, which is a pretty good servent (server/client), is the only one from which URI's (URL's) can be cut, paste, and clicked through to from the web/IRC/e-mail etc. I'm sure clients like Gnucleus will have this ability in the future. If you had Shareaza installed, you could click on a link like this - which is an, I believe uncopyrighted, Chomsky speech, Shareaza would launch (if you don't have it already) and would ask you if you want to download the file or cancel. If you select download it would connect to GnutellaNet, search for the file, and if it found a host which has the file and which has upload slots open, would start downloading it. Actually, the Slashdot "allowed HTML" filters are pulling some necessary characters out of the above link, so you can't click through on /., although you can on a normal HTML web page. I can't post an URL that you can cut and paste either since /. forces a line break after 40 characters or so, if /. didn't do this and the below was in one line, you could have cut and paste it into Shareaza, I'll show it here for an example, imagine this was all on one line for you to cut and paste, or better was just a link to cut. You can do this on any HTML page, it's just the Slashdot HTML parsing messing it up -

gnutella://sha1:HXHSJ6ATN3LQCCIOBGUEWV5FFCKP2KBL/N oam%20Chomsky%20-%20Audio%20Book%20-%20Noam%20Chom sky%20-%20At%20Johns%20Hopkins%20University.mp3/

I would give the above link a rank of "7", because the last time I searched for it, 7 people replied they had it. I have several hashes with a score of 80-90, meaning you're more likely to find or download them, but the above is the only one I have that I have enough confidence in that the data is uncopyrighted.

So now you have one link to a hash - where can you find trusted sources which tell you what hashes are ubiquitous, making it more likely you will find and be able to download them, are rated in terms of quality by multiple sources and so forth? Well for Gnutella, one source is Bitzi. You can search for data there, see what is the most reported, what things are ranked, see comments, see bit rates, file sizes, artists, titles and so forth. It is very cool. Most interaction is from Bitzi into Shareaza (the only Gnutella client that does this currently), but from within Shareaza if you find a file you can type "find Bitzi ticket" and see if the hash has been reported on already. One thing which I'm sure will soon be remedied is that Bitzi does not have direct clickthrough to Shareaza, I have to copy hashes to my clipboard, edit them to Shareaza format and paste them into Shareaza. I'm sure soon Shareaza and Bitzi will agree on a standard and remove this step so I can just click through. And soon Gnutella clients other than Shareaza will have this ability as well. Bitzi's data base is open to the public, you can read their open data policy on their web site, anyone is free to use the data as long as Bitzi is credited. Bitzi.com is the only large, good source of Gnutella hashes I know of. Edonkey2000 has had hashes for a while, and has several good, large sources for hashes such as Filenexus.com and Sharereactor.com. Since Gnutella is a larger network and it just implemented this ability, I'm sure it will have even more and larger sources in addition to Bitzi. And since Bitzi's database is open to all, if Bitzi goes down someone else can open the database up again somewhere else. I'm sure in the future, even the trusted rating system will become distributed.

Gnutella uses the sha1 hash, Edonkey2000 uses another, and Kazaa uses another. Web sites exist that centralize the hashes for these. I'm sure soon web sites will exist that coalesces and translates all of this. Gordon Mohr, who runs Bitzi, wants to see a universal p2p tag, magnet, which is agnostic about which p2p backend it is using. Why not? We can have a tag that we (more or less) trust, and can retrieve the data from Gnutella, FastTrack, Edonkey2000 or Freenet. It's a great idea.

I am less interested in other p2p networks than Gnutella but I'll discuss their hash and meta-data web sites a little. The most interesting one is Edonkey2000, which as I said, has come to specialize in large (100MB+) files, and which I have to admit is a pretty good way to download large files with some guarantee of integrity. There are two major meta data sites for Edonkey - Filenexus and Sharereactor. There are other sites as well. If you're looking for large files, they do a pretty good job currently.

Fasttrack (Kazaa) uses hashing, but the Kazaa client is not that friendly to this kind of thing. So Fasttrack/Kazaa is more of a pain in this respect than any of the others. Nonetheless, you can download a program called Sig2dat that helps you copy and paste FastTrack's UUhashes. The you can go to web sites that give meta data, rankings and so forth to these hashes. Kazaa/FastTrack is unfriendly to all of this so it is much more of a pain - you have to install files that help you do this (sig2dat), you have to restart Kazaa for every file you want to download in this fashion and so forth. With Kazaa, all of this is a hassle, it's much easier to do in Gnutella (Shareaza), Edonkey2000 and Freenet.

