Shutting down Kazaa

An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting wired.com article on the fight between the world's media corporations and Kazaa. The lengths Kazaa has gone to to keep itself immune from attack (incorporated variously in Vanuatu (where?), Estonia and Australia), seem to have largely paid off - until now."

Comments

Kazaa vs eMule

[Anonymous Coward]

Kazaa is P2P for the non-power users...I urge everyone to try out eMule / eDonkey....file integrity is next to none other and speed is remarkably impressive (considering the chunk based downloading system). Check it out!

Re:Kazaa vs eMule

[fault0]

The problem with eDonkey is that it's pretty centralized in terms of the way OpenNap was centralized (actually more, as there is no "networks" in eDonkey). If the RIAA/MPAA saw eDonkey as a threat, they could easily take down the individual server operators (like the RIAA once did with OpenNap server operators)

Overnet tries to solve it, but it's just not there yet compared to KaZaA and even giFT/openFT. Hopefully it will be in the future, because I love ed2k and related services.

Re:Kazaa vs eMule

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll vouch for this. eMule is several times more reliable and useful than kazaa and gnutella/2. It's extremely easy to spot fakes on eMule. It's extremely hard for systems like overpeer to work against eMule. Sharing at reasonable speeds is also forced by the client; on kazaa you constantly get downloads in the .5k/sec-2k/sec range, on eMule this rarely happens, if you have more than 20 or so sources, you are pretty much guarenteed a fast download, even on files in the gigabyte range. Network exploits are also quickly taken care of by eMules open source developers.

Also for anybody who thinks the donkey network sucks, you have probably only tried the actual edonkey2000 client, don't use that one, it realy sucks, the author loaded it up with spyware and did a realy hack job on it (although he did a very decent job on the network protocol). Get eMule instead, it's GPL too.

Re:Kazaa vs eMule

[chabotc]

Incase some people do want to try out mldonkey (i would advice it), these links will allow you to hit the ground running:

downloads:
* edonkey2000: http://www.edonkey2000.com/ (official client page. Has a almost working linux client to.. windows client is good)

* eMule: http://www.emule-project.net/ (considered the best windows client. Also open source)

* mldonkey: http://www.nongnu.org/mldonkey/ (linux client, with GIU, Web & telnet interfaces. Considered 'best' on linux. Open source)

* cdonkey: http://cdonkey.suche.org/ (some seem to like it, i don't want to touch it)

Good content sites:

* http://www.sharereactor.com (between its own listings, and the content in the forums, this is a unbeatable resource!)
* http://www.filenexus.com (sharereactor 'competitor', much smaller, but does music)

* http://www.sharedfolders.net (place where ppl can share their own 'releases' and faborites.. some good stuff can be found there, but takes a bit of work)

Enjoy, and welcome to the donkey file sharing world ;-)

Re:Kazaa vs eMule

[bsharitt]

For the Mac users there's Jim, which is a giFT client. It can be found here. Binaries and all. I've found the network to be much better that Limewire and all those Gnutella clients, although there isn't as much content yet(that's why more people need to use is).

Whatever

[drunkmonk]

This is a measure/countermeasure race, one that the RIAA/MPAA cannot win. Technology changes faster than litigation can be processed, so for every Kazaa that is shut down, the people who are going to develop the next generation of file-sharing utilities will learn from the mistakes made, both legal and technological, and create better tools. There's only so much that litigation can do to prop up a failing business model.

Vanuatu

[errxn]

I got curious, so I checked it out. It's a small island nation in the South Pacific. Here's a map, for the interested:

Re:How?

[swordgeek]

Fairly simple. Kazaa is a proprietary client using a specific, 'proprietary' protocol[1]. There's only one company behind it, even if the distribution itself is well, distributed.

Now something like Gnutella is going to be near impossible to kill.

[1]proprietary is in quotes here because the very concept of a proprietary network protocol is somewhat questionable. Suffice to say, it's not an openly revealed protocol.

Re:kazaa

[edox.]

Diet Kazaa is much better than kazaalite you can change your nearest supernode[find a t1 or higher super node]. It has ip browser that show the ip address of the remote user. It blocks upgrade notice. You can customize ur kazaa remove the media bar, remove the menu bar etc.. all that kazaalite lacks

.

What About Gnucleus?

[ras_b]

I'm surprised i don't see more mention of Gnucleus for file sharing. Why don't more people use this? Gnucleus is an open source client for the gnutella network- no ads, no spyware, and no hidden corporations running it. I have been using it successfully for a long time, but whenever i ask others what they use it's always "kazaa". I don't get it.

Re:kazaa

[(rypto*]

Get it here Its worth endorsement

Until Now?

[m1a1]

Until now implies that something can be done if the judge rules in favor of Hollywood. This is simply untrue. As you can gather from the article, the CEO of Sharman Networks has not set foot in the U.S. and will not do so. Sure the company is on trial, but all that exists of them in the United States is lawyers. How they expect to get traditionally uncooperative countries to shut down servers I don't know. It will be interesting.

Re:Kazaa participation level

[Kaz Riprock]

Because of the intense bandwidth being consumed at universities across the nation for uploads and downloads thru the Kazaa ports, many schools are cracking down on fileswappers (not for copyright, but to keep the network traffic managable). In that way, a lot of college students will leech because if they spike the upload bandwidth, the IT police knock on their door and terminate their in-room connection. This has been covered here at slashdot before.