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.'"

Comments

Most downloaded by lazy folk

[NDeans]

It may be the most downloaded program, but it's absolutely worthless to me. I'd rather use IRC and not worry as much about the quality of my downloads, and benjamin, if y'all can remember that big deal.

Beat Gator huh?

[el-spectre]

If one really wanted to be a jerk, you could send out HTML spam containing some JavaScript code and take the title in a coupla weeks...

Kazaa is already dead

[ites]

It is popular, but I believe it is stuck in its 'second generation P2P' model, namely closed-source, Windows-only, spyware advertising, worm-heaven.

All products go through a life-cycle from pioneer, early-adopter, maturity, late-adopter. Kazaa is already in its late-adopter phase.

Question: what are the early-adopter P2P products today? These will be the market leaders tomorrow, and they will be: open source, portable, secure against worms and attacks, silent.

Re:Kazaa is already dead

[Jugalator]

I prefer eMule to Kazaa. A SourceForge project and an excellent P2P application with much better functionality than Kazaa. It has pretty speedy update cycles too, they aim for about 1 to 3 weeks between updates and are so far keeping up with that goal well. It's of course free and completely void of spyware.

http://www.emule-project.net/

The current version, 0.28b, is much more mature than one might think from the version number. :)

Ports of eMule (Windows application) are under development: lMule (Linux) and xMule (OSX). See their forums for more information.

Nah....

[tcak]

What about Macromedia Flash Player? As it runs on most web browsers, I believe that the number of downloads would be quite substantial, rivalling Kazaa. Consider the number of Flash-enabled sites out there.

How about free web browsers? MSIE? Mozilla? Opera? Programs installed via Windows Update? Quicktime Player?

That 229M number is pointless

[stud9920]

Thousands of people use kazaalite, which is downloaded from dubious (as in more dubious than download.com) websites

Thousands more use kazaa to download kazaa.

Kazaa's golden days followed by Kazaa Lite's rise

[xombo]

Even though Kazaa may be in the last stretch before it loses its following because of spyware and the like, the off-shoot Kazaa Lite seems to be going strong and has a much better potential for taking Kazaa's place. Granted Kazaa in closed source and contains worms and spyware but Kazaa Lite being free of all that seems to be in the right niche to move in.

what about multi p2p programs ?

[chrispy666]

mldonkey supports edonkey, bittorent, kazaa, overnet, napster, and probably other protocols that I forget, in one single program, that runs from the command line, on many platforms (linux x86, osx, bsd, even win32 !) as for GUI, you have a pletora of frontends. While this might not be a new p2p system, it's by far the most convenient way to download stuff from many different sources... mldonkeyworld

A resounding success for Spyware

[sh0rtie]

As Kazaa comes bundled with multiple spyware programs this also gives you an idea of how many computers are infected with its programs, mind boggling really

remember Kazaa is just a vehicle for this software as their revenue model is based on the user installing it, i feel sorry for all the support desks that are going to have to deal with all the problems it brings and the security implications when someone/thing exploits it, imagine how many corporate systems are infected and the implications that could bring for security in the workplace now that other private companies have direct access to their data bypassing firewalls etc (by using http port 80 to communicate) i mean Windows isnt exactly the most secure system around but these applications have made this so much worse and it can only be a matter of time until someone develops a *nix port of spyware.

The sooner they are out of buisness the better for the user, but these numbers prove that it isnt going to happen unless virus companies decide to pull their fingers out and target these applications which are probably more destructive and intrusive than most viruses.

According to the virus scanner companies stance , if you release a worm,virus etc with an EULA you are exempt from detection and are free to extract any information you like from the users/hosts system for financial gain
(regardless of what laws exist to protect the users data in his/her country)

luckily a few good people have addressed this problem but as their software isn't as widely known as the big boys (Symantec,Mcafee,Sophos etc) and doesn't come bundled as standard by pc manufacters (as a lot of virus protection does) i fear this situation can only get worse until the users computer becomes an un-usable device

Re:Legal use?

[switched4OSX]

Don't worry. RIAA will by a couple key politicians and eventually get a law passed outlawing P2P for any purpose. I agree, this is too bad, P2P has many legal uses.

Running Kazaa on your Linux box

[cerberusss]

Just a tip for people; I run Kazaa on my Linux box: I installed win95 with Kazaa in the Bochs virtual machine. I'm pretty sure it can't come out of the box :)

scalability

[KingRamsis]

Kazaa is one of the most scalable software I ever seen, downloaded 229,150,955 times, assuming only 10% of the people are online at a time, that is 22 million online users searching its database... makes you wonder if their advertisment business can buy them all that bandwidth and equipment.

I would love to have a look at their p2p protocol, actually i think it should become an RFC.

Re:Punishment

[warmcat]

That is true. There are numerious buffer overflows within mpeg itself

MPEG itself is a committee... but its true, no doubt there are exploitable problems in the various codecs.

With Windowsw2k unpatched I have clicked on porn only to have hidden code in the mpeg launch IE and god knows what

More likely it was simply a mislabelled .asf or .wmv, which, thanks to Microsoft's forward-looking concern for delivering what the consumer wants, are designed to be able to spawn browser windows (containing whatever). WMP will accept a mislabelled .asf or .wmv and play it anyway, spawning said browser windows from what you thought was a .mpg.

Re:What?

[valisk]

For me its as simple as this,

If I were to download Photoshop with Kazaa, spend time learning how to use it, and enhancing my job prospects I would quite likely end up joining a company who would buy a Photoshop license for me to use. So my Piracy would have directly resulted in economic gain for Adobe, why the hell they should be bothered about the everyday Joe dling it I don't know.

I agree with you about Gimp, it's good but Photoshop is better and it's nic eto know that Codeweavers have made some updates in crossover so that Photoshop can now be run without having to buy a windoze license.

Most Downloaded

[archetypeone]

equals Most Likely to be sued. I'm quite happy sticking to Gnutella.

Quicktime - most distributed licensed software

[adzoox]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Quicktime in all its iterations is the most widely distributed program, even surpassing Windows. (Because Windows has come with it built in since ME, right?) It's on all AOL discs since 4.0, it comes with MOST digital cameras, whenever there's a popular movie trailer it becomes the largest weekly download total. There were 7 million downloads for the trailer to Phantom Menace and 12 million for Attack Of The Clones. Every Apple computer sold since 1991 has had it as part of the base OS.

I beleive I remember hearing at the Quicktime Live conference that the title statement was accurate.

It is interesting to see all the records Quicktime has.