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I realize that's a joke, but I'm afraid that it doesn't quite work that way. Movie pirates often don't pirate things because they really want the individual thing, they pirate them because they can. It's a bit of a gmae to them. i.e. Who can end up with the most stuff. Perhaps the most indicitive signs of this game were the rooms in DirectConnect (since replaced with DC++) that required you to have 40 to 100 GIGS of data shared. If you failed their test, a bot would auto-kick you.

I wouldn't be surprised if many pirates never use/watch the stuff they get. It's all just a game. A scavanger hunt, if you will. Whoever gets the most stuff "wins". The funny part is that they may just "win" a call from the **AA or law enforcement. What a prize. :-/

I'm not familiar with Direct Connect at all.

Obviously

Most of the other large P2P programs rely on large centralized servers, which gives the RIAA, MPAA, and law enforcement agencies an easy target. Direct Connect, as mentioned by numerous other posters, is just a client/hub software package that lets anyone set up their own server for others to connect to. Think one giant MMORPG server operated by a game developer versus a few hundred small Quake servers operated by anyone with a spare box and a decent connection. If you take down the MMORPG server, nobody can play anymore (unless you join an unreliable hacked private server, but that's not the point). But if id software gets firebombed, people can still create and join Quake servers for as long as they want. Same deal if NeoModus gets shut down, especially since the most popular client for the Direct Connect protocol is 3rd party open-source. And there's plenty of open-source hub programs for it too. Even if the DoJ managed to get rid of every hub in the United States, that would eliminate only 20-30% of the network because most hubs are operated out of Europe (mostly Norway and Sweden). I'm not sure what seizing those computers really accomplishes though, other than taking hubs offline. A hub is just a router lets one person connect to the other. The hub never touches or sees any of the files that go between the users. Once you unplug it, it contains 0 petabytes of data.

In order to join the network, members had to promise to provide between one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, Ashcroft said.
Also, I'd like to point out that this is a logical step to take if you want to make a Peer 2 Peer network instead of a Peer 2 Leech network.

The original direct connect site lists them as having passed the 1petabyte TOTAL for data shared on all hubs, granted its an old statistic, but better to get it from the horses mouth.

Most hubs I frequent contain 25-250TB of data.

the 100gb entrance fee is reasonable. Most hubs I've been in expect between 10 and 150.

Most important thing to remember about DC, though you must have x amount of data, the greater majority of it is duplicated with at least 1 other person in the hub, making any total shared figure meaningless.

I think they fucked up!

Does anyone know which hub group it was?
Most of the ones I go in are swedish (fat pipes, cold dark nights, bored teenagers!)

Buying drives would not be the only expensive part. If we assume each of your 100,000 or so drives consumes 5W, you are looking at half a megawatt of power consumption before you plug them into computers! At the bargain rate of $0.03/kWh this would cost you about $11,000 a month to run. That's not the kind of spare change most people have for their file shares. That cost would be joined by what it costs to run other hardware, bandwith, HVAC, and floor space.

200 petabytes of songs and movies! Pretty amazing.

The website says the whole network contains about 1 petabyte of data.

I've notice that a lot of hubs running Direct Connect auto-kick DC++ users.

Don't know if this is due to the hub Admin or the program itself.

Still, Direct Connect/DC++ kicks ass.

Well I'm a Dane (and therefore I'm obligated to hate the Swedes :)) and I'd say that in Sweeden the are much better off than us Danes. Bandwidth in Denmark costs about 400DKK ~ $60 a month for a 2048/256 ADSL line, where in Sweden the get 10/10 Mbit line capacity for 1/4 of the Danish 2 Mbit ADSL. 100 Mbit bandwidth is also quite common over there for end-users

BTW, if anybody has tried Direct Connect P2P program they'll quickly find out that the 7151.97 TB online are almost hosted alone by Swedes...

