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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.'"
Seriously, this is really bad news. I'm pretty sure that the extremely easy access to software for windows is one of the main reasons why so many use the crap instead of free/open source software.
And there could be serious copy protections, but I get the feeling that many software companies WANT their software to be pirated (by home users) so the same people want to use say MS Office or Photoshop at their workplace.
I call for better international laws against piracy, but I admit I've no idea how/if it would work.
Ciryon
Cheap reseller hosting and individual accounts.
Well damn! If Kazaa is the most downloaded, then AdAware will have to be the second most downloaded to get rid of all the spyware from Kazaa!!!
:)
Amazing, the most downloaded piece of software in history has spyware written all over it
Or did c|net mean Kazaa LITE?
I sell out to The Man every day.
I wonder how many of the people who downloaded Kazaa a using it for legal purposes. Peer 2 Peer is a great idea, to bad so many misuse it.
I think the number of Kazaa download just tells us that there are more criminals than we think.
It's good to get music, app software, and short videos, like episodes of TV shows. But it seems that for movies and games, everything is incorrectly labeled there. I'm not sure if it's a deliberate effort by the industry (but if it is, why would they still give you copyrighted stuff, albeit under a incorrect name) or stunts by pre=pubescent low-lifes who raise their participation level falsely through this deceit.
Exactly!! Yet I get modded down when I say it. Also what that article doesn't say is that counts all the revisions, and doesn't give a TRUE number of unique downloads. There have been so many revisions, and forced upgrades to the KaZaa system that their unique users is FAR less. Plus you also have to factor in repeat downloads (poor schmucks who downloaded bad stuff off of KaZaa and had to reformat/reinstall because of it) I found IRC well before P2P was in its beginning stages, and found it very easy to use. When KaZaa came out, I tried it, and didn't like it (adware, spyware, malware). I also tried Kazaa Lite, and didn't like that much either. I could get exactly what I wanted without having to d/l it twice, even three times to get the quality and even the correct thing sometimes. I guess I must have offended some KaZaa users out there. Oh well, the program is still worthless in my eyes.
I doubt they would acknowledge the lite version; since it's hacked to remove spyware and ads, they get no revenue from it, so why let people know about it?
Kazaa is distributed free. It is not being pirated. So why are you talking about software being pirated and companies wanting it to be pirated?
He's talking about people using Kazaa to download pirated software such as Photoshop. If people couldn't download Photoshop with Kazaa, they might use The Gimp instead, which would be bad for Adobe, because some of those people who pirate Photoshop at home wind up buying it at work. If they used The Gimp for free at home, maybe they'd use The Gimp at work too.
(Yes, I know, The Gimp isn't as good as Photoshop and is completely unacceptable to some, but it may be good enough for most people.)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The last time I checked, there were about 3 million users connected.
Why is this number so much lower? Obviously people in different time zones probably sign on at different times, but even considering that, the number seems low when compared to what download.com is reporting.
Is this a sign that perhaps a lot of people have trouble getting kazaa to work (firewalls, schools/ISPs blocking it, etc)?
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I was hoping by now, or at least the near future there would be a larger migration to software with open protocols like Emule or Shareaza using gnutella and whatever the edonkey protocol is called.
I've found Shareaza to be almost as good as kazaa in regards to variety, but slower on the download end because of either the lack of a decent userbase or the protocols still need tweaking.
I think we might be seeing, or already have seen, a big rift in content. RIAA/Mainstream stuff fills the Kazaa networks while less mainstream stuff is begining to appear on open protocol networks as people with a clue are migrating away from the spyware infested world of commercial P2P.
Got a popular file? Put up a magnet/gnutella/ed2k link somewhere and tell people to download a non-commercial client if they want access to the "good stuff." Sure, there's no accounting for taste, but a little effort could undermine and help produce a mass divestment from Kazaa and the Sherman networks.
Is not really the gui, which is quite ok once you explain what the thought behind is. The problem is more the missing cymk support which makes it totally unacceptable for professional graphic artists and professional graphics design. At least over here in europe, if you give a picture to a printing company either it is cymk or it is rejected, and for a reason!
The missing cymk is the real problem behind a wide adoption of gimp, the rest is seconary. I'm pretty sure once that one is in the adoption of the program would be much wider than it is today.
