P2P Services Speak Out Against Gnutella2

An anonymous reader writes "Three leading Gnultella services voice their opinions on Gnutella2 or Mike's Protocol as they refer to it as. None of the three recognize Gnutella2 as true Gnutella and worry its propritary protocol will divide the Gnutella community. In the first interview Vincent Falco of BearShare contributes his thoughts. The second interview gets input from Greg Blidson of LimeWire, and Arno Steenbekkers from XoloX."

Comments

I thought everyone used Kazaa

[bushboy]

I can't remember the last time I ever considered Gnutella as an operable and useful P2P application.

It was a mission to connect and even more of a problem to actually download useful content !

Unless you were a l33t bandwidth wh0r3, it remains to this day, a useless p2p application.

Kazaa on the other hand actually works !
On a low bandwidth pipe, you can still obtain large files, even if it takes you a week to do it.

Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa

[0x0d0a]

I can't remember the last time I ever considered Gnutella as an operable and useful P2P application.

Try gtk-gnutella out of CVS. Gnutella these days is a very, very different beast from what it once was (thanks to lots of work on the part of the GDF), and its performance is *far* better than it once was.

The reason Kazaa doesn't work for everyone is because it's the last remaining closed P2P protocol. Linux folks can't clone it (and it's extremely difficult to reverse engineer the authentication stuff) because of that, so Kazaa isn't available for Linux.

I've found that Napster for music, eDonkey for large files works pretty well.

I wish more people used oggs, though...

Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa

[Shade, The]

Um, I'd say his point is that Kazaa only works on Windows. If a person does not use Windows, then they can't use Kazaa, and therefore it's not a choice for some people. How difficult is this to understand? Therefore some people are doubtless interested in Gnutella. Especially since it's gotten quite a bit better, recently.

Gtk-gnutella works quite nicely, I've found. Downloaded all of Trigun and half of Hack Sign from there so far. I even managed to find some Maaya Sakamoto MP3s. Not that I downloaded them, for that would be illegal and bad. *Ahem*. Anyway, the only Anime I couldn't find reliably was Outlaw Star, so I grabbed that from IRC.

Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa

[peter_gzowski]

I've found that Napster for music, eDonkey for large files works pretty well.

I assume you mean KaZaA for music...

Just a few comments on your comment. KaZaA (Lite) works in Linux under Wine. The KaZaA Lite site even links to instructions on how to get it working. The fact that KaZaA is a closed protocol is not the reason it doesn't work for everyone. No one program is going to work for everyone. KaZaA works for most people I know, from the indie rock fans, to the hip-hop fans, to the jazz fans.

eDonkey is good for large files, albeit slow. I've been using BitTorrent for a lot of my large files (the latest buffy and anime fansubs) lately, although I don't know if this counts as P2P.

I took your advice and grabbed gtk-gnutella (there was a recent release, so I didn't see the need to get the CVS). I'll have to use it some more, but it seems like the same old beast to me. Will give it some more time, though.

Re:I thought everyone used Kazaa

[einer]

Um, I'd say his point is that Kazaa only works on Windows. If a person does not use Windows, then they can't use Kazaa, and therefore it's not a choice for some people. How difficult is this to understand?

Kazaa Lite runs under wine.

How does one "block" hostile clients?

[McCart42]

I would think that it would be fairly trivial to get past any blocks of a certain P2P agent (with an upgrade of the software, that is)...is there some information about the protocol that makes each client unique, and constantly so; i.e., upgrades to the software cannot change this identifying bit of the protocol for the client?

Re:How does one "block" hostile clients?

[1nv4d3r]

Any client can lie in the next upgrade, so a good option is usually to block based on behavior. In other words, no matter what client you claim to be, if you send me more than x requests/second for longer than y minutes, you're disconnected.

The other benefit of rules like this is that you don't discriminate one bad client; you discriminate against actions that hurt the network. As long as it plays nice any client is fine.

This guy is a developer?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the GDF:

"......You could have just left it alone...but unfortunately you decided to have yourself added to the...
[flames=on]
RETARD LIST! YOU F#$@ING IMBECILE! I DONT EVEN NEED TO ARGUE ON THE MERITS WITH YOU, BECAUSE YOU ARE THE **ONLY** JACKASS WHO OFFERRED TO IMPLEMENT G2 BEFORE THE SPECS WERE RELEASED! GUESS WHAT DUDE! YOUR CLIENT SUCKS A BIG FAT DONKEY'S DICK! NO WONDER MORPHEUS DUMPED IT LIKE THE STEAMING HALF COILED TURD THAT IT IS!
[flames=off]......."

This guy is a developer? That's pathetic, this looks like something a ten year old posted.

If you are wondering what client he is speaking of, he is talking about Gnucleus.

Re:This guy is a developer?

