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"The media companies are asserting that if a technology is primarily used for illegal activity, then it should be banned."

Where did you read that? I've read the brief and they appear to be saying nothing of the sort. They are trying to put Grokster out of business. They are not trying to ban P2P protocols. There are plenty of ways to implement P2P in a way that respects the rights of others (in fact, Wayne Rosso, Grokster's president, is working on just such a system), but Grokster sure ain't it.

There is a debate technique known as a "straw man" in which one deliberately mischaracterizes one's opponent's argument to make it easier to tear down. I don't know if that was your intention, but there are plenty of intelligent things to say on both sides of this case without having to resort to this technique.

"Since there are statistics showing that a majority of email is now SPAM, which is illegal, shouldn't we have to shut down email as well?"

Of course not. But I can imagine an instance where a spammer that's being taken to court trying the same trick: painting it as an attack on e-mail itself, and not the action of the abuser.

"laiming P2P networks should be banned because it's used to share copyrighted works is like claiming that HTTP should be banned because web pages are used to slander people, or that knives should be outlawed because knives are used for stabbings."

I think everybody agrees on this. That's why MGM isn't trying to ban P2P. They're trying to put Grokster out of business, because they set up a business to capitalize on the widespread popularity of piracy, and they're profiting from it. It's not MGM vs. technology; it's MGM's business interests vs. Grokster's business interests.

"However, the designs of all of these tools are morally/ethically/legally neutral, as is the case with tools in general."

It depends on how you define "design" in this context. If you're simply referring to protocols, you're 100% correct. But in this case, it's clear that Grokster's founders designed the software as part of an overall plan to provide a medium that would be largely used for piracy, and to make money off of it. That's not neutral.

Compare this to somebody who designs a P2P app from the ground up to be permissions-based, or who designs a P2P app with hooks built in for filtering (as Grokster president Wayne Rosso is now doing with Mashboxx), or somebody who sets up a Torrent site and only allows torrents for content that's published under Creative Commons. Exploiting P2P in a way that respects others' rights takes a little work, and is less of a sure thing in the money-making department (those legal torrent sites don't get great traffic, while Kazaa's founders are now millionaires), but overall it isn't that tough.

From Slyck P2P news get it right /. first you post false 'News' about Lokitorrent now you post crap about Firefox .Who did M$ pay to spread this FUD.

FireFox Spyware Hoax Spreads
February 27, 2005
Thomas Mennecke

On February 16, 2005, Microsoft released their anti-spyware agent name "Microsoft AntiSpyware." The response from the release so far has been generally well received, even if it was not home grown by Microsoft. Microsoft bought the intellectual property rights of Giant AntiSpyware, and marketed it under their own name. The software is free of charge.

Yesterday, a screen shot began circulating across the Internet. The screenshot was of Microsoft's AntiSpyware program identifying Mozilla FireFox as spyware. According to the screen shot, it noted FireFox "vulnerable to a lack of security updates" and "...is a very high risk thread and should be removed immediately."

Admittidly, the screen shot is very well made. Local discussion on IRC also questioned whether the screen shot was authentic or not. However, after downloading, installing and running Microsoft AntiSpyware with Mozilla FireFox installed, it was quickly learned this screen shot was nothing more than an extremely clever hoax.

Despite this, several major news sites have posted this as real news. Please note this is not true; Microsoft AntiSpyware does not recognize FireFox as spyware.

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=688

I agree, the author of the article bears some scrutiny. SharePro doesn't exactly enjoy a high standing with many memebers of the filesharing community. It's interesting that Slyck.com is mentioned in this article. A critical commentary on the demise of Earth Station V (SharePro is the forum admin for ES5) was recently posted on that site. SharePro states that: "Slyck.com promoted people to donate to Loki Torrent". In the context of the recent article, it could be construed also as an attempt to tar Slyck by association.

I can't stand rar files. Its like saying "lets use this archive format that is different just because we want to be different."

LOL, yes, this is exactly why I use RAR, honestly! Jesus you're dumb.

Zip has been a standard for a long long time now, so what is the point in archiving in something completely different that then makes people go out and download and install yet another piece of software to have loaded in memory to do the same thing zip does.

You know, the horse and carriage has been a standard for a long long time now, so what is the point in getting around in something totally faster that then makes people go out and buy something just like it when in the end it does the same thing as that horse and carriage.

Clue: WinRAR compresses better, is more secure, and is a heck of a lot more feature rich than WinZIP. WinZIP is, to put it nicely, a piece of shit. And ZIP is outdated compared to RAR and 7-Zip (be it compression or security).