According to BusinessWeek, "secure" P2P is offered by the following (some use encryption):

Direct Connect
http://www.neo-modus.com/
http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net/

Waste
http://waste.sourceforge.net/

Freenet
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
http://jtcfrost.sourceforge.net/

invisibleNET (aka invisibleIRC)
http://www.invisiblenet.net/

BadBlue (commercial product)
http://www.badblue.com

Groove Networks (commercial product)
http://www.groove.net

Direct Connect?

Try DirectConnect. It works well enough.

You're probably referring to mlmac, which is a GUI wrapper around mlnet (formerly mldonkey). Between this, the BitTorrent client, Limewire and the Mac Direct Connect client, Mac users are well served on almost all of the major networks.

here's the link to Direct Connect
Happy Hunting..

Isn't that already a trademark of NeoModus?

Or are file-sharing and telecommunication different enough to justify the same name?

There is. It's called Direct Connect and ever since someone at my school setup a hub I hardly ever use Kazaa anymore

You mean just like Direct Connect?

The enforced ratios (e.g. you must be sharing 10gb of Dave Matthews sets) are what makes DC so annoying and elitist.

I wanted to try karma whoring... here ya go:

DirectConnect
Phynd
FlatLAN

When will this crowd catch on to Direct Connect? Talk about non-leeching - in some hubs you have to share a minimum of 60 GB+ just to join. Yes that means those hubs average over 60GB/user. Nothing else even comes close.

"DC", unqualified, is the original software from Neo-Modus (the creators of DirectConnect). DC++ is an open-source implementation of the DirectConnect protocol. They all use the same protocol. DC doesn't support resuming of broken downloads from other sources automatically, but you can resume manually.

You would be writing a Linux Game then, not a ps2 game.

If you write a ps2 game, you get to run in super user mode and touch all the hardware. If you write your game on linux. well you wrote it on linux, not ps2. You would run as a user program, and wouldn't get to touch the hardware. Have you ever deved on a console?

I have if you count GBA as a console.

Available here.

Erm, think about trying DirectConnect, which sort of makes this whole thread sort of useless, though it's Mac OS 10.2.x or higher.

It seems like this one has been out on the windows side of the computing world for quite some time. The OSX client is pretty new, but it is really nice. You connect to a chat room or hub and can then search download from the other participants in that room. There are not to many mac rooms at the moment, but media content is plattform agnostic anyway. Get it at www.neo-modus.com

And I know that you shouldn't steal music. Up until now I never did. But I happen to own an iPod and it really pisses me off, when I can't put the music from a legally obtained cd on it just because some record companies think that they are funny. Copy protection won't stop me from stealing music - it will me get started.

Why is it that for all these articles about P2P networks, I have never once seen Direct Connect mentioned?

There is more information (pirated software, movies, games, tv shows, etc) available on those networks than on any other network I have ever seen (except *maybe* napster). Everyone who uses it must share, and essentially must have a fast connection.

But there's never been a mention of it...

?

Direct Connect is a p2p protocol. If you go to you can find out all about it.

Lately I've been finding all I can download off P2P programs like Direct Connect and Furthurnet. Its mostly live shows, and they are all in .shn format, which is a lossless compression format that restores to the original .wav file.

These communities shun both compressed files like .mp3 and trading anything that has been released commercially. What you do get is great recordings of live music from bands like U2, DMB, Grateful Dead, etc., all ethically traded and in their full audio glory.

The audiophiles I know pretty much don't listen to mp3, ever.

I have two words for you, Direct Connect. I've seen over 40TB online at once, the connections are reliable, everyone is required to share a certain amount (depending on the server you go on), and everyone is required to have a certain number of download slots.

I most definitely do not use CD-R's to trade music and movies here at college. I either use a program called Direct-Connect (which is definitely p2p) or just the basic Windows SMB File sharing (for which I use a program called ShareScan to access). I guess that this means that the RIAA should sue microsoft for allowing me to share music (wouldn't that be a fun lawsuit to watch).