Free doesn't necessarily equal good, either. What's cheaper, hiring a graphic artist who knows Photoshop well and training him to use Gimp so you don't have to buy one Adobe release every once in a while, or buying Photoshop and letting him get on with his work? Photoshop is a fine program that can take you from start to finish, anytime. If you need complex curves, you can call in Illustrator. If you want to do document work, Framemaker fits in with both beautifully. They're all solidly written, have all the important bits, and they make sense to everyone. That's what's cheap, guy, not your "free" software.
As for other details, like how fast you were able to generate the kind of plasma you wanted, doesn't your first sentence say Photoshop has too much stuff most people will never use? This sounds like a very biased view of what should be in an image app. "Well, it shouldn't have all that stuff, but it ought to be able to do the task I wanted to do today without a plug-in."
Why are they downloading kazaa for, this is the worst peice of software ever, the amount of spyware, pop up software and underlying P2P stuff that you cant control is terrible..
Be a geek and get control and use kazaa lite instead, its smaller, also free and if memory serves you can get that from download.com as well.
This is what i use and i much prefer it.
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
If Microsoft added spyware that was impossible to uninstall (via normal methods) to Windows Media Player or IE people would have a shit-fit. If Kazaa does it they dismiss it and say to go download Kazaa Lite. Why support a company or piece of software that supports spyware? What's next? In order to run this shareware program you need to let us install Nimda on your system. The program will not run on a non-Nimda infected system?
First we train a decade of Windows lusers to click next-next-next-next-ok-finish without paying attention because of 500 page end-user license agreements and then some company comes along and slips a couple of sentences into there and suddenly they feel justified to install a trojan on your system that hides itself and makes itself difficult to uninstall. The average user cannot do it by themselves. That's just outright wrong. If I come across another system with 40 different spybots running I'm going to scream.
The first reason Kazaa destroys all the other file-sharing methods is that it has all the users. The number one rule of P2P: More users equal more files. Sounds simple but a lot of people miss the obviousness of it.
Most Open-P2P services lose this battle immediately by not interoperating with each other. And every new Open-P2P implementation just further fragments the available user and file base into ever smaller fiefdoms. Not to mention the Open-P2P user base is not the average user, but the super user.
The other place the Open-P2P implementations really miss the boat is in the default user setup. The default settings of Kazaa share all of the files a user downloads with other Kazaa users. It also defaults the user to allow unrestricted downloads at unlimited speed from his machine. Sure, these settings can be changed, but that's not the point. Kazaa caters to the least common denominator computer user, truth is, that's most users.
But most Open-P2P implementations shoot themselves in the foot from the instant they are downloaded. They default the user to "not" share all downloaded files, then let them choose the transfer speeds. They also add in tons of "features" and settings that mystify the average user. Average users don't know from nodes and really don't want to know. They want to get files and not have to mess with settings. Kazaa works out of the box, while most Open-P2P implementations take a lot of wrangling just to get working. But the real key is that most users never change their default settings. So most Kazaa users share everything they download, thus there are always more files-per-user on Kazaa's system than any of the Open-P2P systems.
Then there's IRC and the Newsgroups. IRC has been DDOS'd into irrelevance and even when it wasn't, sitting in file que's for days on end was not my idea of fun. Newsgroups are still with us, for now. But many ISP's offer very spotty service and as binary use grows, I suspect even our dear old newsgroups may come under heavy fire from the MPAA/RIAA.
Bottom line, having tried all the various flavors and methods of file accumulation, Kazaa kicks everything else's ass. Using Kazaa-lite and a handful of Kazaa specific search and download enhancement utilities, there's almost nothing I can't find on the service. The Open-P2P providers aren't even close.
The only way any Open-P2P will get close to Kazaa is by emulating it, then bettering it. If I were building an Open-P2P system to try and beat Kazaa, first I'd copy it, the back-end, the front-end, the "lack" of settings, everything. Then I'd concentrate on features designed to get around all forms of ISP restrictions and MPAA/RIAA manipulations. I'd implement things like port swapping, encryption, IP spoofing, tunneling, reputation systems, cloaking shared data to elude packet shapers and anything else I could think of. I'd make it all automatically activate when necessary and have all the college users overnight. All those college users with all that bandwidth would give the system the inertia it would need to succeed. Once you have inertia, you have the files, and when have the files, the users will come. And when the MPAA/RIAA really start moving against the ISP's and Kazaa, a system like this could take Kazaa's crown.