And lastly there is Freenet. Freenet has been using hashes since the beginning. Freenet is a publishing network, not a file sharing network. That is nomenclature - file can be and are shared on Freenet - from html pages to gifs and jpgs, to mp3's, to avi's, although Freenet is the last place you want to look for large files, Freenet's bailiwick is small files. Even a 4 meg mp3 on Freenet is harder to find and slower to download than any of the other 3 networks. Small files are the domain of Freenet - HTML pages and images. The Freenet protocol is more rich than the other protocols in many ways, thus you have more than just audio and video files going over it, you have third-party applications utilizing it, thus you have things like Fproxy (A world-wide web equivalent which runs over Freenet) and Frost and Freenet message board (Usenet equivalents - both for text and binaries). One benefit of Freenet is it's hard to crack down on people for publishing information - because no one knows who data is coming from or going to. This is not absolute, but it is much safer than the file sharing p2p networks in this respect. Also, people publish data, so that what you put out is stored somewhere other than your computer, and if your web site or shared file or whatnot is popular, it will be out there all the time without your node needing to be connected. Freenet also used a lot of signatures, encryption and so forth, so you already have a pretty solid trust mechanism and data integrity. It depends on what hash is used - KSK hashes are insecure, but SSK are signed. So with Freenet there are large upsides and downsides - the downsides are downloading is much slower, since you're downloading via intermediaries, not directly, and the larger the file, the slower the download and the harder it is to find a complete file. The upshot of Freenet is that there is less of a legal risk with regards to sharing/publishing data, data is signed by the publisher which greatly helps integrity, and also Freenet's protocol allows extensions other than file sharing with it's own internal network - web and Usenet like applications, and I'm sure there will be more in the future.

Share Reactor. They release the files into the wild through edonkey2000, provide the MD5 checksums of the file you want to download, and edonkey2000 does everything for you. It already has a nice and juicy base of supporters (although I wouldnt say humongous, like Kazaa, specially because of the server "issue" in edonkey2000, but that is being taken care of anyways.)

Its a great system, Share Reactor cant get sued, edonkey2000 doesnt have centralized servers, and I get much greater speeds than in any other P2P program. Sure would be great to see other people take advantage of the great possibilities that edonkey2000 (and other P2P programs) can offer like Share Reactor does.

Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Problem with that network is that it's full (really full) of leeches... Once something is downloaded, they don't share it anymore. Maybe is it because the files are usually way larger (600Mbs are extremely common). Overall it's still a great file sharing program though.

A lot of this stuff you can't even get on DVD ("so that means I'm justified in infringing on copyright until such time that a new business model legitimizes the market demand... MY demand.")

--

1 Word
eDonkey

It is already used in eDonkey, a rather popular sub-p2p program. The true p2p version, Overnet is currently in beta.

EDonkey Homepage

ML donkey homepage (my preferred Linux client)

does anyone know anything about eDonkey it has a linux client, but has anyone had any success in finding files and getting them to transfer quickly?

I gotta say, the best file sharing program I have found for large files (like mpegs) is eDonkey2000. The linux client works really well, too. If you check out ShareReactor, they post up big lists of all kinds of files you can get off donkey, but of course there are many, many things on donkey that aren't listed on Sharereactor.

Donkey uses MFTP (I think Morpheus does too, now, actually...) where it takes a file, and hashes it to generate a unique ID across the network. Then, when you search for the file, you'll find many users with the same file, so it'll get different parts of the file from different users, speeding up the whole process. Also, people are forced to share any partial files they have, so the availability is usually pretty high.

I find it can be a touch slower for getting small files (like .mp3s) than gnutella, but for big files (like mpegs), nothing beats it.

There's been a lot of comments along the lines of "why don't we try and find out what the file is before we download it". Nobodies pointed out that edonkey already does this. It uses hashes of the known files that are placed on sites such as sharereactor to identify the files. The forum even has an area where you can post hashes of fake files.

eDonkey does this by taking a hash (MD4, I belive?) of the files the users are sharing. That way, when you download, you are only downloading from users who have the exact same file as you. Saves you from the skipps that you get when you download from Kazaa, since they match files based on filename instead of a hash.

Better yet: use the donkey. It's got ads, but the app is almost never in the foreground anyways...

I read some comments and I realized that what you need is eDonkey file sharing (here).

Files are represented as checksums md5 (no filename confusion). It is free, fast, realiable, secure. Files can be uploaded while being downloaded. This insures that a rare file that is wanted by many people will be distributed as quickly as possible. Support multiple server. This file sharing network is primary used for sharing movies, cd images(appz, games, ...), so it is ideal for large linux distros. Compare downloading movie from kazaa or from edonkey (speed 1 to 50)

Check out feature list: here

I read some comments and I realized that what you need is eDonkey file sharing (here).

Files are represented as checksums md5 (no filename confusion). It is free, fast, realiable, secure. Files can be uploaded while being downloaded. This insures that a rare file that is wanted by many people will be distributed as quickly as possible. Support multiple server. This file sharing network is primary used for sharing movies, cd images(appz, games, ...), so it is ideal for large linux distros. Compare downloading movie from kazaa or from edonkey (speed 1 to 50)

Check out feature list: here

John Williams - Star Wars Episode II Soundtrack - 192kbps.rar

Bummer, ed2k links seem to get munged by /. you'll have to do your own query.
--

Edonkey 2000, there is your fort knox.

Helpful links :

Edonkey

Sharereactor (Select Anime from menu, then click 'complete list of releases')

Jump on the e-donkey

A non-mp3-centric p2p network? must be you haven't tried all of them. I find this one has nearly any movie i'd want, but rarely has more than 5 songs by any artist. It does movies really well, with multiple (slow) simultaneous connections, I always get what i can find. However, finding an MP3 is not worth the work, although YMMV. don't forget to check out this site if you do decide to use the donkey.

-Dave

A file sharing program called eDonkey does this.

It's fantastic for getting MST3K avis!

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Check me out!