Washington University in St. Louis also slows down Kazaa. But it is not a problem really. If I want to get files, we have set up a local hub using direct-connect. It is incredibly fast (I usually get speeds of 2-10 MB/sec (yes, that's megabytes))It is fast because it is all within the Wash. U. network, therefore none of the precious external bandwidth is used up. The only problem is that somethimes the newest songs are not available to be traded yet. But for us, blubster circumvents the slowdown because blubster uses udp, not tcp like most p2p software. Blubster can only be used to download songs though.

There is the obvious solution, stop downloading copyrighted works. Given, not all p2p transters are illegal, though I don't think it would be wrong to say most are. That's what I've done, and I've constantly been mocked by suitemates who are running cracked versions of UT2k3 today.

But, that's not what you wanted to hear. Basically, You've got a HUGE body of moderately competant computer users with absolutely no money and still a desire to listen/watch/use whatever copyrighted stuff they can justify, you've also probably got an extremely fast LAN connection. Have someone run a direct connect hub on the LAN. Pass the IP around, and you'll probably fairly soon have something resembling my university (probably more, even, I believe your university has more students than does mine), of 1000 users sharing TERAbytes of data. Likely, the university doesn't care about it's local bandwidth, it's just stuff that goes over the internet that's really limited.

At McMaster U. (Hamilton, ON, CA) they use a program called ResX. Think of KaZaA (in fact, suspiciously EXACTLY like Kazaa...) except it only works on the LAN. Think DivX DVD-rips in 40 seconds, 5-meg MP3s in 3 seconds. Now that's tasty.

McMaster actually paid a company to write a Kazaa-clone that would only work on the LAN. It was cheaper than bandwith-shaping the Internet pipe. However, I doubt all universities will do this.

My recommendation to you is to find other P2P people and set up a Direct Connect hub or something similar. Make it only avaialbe to people within the university.

Good luck!

-cruz

UC Irvine is definitely not alone in this. A number of schools are simply throttling the speed down on common P2P ports. My brother's school, Denison, does this. The student's solution is usually pretty simple though: Move to a client that uses port 80. Most of the time the speed is restricted only by port and unless they restrict web access this will get one back onto the autobahn.

That's what open source if for! I'm sure there are several pieces of software avail. that have open code. Also if no one else has heard of it, check out www.neo-modus.com. Very nice! You could call it the underdog of PTP. I believe they are also working on a Linux port.

• Good: Well, from the screenshots at AG's site, the interface looks well designed, though it does fill the entire screen in a manner which is ill-suited for those who just want a music player. Like me. There better be a "compact" mode.
  
  
• Bad: From the list of available artists, I'd say they have a rather impressive collection for a RIAA-stomped file sharing service making a comeback. Except of course we're now limited to a mere 300000 or so (probably fewer) tracks, and it's not possible to add your own music to the mix anymore, download remixes, or download rare tracks that are hard to find elsewhere, legally or illegally - just the stuff I used to use AG for.
  
  
• Good: They've got a free preview period. Which doesn't require you to give away CC details. I figure lots of people will sign up for the preview only to dump it 2-20 hours later or when the preview runs out, whichever is sooner.
  
  
• Bad: It's no longer free. Well of course it's not, the users aren't providing the content anymore! Though $9.95/mo would be quite nice provided the downloads were high-quality MP3 or OGG's - heck, even WMA's (wo DRM) would be preferable to the streaming shit they currently offer. Which brings us right down to ...
  
  
• Bad: STREAMS! God, don't we all hate those things? Can't save them. Will definately require a special program to download and play, which means bugging down our systems with even more apps, probably loaded with DRM. Also, most of us aren't on connections that can handle a constant speed of 128-192kbps, especially not people living far away from the servers (which will be centralized, no doubt).
  
  
• Bad: No way to burn music to a CD (apart from analog copying - if I can hear it, I can record it) or otherwise get those streams to somewhere without an Internet connection. That thing alone renders the service utterly and completely useless to me as a music consumer. I believe I'm not alone in feeling that way.
  
  
• Bad: It's Windows only. No further explanation or comment req'd on that one ...
  