What annoys me even more is when you download a movie file and someone rar's it up into a million different pieces. You aren't compressing it any and we aren't all on 14.4 modems anymore. Just make it a freaking iso or bin file and be done with it. Don't even get me started about people who rip cd's to mp3 but don't bother to run them through the online system to have it automatically assign cd and track titles. People are freaking lazy. If you are going to do something illegal like that at least do a good job and do it completely and correctly.

Your newbieness truly knows no bounds. Please educate yourself, don't worry, we'll all wait:

• http://whyrar.has.it/ (specifically http://whyrar.omfg.se/index_eng.html)
• http://www.slyck.com/ng.php?page=5

Now, STFU and sit.

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8690/

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8875

since its not openscource and there is no linux version we were discussing if there is any thruth to this:

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8875&p ostdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0/

anyone got an idea?

check this, dude

...new BitTorrent sites are appearing at the same time others are closing. One of these sites is mininova, which is the follow-up of the well-known SuprNova.
A full list of torrent sites can be found here.

Over at suprnova.org, they have a message stating that they'll be making an announcement tomorrow, 30 December, at 21:00 GMT. Does anyone have any insight about what it might be? Exeem, perhaps?

"French police have at least temporarily shut down Youceff Torrents, one of the largest torrent sites and recently listed in Slyck's Top 10 SuprNova Alternatives. Arjan, the site administrator, was given no warning. The first signs came Monday afternoon when the site went offline. The hosting company initially said it was due to an electrical fault. This morning, Arjan received and e-mail explaining that the servers had in fact been deliberately terminated and the police where on scene. Slyck spoke to a rather nervous Arjan, who explained that the police would find nothing on the servers but torrent files. He does not host any FTP servers or warez. Arjan does not live in France, or believe he has done anything wrong, but he is naturally apprehensive that the local police will make a visit to his door." http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=624

A few C&D letters will cool off most people who have neither the money or inclination to fight a protracted court battle.

But how well does that really work? That has been the strategy so far with ed2k/overnet, and they're no closer to shutting that down than before they started. You kill one site, and a bunch of new ones show up in its place.

That's nothing. Before the RIAA started suing, Kazaa was about twice as bit user-wise (according to Slyck), and I think quite a bit more than twice as big size-wise. Most of the people who left Kazaa went to eDonkey, though, so the files are still there somewhere.

the future content of p2p networks will be information in general, and not so much about software, music or movies.

we nerds need a safe and reliable haven that grants our freedom of speech.

be sure to check out the following discussion:
http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7539

Finding files can be annoying, yeah. Mostly I, and most eMule users for that matter, just use ed2k link sites, and forums. For anime, you can get nearly any fansub ever released on AniDB. For a while, ShareReactor was the ed2k link site, but they were finally taken down. On this page you can find some great sites that still work today.. You can still use archive.org to access the huge library of ed2k that was on SR, a total of 2243 releases at the time of the last crawl. One release is counted as one full item; one movie, one game, one season of a TV series is one count. So it's a whole shitload of files, no mistaking that.

September 22, 2004 - 22:00
FastTrack -- 2,379,344
eDonkey2K -- 2,202,766
Warez-- 1,009,821
Overnet-- 893,068
Gnutella -- 437,229
DirectConnect-- 264,283
MP2P -- 262,499
Filetopia -- 4,439

you'd realize that FastTrack had 2,493,637 and eDonkey2K had 2,402,593 on September 21, 2004 19:00.

Furthermore, if you bothered to read the article they posted about FastTrack closing in on eDonkey2K, you would have also noticed the following:

Although the statistics show the eDonkey2000 network slightly ahead of FastTrack at the time of this writing, it is much too early to declare a new P2P King. Too many variables currently exist in the way that a client collect their population numbers to difinatively stay that one network is ahead of another. However, what is certain is that the eDonkey2000 network is closing in on FastTrack, and if Sharman does not fall back on their "invaluable experience" soon, a new P2P King will be crowned.

I'm not sure why the link goes to slyck.com instead of the actual news story, but the direct link is here

Repeat it along with me, folks, "Apple is dying!" I'm sure netcraft will confirm it any day now....

And it's really no wonder considering how much fighting and disagreements Mike has caused with his Gnutella2 (MP) protocol. There's pretty good article about this all in this Gnutella vs. Gnutella2 two part article. [slyck.com]

However to me it seems that Mike has acted pretty much like an ass. No need to support Shareazaa in any way no matter how GPL it is now. I wonder how many new features or changes he will accept from contributors...

