Shareaza 2.0 Released Under GPL

RageEar writes "Today it was announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges."

Comments

Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

I love shareaza, but wish it came with peerguardian built in. (Yes, I know you can import it into the security block but that should be automatic)

Better?

[superpulpsicle]

Is this thing better than Gnutella, Kazaa or some other P2P software. Better yet does this software handle spyware issues better? I don't think there is enough patches to go around patching my already over-patched system.

Re:Better?

[xsupergr0verx]

No spyware, uses Gnutella2, Bittorrent, and eDonkey2k network. Pretty killer little toy.

Re:Better?

[darth_MALL]

Not too sure if this is what you were asking, but I think spyware is a non-issue with Sharezaa. This is from the PR:
"it made some important technical improvements, broke some new ground with an original P2P network, "upped the ante" with many of its competitors and probably contributed to the growing trend away from "heavy spyware bundling".

Re:Better?

[smd4985]

Shareaza is definitely no better than Gnutella (LimeWire performs much better). Shareaza has a nice interface but downloads are iffy and the client is very buggy. Seems like the move to GPL is a desperate attempt to catch up to LimeWire (which has been open source for a while and making amazing strides).

Re:Better?

[hawkbug]

Yes, but does it encrypt the data stream so people can't spy on what your download? If not, it's still just another file sharing app people won't use.

Re:Better?

[xsupergr0verx]

Very true, it's use of Gnutella is pretty lame. However, this is easily my favorite ed2k program and I adore the bittorrent throttling settings (I had a linksys card that overheated using BT once!)

Re:Better?

[y2imm]

For what it's worth, I've been using Shareaza for about a year now, having tried Limewire et al, and finding them wanting in their interfaces. No spyware either.

Re:Better?

[xsupergr0verx]

You don't get busted for downloads, you get busted for uploads. The program has an option to turn off all uploads (even of partial files.)

Very useful for me, as in the last year I recieved two "friendly letters" from the BSA and MPAA respectively.

Re:Better?

[sabNetwork]

I beg to differ. Have you ever tried Shareaza? I am not affiliated with either project, and I must say that Shareaza blows other Gnutella clients out of the water.

* The user interface is unmatched, at least on the Windows platform.
* Performance-- LimeWire and Kazaa both suck the crap out of your CPU.
* Support for multiple protocols
* Plugin functionality

The biggest benefit of Shareaza going open source is the inevitable addition of a FastTrack plugin.

Re:Better?

[Tweaker_Phreaker]

LimeWire is a great Gnutella program but that's all it is (Shareaza supports four protocols) and it still lacks lots of features that Shareaza has like ghost ratings (tells people about bad files that you've deleted) and the ability to ignore ID3 tags while hashing (even if people change their ID3 tags, it will still have the same hash).

Also, Shareaza's Gnutella performence isn't too great because:
1) Its Gnutella code hasn't been updated much because Mike (Shareaza's creator) seems to want everyone to use 'Gnutella 2' instead and he's been busy adding lots of features into Shareaza.
2) Shareaza is only a Gnutella Leaf node and depends on other clients to be the Ultrapeers but most Gnutella clients started to give preference to their own kind (ie. LimeWire mostly only connects to other LimeWire clients) even though it goes against their own ideology.

Re:Better?

[risings0n]

You must've not noticed downloads show up as bits/sec instead of bytes/sec to make it look faster. That's just a weak way to hide buggy code and make it look to the end-user this program gets mega-speeds. No thanks, I'll pass (again). I'll stick with my bittorrent :D

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

* Performance-- LimeWire and Kazaa both suck the crap out of your CPU.

Is sucking the crap out of something good or bad?

Re:Better?

[orasio]

freenet?

Re:Better?

[spacefight]

Not true. They plan to bust you (and they did) for downloading as well, although this might not be the case in the U.S. but for sure other countries, I think it was the U.K.

Re:Better?

[Impotent_Emperor]

I think that's a changeable option. You can tell it to show the rates in many different forms. I've get it set to show in kilobytes per second. Speed really depends on how many available hosts there are and how much bandwith they are giving (and how fast your own connection is).

I don't Shareaza for download BitTorrent files. I just got used to the regular BitTorrent program. Also, I had to reinstall BitTorrent because Shareaza hijacked the settings and took over for it.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not have noticed you can fully configure the display units.

No need to switch away from bittorrent; Shareaza will happily act as a bittorrent client. It will even simultaneously grab parts of the same file from other networks if it can find it.

Re:Better?

[42forty-two42]

Any chance of the ed2k protocol support being ported to giFT? Or, alternately, fasttrack being added to shareaza...

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Under what law do they propose to do this? Copyright is a restriction on distribution and nothing more.

Re:Better?