  
• Bad: It's only available in the US due to licensing restrictions. I mentioned above that not being able to carry stream music with rendered the service useless to me - well, since I live in Sweden, this "US only" thing kind of ruins it a little more.

I'd take a wild guess that he's running some sort of P2P client (e.g. KaZaA, Direct Connect, Gnutella etc.) They can soak up a lot of upstream bandwidth (so I've heard :-)

But what about us PC Users? GNUTella is of course a good place still, but most of it's clients are either packed with spyware, or just un-user-friendly. There's Direct-Connect (www.neo-modus.com), but due to some of the restrictions a lot of the hubs are placing, not everyone can participate on it in general (some of the hubs require such minmums as 50gb's minimum share [meaning they have to have 50gb+ of files shared or they're not getting in the hub.], others descriminate you based on your connection [some hubs will only allow 10mbit's+ only. tough luck for us Cable and DSL customers.]). And don't go to DC thinking it's another Music fueled p2p, it is more-so a porn and other file type's kind of place to hang out, you will find mp3's and other formats of music, but 1st you need to figure out the GUI as well. So, officially, unless you don't mind sitting down for a couple of hours or days figuring out how to work a piece of software, I don't suggest moving to Neo-Modus's offering.

So what else is there? I've seen WinMX, but the new version has a new type of way to connect, which I have yet to determine if it's my ISP and their unrightful port blockings again, or if a piece of my network isn't setup right.

DC is great for huge files like movies, but Kazaa has the best network for smaller files - mp3, etc. and also the advantage that there are more than 1000 people to share with at any given time.
DirectConnect and DC++ are Napster-style clients that connect to central Napster-style servers - albeit distributed, private servers. The average server is just somebody's home computer, and most cannot handle more than 400 users.
Kazaa is orders of magnitude more scaleable.
DC encourages sharing.
I use them both, personally...

It looks like a Linux port is in the works.

AFAIK, a p2p solution called 'Direct Connect' (homepage: here) supports 'private hubs': I think this is just what you wanted. A problem is that the original software package is windows-only; but of course, there are some linux ports available. The system itself is quite elegant, works nicely and has everything you would expect from a good p2p package, however I recall hearing that some windows implementations use Visual Basic, which is just plain wrong.

I'm impressed that you've shared 400k files. You must be sharing tiny files or have access to a huge amount of disk (well over a terabyte if your shared files' average size is similar to the average size of shared files (i.e., ~4 megabytes)).

You are assuming I like MP3s.

Manga and Ebooks compress well. :) Especially the latter, the former tend to already be compressed well.

My 20GB HD used for program files has, err,

well in 1.5GB there is 30k files, so umm. . . .

::notes that this could take awhile::

My pure data drive has a somewhat higher file density;

hmm 60k files and at 2GB. Ok obviously NOT scaling linearly here. :)

Of course these tend to be a lot of small system files as well, so who knows about the density in the end.

Hmm, now for the math.

400,000;

At 1Meg each that is 419,430,400,000 bytes;

oh hey wait,

10GB, 167,679 files.

Ahh, bloat. Heh.

My measly little 20GB app drive (my 80gb data drive is dead at the moment as the partition table is fubared and I can't figure out how to get it working again, any idea of a simple way to write to the drive "Heya, this is a FAT32 /not/ a FAT16 drive! Beh, last time I use FAT32 just for compatibility. . . .) has 10,885,496,246 Bytes on it.

419,430,400,000

Ok so I was off by like one measly decimal place, yeesh. Not half bad for talking out of my ass. (ok and a multiple of four. ^_^ )

So the darn thing has the equivalent of 40 or so users on it. Big whoop. On DC many of the higher end sharers have 100GB+ of data up for share, and many of the Manga collectors have who knows how many pure files.

By comparison DC has, err, well. heh. their Animated GIF say sit well. :)

I still say that 400k files is puny, especially since those are 400k worth of untargeted files. Hell since at least half of those are likely MP3s that I have no interest in at all, they really only function as about 200k worth of files. (if even that.)

