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Kazaa Says On Track to Be Most-Downloaded Program

Cody Watkins writes "Reuters has a story about Kazaa surpassing ICQ as the most downloaded piece of software (according to C|Net Download.com). 'As of late Thursday, the Kazaa Media Desktop application -- a file-sharing software that has drawn the wrath of the music industry by enabling its users to swap songs for free -- had been downloaded 229,150,955 times, as measured by Download.com.'"

12 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. Only the highest on download.com by robla · · Score: 5, Informative

    You'll note that the origin for this story is CNet, and that the metric that they are using is download.com (owned by CNet). Since Kazaa.com actually links straight to download.com, it's not surprising that they have the highest numbers on download.com.

    Over 335 million unique RealPlayer/RealOne Player registrations have been received by RealNetworks.

    Other software makers (who don't use download.com) probably also have numbers higher than Kazaa.

  2. Actually by kilogram · · Score: 2, Informative

    Kazaa Says On Track to Be Most-Downloaded Program

    Actually, Kazaa Stays On Track...

  3. Re:Value-added by sould · · Score: 5, Informative
    Here's your value added Kazaa right here.


    Kinda works under wine too

  4. Informative Link by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Reuters has more details.

  5. OSS and Windows by cjsnell · · Score: 5, Informative

    But, you see, OSS for Windows is catching on! Some of the most popular programs on Sourceforge are win32. Everything that you need for spyware-free commercial-free RIAA-free music and video sharing is available there, on sf.net. Here's a sampling:

    CDEX - a great MP3 ripper. Use with LAME for great, free rips.

    eMule and DC++ - very popular P2P clients

    BitTorrent - For large file sharing (movies, etc)

    VirtualDub - for video format conversion (DiVX, VCD, etc)

    Audacity - multi-track audio editor

    I could go on and on. Look at this list and all the win32 apps there.

  6. Re:Punishment by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Informative
    "Further, it is rumored that viruses or worms can be transmitted via sound files on Kazaa"

    That is true. There are numerious buffer overflows within mpeg itself. With Windowsw2k unpatched I have clicked on porn only to have hidden code in the mpeg launch IE and god knows what. Most of it just directs me to their site full of full screen pop-ups that are impossible to close. Annoying and plain obnoxious. It is by the same porm spammer who hides the same advertisements for his site. I think his site is www.firstime.com. I do not remember. Do not go there unless you want 10 full screen pop-ups that even alt+f4 will not close thanks to nasty javascripts.

    Anyway my machine got hacked as well. It connected to port 666 which is irc doing god knows what. My guess is from the mpegs because I have a firewall.

    Anyway if your doing a new pc installation always patch WIndows first, before proceeding to anything else. This is common sense but I had no idea how insecure windows was until I saw this first hand. I do not believe slashdot antiMS hype. My old man without a firewall got hacked with 20 minutes after he got his dsl. He ran outlook unpatched. Amazing!

    I had to reformat my drive and start over after the kazaa-lite fiasco just to get rid of the virii. I am too cheap for an anti-virus checker.

    With Windows2k and media player fully patched the same mpegs do not launch IE or any extra code. My guess is the website owner used the buffer overflow to zombie my machine and direct my to his website hoping I would pay money for his lousy crap.

  7. Re:Punishment by mattrix2k · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am too cheap for an anti-virus checker
    There is a (legal) free virus scanner.

  8. Re:Napster baaad, Kazaa wooorse by orthogonal · · Score: 3, Informative

    A simple thing like FTP for example, to update our websites.

    FileZilla, GPL'd, I think.

    Webcam, I agree, hard to find free & decent win32 programms.

  9. Re:Napster baaad, Kazaa wooorse by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    A simple thing like FTP for example, to update our websites. Normally I would expect this to be part of the OS, but no. Windows ftp client is a very simple useless piece of software. I have to spend days hunting the web for something suitable. When I do find one, WSFTP or CuteFTP for example, I can only use it for 30 days then I have to pay.

    There are any number of freeware ftp clients. Go to a site like freewareweb and find several.

    Personally, I use the ftp client built in to Far, which is shareware, but doesn't expire. (I guess the Win version of Midnight Commander has it too, if you use that on Linux.)

    Want to write a PDF file? People in my office needed to, asked me to find something free online. After spending a couple of hours looking for something for windows, I ended up giving them a knoppix cd.

    Or you could have used Ghostscript, i.e. the same app as in Knoppix.

    And trust me, paying for software is far more abhorrent to these co-workers of mine than any piracy issues. In fact my boss always makes a joke every time someone comes in to get some software, "but you still have to pay the software company for the license to use the software". Heh.

    Well, just go to Astalavista for all your serialz and crackz.

    I hate Windows myself, but I stick with it for most of my work exactly because I can find just about any app I need, free (as in beer). There are many cool apps, it's the OS that sucks.

  10. Re:Running Kazaa on your Linux box by cerberusss · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, by coincidence I'm working on a pretty powerful box right now... Office runs OK too. But you're right, normally it's so slow it's almost unworkable. And the fact that the max resolution is 800x600x16 is a pain, too.

    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  11. Re:Value-added by sparrow_hawk · · Score: 2, Informative

    Argh, don't bother using Kazaa Lite under wine on Linux. You don't have enough time or hair, believe me. Get giFT, toss in the FastTrack plugin, and you're all set. Gnutella, OpenFT, and FastTrack, all with one daemon.