[paganizer]

Freenet is actually still working.
The developers have a nasty tendency to come out with a working build, wait about 2-4 weeks, then come out with a non-working build. the last 6 stable releases have all worked about as well as any have in the past, and we are WAY overdue for the must upgrade non-working build.
Frost is even working pretty good; it has unnecessary libraries (why, exactly, do you need to format the messages in XML? what was wrong with TXT?), and is about 2mb more bloated than the may 9th, 2003 build which worked better, but it DOES work.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Freenet would be a useful addition, or better yet, Mute, since it acts and lookslike like classical p2p (i.e. there is a search bar).

There have been ideas floating around about developing a system where you share file meta data on Mute and use fast P2P to download the parts. The parts would be distributed among different people and you'd need them all to decrypt the file.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found Shareza slower and clunkier compared to eMule. It could be just my limited experience / personal anecdote though.

Anyone else find it slow (for downloading).

I also found it confusing to know where the file was coming from (i.e. what network). eMule is a little better at telling you where the file is coming from, but if more P2P applications start hosting multiple networks then they should make this information explicit.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

"ghost ratings (tells people about bad files that you've deleted) and the ability to ignore ID3 tags while hashing (even if people change their ID3 tags, it will still have the same hash)."

Those are good features, very good features.

Does the ghost ratings allow you to ignore files by hash? I've been asking for this to be included into eMule, it would allow people to preignore bogus files.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its Gnutella code hasn't been updated much because Mike (Shareaza's creator) seems to want everyone to use 'Gnutella 2' instead and he's been busy adding lots of features into Shareaza.

And it's really no wonder considering how much fighting and disagreements Mike has caused with his Gnutella2 (MP) protocol. There's pretty good article about this all in this Gnutella vs. Gnutella2 two part article. [slyck.com]

However to me it seems that Mike has acted pretty much like an ass. No need to support Shareazaa in any way no matter how GPL it is now. I wonder how many new features or changes he will accept from contributors...

Re:Better?

[It'sYerMam]

How does making a download look faster hide buggy code? The coding of shareaza will have a negligible effect on download speeds - rather, as the sibling points out, this depends on available bandwidth.
I remember reading in the manual/FAQ that it was in bits/sec, and that this can be changed.

Re:Better?

[Curtman]

I don't know much about giFT, but there's a few settings in mldonkey related to it. I prefer the PHP gui myself (start the core and go to http://localhost:4080 ), but if giFT is your cup of tea, give it a shot. I'd stick with 2.5.16 though if you do, the newer versions aren't quite ready for prime time IMHO.

Re:Better?

[zach_d]

canadian courts ruled p2p software as no diferent from having a photocopier in a library. the judge threw a the canadian recording assn. out of the court.

Re:Better?

[0111 1110]

You will be severely penalized in Bittorrent swarms and moderately penalized in Emule/Edonkey in terms of a much slower download speed and/or longer queue waits (in ed2k)for not uploading.

Also, official versions of Shareaza do not allow zero uploads on the ED2K network because it's not allowed, and shareaza clients would be banned by other clients and probably by the servers as well.

Re:Better?

[pebs]

Is this thing better than Gnutella, Kazaa or some other P2P software.

Yes. Shareaza is an example of quality software. It has a slick interface that has good eye candy, yet none of it gets in your way (the UI is very useful) and it is not bloated or slow. I'd like to see the source code for the UI alone. Then it can handle Edonkey2000, Gnutella, Gnutella2, and Bittorrent downloads. And it handles them well. I've always found it to be very stable. Give it a try and see what I'm talking about.

The fact that this app is now GPL is great news.

Re:Better?

[Hatta]

No spyware, uses Gnutella2, Bittorrent, and eDonkey2k network. Pretty killer little toy.

Nice, is there a command line tool? I use the bittorrent and ed2k command line tools frequently. It would be handy if I could consolidate them, you know set a max total rate limit, instead of limiting each individually. I'd prefer to move away from the proprietary ed2k tool too.

Re:Better?

[amembleton]

Yes, I switched back to eMule, after trying Shareaza for a few weeks. I'm just trying to set up MLDonkey. It might be better, who knows.

Re:Better?

[42forty-two42]

giFT isn't a GUI - it's a p2p network daemon - you run it, it connects to p2p networks, then a seperate client program (I use apollon) presents a GUI, communicating with giftd via unix sockets. Or possibly TCP, not sure. Poisoned is a Mac OS X GUI for giFT.

Re:Better?

[Curtman]

I see.. So giFT is pretty much mldonkey without the donkey.

That's some terrible link-fu BTW.

Re:Better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Very useful for me, as in the last year I recieved two "friendly letters" from the BSA and MPAA respectively.

Respectively? You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Better?