[grumpygrodyguy]

This guy is a developer? That's pathetic, this looks like something a ten year old posted.

Maybe he's a ten year old developer.

unfortunately...

[rebelcool]

kazaa cannot locate 90% of the rare music i look for.

If you want popular or semi-popular things, kazaa works well. For rare things, you might, if lucky, find one person somewhere who has it and it almost always returns 'Needs more sources'.

Vinnie is a pathetic troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what happened today on the Gnutella Developers Forum

Vinnie says Shareaza is damaging the Gnutella network. Well, his own words are blackening the public's view of ALL Gnutella developers. He himself should be banned from Gnutella, period.

Consider this: most people do not visit the GDF group. So when Vinnie makes an ass out of himself, most people just see his words, and assume that he represents all the other Gnutella developers. People see Vinnie flaming, spewing insults left and right. What are people supposed to think?

Vinne, it\'s alright to make points such as "Shareaza is flooding the network with requests." But when you say things such as "YOU ARE A F#$@ING MORON YOU GODDAMNED SON OF A WHORE," you have gone way past the line.

"I've tried being civil"
If such behavior is what you define as civil...

"I suggest other developers "
Wait, Vinnie, you make it sound like you represent the WHOLE Gnutella community. However, this statement makes it sound like there hasn't been a complete agreement yet, and that this is more your own personal opinion. Has an official decision been made or not?

"YOUR CLIENT SUCKS A BIG FAT DONKEY'S DICK!"
So this is what Gnutella developers are like? Freely bashing other people's work and insulting them when all they have done is try to improve the network. I guess I'll make sure to avoid Gnutella developers at all costs, they sound nasty. Or maybe it's just Vinnie.

Last question: why have I not negatively responded to Adam Fisk? Because he has been civil. You have not.

lost end-user focus

[1nv4d3r]

When did we lose focus on creating the greatest Porn2Pr0n system possible?

These guys should stop bickering and ask themselves every day:
- How can gnutella deliver more pr0n, faster, with more accurate search results?

I know I do, and I don't even develop P2P systems.

I think that it's reasonable, though

[0x0d0a]

For a protocol where the peers matter so much, Gnutella works surprisingly well. That's been because the developers worked together very much to keep things going properly and sharing improvements ahead of time to let everyone adapt.

Shareaza broke that.

It doesn't really *matter* as much as these people make it out to be, because almost nobody *uses* the damn client, but it's really stupid that they took the "Gnutella 2" name, which really is deserved by the coalition of developers that shared and worked together.

Re:I think that it's reasonable, though

[Herr_Nightingale]

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.

Re:Since Napster is dead....

[samhalliday]

Peer to peer search clients in general just suck.

I agree, anytime i search for anything these days, all gnutella comes up with are about 100 files out there all called exactly what i want, but containing some kind of advertisment in surprise. Yeah, i can block that persons IP and stuff... but, there is so much false stuff floating around out there now that its not even worth the effort.

I hear figures which say P2P and napster kill off the music indutry, but in my own personal experience, i have seen quite the opposite: pushed by hearing new music for the first time in a long while, my father bought the only cds he has bought since they came out last year, and many of his friends also. i have also been on ICQ and asked friends, on the other side of the world "you hear so-and-so yet?" yeah, search on napster... and within days they have ordered the CD (which may or may not be sold locally in their country.).

i dunno where all these figures have come from, nobody prefers to listen to music through crappy computer speakers, they buy CDs to go in decent stereo systems when it is good enough...

ShareReactor.

[Grendel Drago]

One word.

ShareReactor.

Complete, well-ripped releases. Most of the good stuff is in the forums. Sure, it's slow during peak hours, but that's a small price to pay for knowing that everything will arrive, intact, full quality, checksummed.

Also, eMule is a really nice-looking client.

--grendel drago

Re:ShareReactor.

[Ashran]

One word: Usenet
Nuff said

My Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use Limewire all the time, but it was written in Java so it was (a) slow and (b) had its own set of menu/window widgets, which made it a pain to use. The only files I ever found were popular music that I didn't need, Futurama episodes (okay - that part was good), and faked porn files that had links to paysites encoded inside.

I switch to Shareaza. It's small. First thing I notice is that the user interface is GREAT. Seriously, you have to be smoking crack to think its user interface is bad. It keeps me informed about my searches, uses the OS' native widgets, is FAST and best of all, I have never seen so many responses to my searches. Whether that is becuase of "Gnutella2" or something else I don't know, and don't care. When you're trying to download movies of Anna Ohura at 3am, you want what works, it's that simple.

And Shareaza doesn't include spyware crap.

Mike's response

[soupdevil]

Check out this thread on Shareaza's forum if you want to read Mike's thoughtful response to Vinnie.

http://www.shareaza.com/forum/viewthread.aspx?ID =5 138