Then kick out the porn, hey, down to like what, 2 files? Ok so I will give the user base the benefit of the doubt, 150k files or so?

Which is hardly an impressive number, since even then those are just POSSIBLE relevant results and not even guaranteed things that I care about.

Let Napster die... It will always have a spot in our hearts and a spot on the bumpers of those who ended up with stickers. But, it really is the wrong way to go about it. I am not going to pretend that everybody here uses these things for legitimate purposes so lets get down to the point. If you want to use a service and have it stay around for awhile, you need to find another filesharing method that has been around for years without being pinched off.
The number one that comes to mind for me is IRC combined with a real file transfer method (ftp) none of that dcc crap. Well... awhile back I started playing with Direct Connect. And it seems to be a good shot at the "right" way to do it. Anybody can setup a HUB, which is used for chatting and brokers search requests. Hubs can interconnect (like irc) and make a much larger resource base. And clients are the nodes.
It has a higher learning curve than napster or kazaa but after you figure it out and find a few good hubs you like you should be set.

Try Direct Connect. I found a few clients on freshmeat but I like it so much that I just boot into windows when I need it (that's not to assume that you have windows installed, just saying what I do).

The system is more like IRC than any other p2p system I've used before. Plus there's nothing you can't get. There are file format filters to help your searches but the system itself doesn't care what kind of file you're sharing.

--
Garett

They're *thousands* of megabytes big, but if you got the bandwith, HD space and patience, try Direct Connect, one sweet file sharing system.

Direct Connect is a fine filesharing network. It is organized very much like IRC in that you don't connect to one central server, but rather independently run "hubs" (you can chat with other users on there too, similar to napster). However, there is a registry of public hubs available when you load up the client. Quite a bit of data online. Check it out.

Dammit, meanwhile Rutgers is gouging us with "Academic Pricing". A kid in my dorm building set up a Direct Connect hub and between the two hubs (they span Rutgers Newark, Camden and New Brunswick) and currently contains close to 8 terrabytes of stuff all on 10Mbit switched campus ethernet. Only bad thing is that they capped our internet activity to 2GB down and 512MB up over a 7 day period. So DC makes it more than bearable.

I live in Chicago and I used to live at the far end of the Verizon Digital network just south of Chicago. Verizon is by far one of the best carriers around. Last year in the city the coverage was kinda week but I had an old phoone. I now managed to loose the old phone and get a new that seems to work perfectly. I get the best reception of anyojne I know.
I think this program would be great. Currently this is no real way of providing "regular" interent access such as web browsing. This service would seem to provide decent dl rates for those who don't find 14.4 kbs acceptable.
I would also think that this would work rather well with the Kyocera/Palm phones Verizon offers here. I am not aware if these phones have interent access presently, I would assume not being they are b&w. I would think Phone/palm combinations in color would be a huge hit with there ability to be a palm phone and web browser. I would also think that anything over 100kb/s would also suit most people needs. That seems to be a decent web browsing speed as long as you don't feel the need to try and run a direct connect hub from your palm.

Of all the Morpheus/Kazaa articles on /., I've never heard once of Direct Connect.

I've used both programs for awhile now. Direct Connect is much better and there's more stuff available. You can find much more one one Direct Connect Network than all of Morpheus. Cummulative, there's more data too. 405 TB available right now on the Morpheus network. 947 TB on DC. However, there is 11 times more people on Morpheus, heh.

CORRECTION: That would be NEO-MODUS.

Direct Connect for Windows does something along these lines. I've only used it once, but I know that many of the servers you can log into require you to be sharing a minimum amount of data (say, 4 gigs) before you can join. As a result there is a hell of a lot of files available on the network. At least, there was when I signed on that one time several months ago.

Direct Connect is the best thing to come out of P2P, ever. Anyone can run a server, and each server allows something like 500+ clients. Most servers have minimum-shared limitations so everyone's sharing something, usually making the total amount available in the excess of 10 TBytes. Wonderful. You should go download it now.