And it's really no wonder considering how much fighting and disagreements Mike has caused with his Gnutella2 (MP) protocol. There's pretty good article about this all in this Gnutella vs. Gnutella2 two part article. [slyck.com]

However to me it seems that Mike has acted pretty much like an ass. No need to support Shareazaa in any way no matter how GPL it is now. I wonder how many new features or changes he will accept from contributors...

Realistically, how are they going to go after thousands of people?

make that millions (look at the chart on the right hand side)...

Once I have anti-virus, I install an eDonkey client like eMule, then surf to one of these pages to find the apps I want.

The last step is to fire up my WiFi and download the apps I selected over somebody else's DSL.

duh, this is satire

Once I have anti-virus, I install an eDonkey client like eMule, then surf to one of these pages to find the apps I want.

The last step is to fire up my WiFi and download the apps I selected over somebody else's DSL.

duh, this is satire

Just don't outsource to Switzerland. (I'm surprised this didn't make slashdot front page, actually).

The eDonkey network is so much less useful without ShareReactor as a trusted source of hashes, so it's a Good Thing(TM) that SuprNova + BitTorrent is around to pick up the slack!

I posted this anonymously, but I know that a whole hell of a lot of people in the "underground p2p circle" share the exact same sentiment.

Site already slashdotted, some other news about the same subject:
Here and here

PS: The second link is heavier and probably will go down soon.

good overview here: PAR2 files

comparison between v1 and 2: here

Google Link here:
CLICKY
Other articles here and here

www.slyck.com is a good resource on all the leading filesharing networks and apps.

Zeropaid /.'ed. Alternative article. Probably the original anyway.. zeropaid has a habit of ahem 'stealing' news.

Hey all.. I'm the news writer for Slyck.com The excel spreadsheet was just temporary and what I was working with at the time - never expected to be Slash-dotted!... Anyway, you've been heard loud and clear, and the list is available in an HTML format. Hope this makes some people happy ;) get it here

Slyck keeps weekly stats on
filesharing usage...here's the usage statistics today:

FastTrack 3,525,734
iMesh 1,175,244
eDonkey 770,032
Overnet 458,752
MP2P 199,214

These stats have actually remained fairly constant for a couple of
weeks now. Back in May there was a lot of fluctuation on the EDonkey
vs Overnet, and FastTrack was around 4.5M. I suppose it dropped
because college students went home for the summer.

At any rate, Slyck's stats have noted no increase or decrease in
filesharing in the last two weeks. So the media hype (both ways)
seems to be just that...hype.

Move along; nothing to see here.

In emule, the ipfilter (similar to an uip filter in a fw) will help avoid those issues.
As indicated in Slyck p2p developers are working on this issue.
The new version of emule has some early work on "only allowing talk to secure client" or something of that effect.
There is a really active community out there looking for technical solutions.
This is new war.
This is amazing all the dev work that went into P2P clients the last couple of years because of the RIAA tactics.
First, decentralizing (Kazaa) then hashing, and now well.. we'll see :)

Take a look at the RIAA beating stuff at
slyck's guide!

i believe this has been covered on /. before, but the first google is this

These

anonymous p2p applications

will be come even more necessary......

Nah ... the RIAA keeps chainging their web hosting co - 4 times since november and it's now being run by - get this - an accounting firm.

Things look pretty bad for Kazaa, since it has control over all of the items listed above, and it presumably operates Kazaa "root supernodes." I suspect that they are liable, at least for vicarious infringement, based on the operation of root supernodes.

He [Janus Friis] told me FastTrack has a "supernode server to fetch seed IP addresses when not available locally" but the supernode server is only used by "Older versions of Kazaa Media Desktop". He added "Let me also direct your attention to the fact that Grokster is an older customized version of KMD/FT".

Only older FT clients use the supernode server; the latest Kazaa is totally decentralized. But this probably will have little effect on the ruling - Kazaa has in fact admitted to operating a root supernode server. Whether this matters at all is debatable.

Gnutella is broken, as anybody comparing FastTrack to (your choice of Gnutella servant here) can attest. It's slow, downloads have a completion rate that is barely usable, and even advances like swarmed downloads don't work very well. Here, try this.. Kazaa Lite is the clean version of Kazaa. Then try this. Limewire is relatively popular, and wholly commercial.
You can post your findings here.

I've tried Shareaza too, and it's faster and has a nicer interface than the other Gnutella servants. It's not, however, on a level with Kazaa yet.
You'll notice that this whole debate over the legitimacy of Gnutella2 (or Mike's Protocol, as Vinnie likes to call it) has two distinct sides: on the one hand, you've got the COMMERCIAL developers, including Vinnie Falco, LimeWire, and Xolox; on the other hand, you've got Mike Stokes and Gnucleus.

What this article fails to mention is that the registration of Gnutella2.com is the real issue at stake. The commercial interests are pissy because they've been one-upped by an upstart, as they see it.

Gnutella 2 is deservedly named, and clearing away the cruft was the only way to improve Gnutella. Mike Stokes clobbered the adware vendors with Shareaza, and did what they were all afraid to do: start fresh, start clean, and start out on a level with the current state of the art P2P applications currently available. I applaud the guy for having such guts. He registered the name, and he deserves to keep it. F*ck the spyware perpetrators.

The problem with Gnutella and GDF is that it's a true soap opera with a few developers, that do not like each other that much. Well, as long as e.g. Bearshare can take control and distribute it's spyware, all of it's own proprietary extensions or seperation of the Gnutella network were fine. There are so many selfish facts and quotes from GDF developers in the past... I can't take them serious anymore! For example read what "holly" Bearshare developer states:

Vinnie (who owns gnutella3.com) has said that Bearshare will be "moving forward with our own proprietary Gnutella 3 technology". He has also stated that "Our goal is not to block Shareaza from the network, but rather to give their users the worst possible experience so they will stop using the application. I'll leave it up to your imagination as for the methods we will employ". Some reports say that a block may already be in place in the latest version of Bearshare.

From http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=90

Civil war among Gnutella developers is not somthing new!
Every good client hiting Gnutella was usually accused being bad or crap. Once it was Phex, then Xolox, today it's Shareaza. Even well integrated features like 'swarmed downloading' were once rated "bad" from those developers who didn't have it in their own clients - now it's standard in every client. Bearshare has a long tradition of hidden features (not available to other vendors) or in suddenly blocking one competitor. Is there any Gnutella client that wasn't blocked or bitched in the past? I doubt that.

It's a long history of bitching against each other... not efficient work but indeed amusing. New ideas on the GDF looks more like "eat it or die" than a detailed and productive discussion. Other ideas are optimized for marketing instead for technology... Limewire decided to call it's superpeer concept "Ultrapeer" to make it look better than other P2P systems (even though it wasn't even reliabale - is it today or does it need more patches called GUESS2, GUESS3 HYPERMEGAGUESS?).

Of course there are exception! I'd like to name two: For exmaple one open source developer, John from Gnucleus, has written lines and lines of free code. Continously implementing new features while at the same time avoiding (the worst) GDF fights. For example, the Gnutella protocol documentation at http://rfc-gnutella.sourceforge.net/ mainly from Tor Klingberg & Raphael Manfredi - which was started long after the big ones had there userbase already (no papers prolly to keep new developers away and to increase greedy spyware businees plans? *asking*). I hope those guys and also Shareaza keep their motivation to innovate and help the Gnutella community. For those who believe the latest Bearwire hype (Bearwire = Bearshare + Limewire business alliance), I suggest speak with some other developers.... log on to irc.p2pchat.net ... AFAIK some Gnutella clients run a home channel there and you can meet develoepers as well.

I recomend to read the GDF archives and please poste some of the most funniest quote. Let's make a Gnutella soap opera best of. :)

Greets, Mark

PS: I wonder why Xolox sneaks to the side of Bearshare and Limewire. strange. well, must be one rules of a true soap opera: suprising changes or dead twin brothers popping up from nowhere.

CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, I would guess -- with lots of redundancy (such as multiple copies of everything, plus devoting a large percentage of discs to PAR-style files). It's really, really cheap.

• LAME - the best MP3 encoder out there
• Exact Audio Copy - the best CD ripper, reads every sector at least two times to ensure maximum quality
• Standard MP3 Naming Scheme - So your MP3s are named consistantly
• Zeropaid - file sharing news and rumors
• Slyck - another news site, less community-oriented
• Blubster - A small but quickly growing MP3 community, very fast servant, good community
• EDKGuide - Once you master MP3s, the next step is DivX
• FileNexus - music, SVCDs, and DVD rips

Hope this helps!

How many people are on GNUtella [sic] or Kazza [sic]?

• FastTrack - 1,314,066
• iMesh - 429,498
• Gnutella - 221,922
• eDonkey - 155,356
• DirectConnect - 83,464
• FileNavigator - Down
• SongSpy - 14,022
• Blubster - 5,961