[xsupergr0verx]

I am meaning it in the sense of "in the order given". I do not think YOU know what it means.

anybody compiled it yet

[jonasmit]

on Linux/BSD? Do any ports currently exist?

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[numbski]

I would imagine not....unless it builds nicely using winelib.

I onlly have MacOS X in front of me, and I don't have winelib on here, so I can't try it on here. Anyone else? :P

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Izago909]

Last time I checked in it was built on .NET. I'm not sure if that's the case anymore, but if it is, some serious revisions must be made before it's truly cross platform.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[sameb]

Don't even bother. You've already got a free, open-source p2p app for all the platforms you could ever want, using LimeWire (written in Java).

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct, LimeWire rocks... though I wish it was written in SWT instead of Swing.

(Uh oh) :)

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Short Circuit]

Last I heard, LimeWire was Java though not Open Source. Phex is both, though.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[sameb]

LimeWire is (and has been for the past 4 years) open source -- GPL'd and all.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Short Circuit]

Heh. Shows how long I've been out of the loop, doesn't it?

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Chyeld]

Except of course, Limewire only handles one of the many protocols that Sharezilla does. Thus reducing the argument to "don't even bother, you can do 10% of what Sharezilla does with this other bloated Java app."

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[sameb]

You can do 100% of what Shareaza tries to do with LimeWire -- that is, search for and download files. The network it runs on is implementation details. You can in fact say that Shareaza is bloated for adding support for multiple networks instead of making one network work as good as it possibly can.

Bram Cohen has complained that Shareaza's BitTorrent implementation is terrible. Gnutella developers have complained that Shareaza's Gnutella implementation is outdated & that it wrongly sends tons of "Gnutella2" packets to clients that don't want them.

Would you prefer a client that picks a goal and makes it work amazingly well, or a client that tries to do lots of things so-so?

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Sweetshark]

Why should anybody? (Beyond the "because I can"-nature of geeks)
There are far superior p2p-clients for Linux available: mldonkey for example supports donkey, overnet, fasttrack, gnutella, directconnect, soulseek, opennap, bittorrent, http, ftp and ssh file transfers. And it has a webinterface and multiple GUI-clients (Linux and Windows) available ...
They might get some ideas by looking at the Shareaza sourcecode for improvements though.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Anenga]

But it is Java. Barf. Java
is like Communism, Great ideas on paper that just don't work.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Nahor]

No, it's not built on .NET, it's regular C++. It was programmed using Visual Studio .NET and uses MFC for the GUI.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[mog007]

Limewire doesn't support eDonkey or Bittorrent.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[slobbargoat]

gtk-gnutella is opensource, and works on the limewire networks aswell. http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[sameb]

SWT is definitely an option, the problem is that LimeWire would sacrifice the "run anywhere" beauty. There's LimeWire users on Windows, Linux, OSX, Mac Classic, OS/2, SunOS, etc.... Until SWT is ported to every platform, LimeWire's going to continue using Swing.

Another option is an abstraction layer between Swing & SWT -- there's some projects (SwingWT, to name one) that are doing that, but it's incomplete and LimeWire won't compile right now with it.

Swing is pushed to its limits (and sometimes beyond) right now with LimeWire, painting progress bars & icons on tabs, user-configurable change-at-runtime themes, tooltips & rowstripes for tables & lists, real-time statistics graphs, etc... a port to SWT (or an abstraction layer of SWT) would be a massive project.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Chyeld]

I would prefer an app that allows me to access the multple, fragmented, and previously incompatable, networks used for P2P access today.

Perhaps you only go for the files that have 2000 sources avalaible to connect to, I don't. Having the ability to use all four networks to grab the same file, and not having to worry that if the file drops off the radar on one of the networks that the entire time spent downloading it is wasted is much more important than worrying about whether the developer 'plays well with others'. I could care less if scared cows are being challenged, frankly each and everyone of the 'core' Gnutella developers have tried to hijack the protcol at least once themselved. I could care less if the current implementation of Bittorrent is less than spetacular. It'll get better. What I care about is interopability. Something Limewire has never had.

On the other hand, I currently use eMule. ^_^

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Short Circuit]

I used to use gtk-gnutella. In fact, last I saw, it had evolved into a decent application. But it doesn't run under Windows, and probably doesn't run under OS X.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[painlord2k]

MlDonkey is not "superior". Shareaza is, for now, the only application that support multiple network swarming downloads. It can swarm the same file from multiple network. All the other are able only to swarm a file from a network only.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't Mono a .net port??
I see they have C++, C# compilers on thier web site.
Maybe someone can try to rebuild using mono.
If not somone can try DotGnu.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[EvilAlien]

Hrm... could this be a use for Mono?

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[vDave420]

Gnutella developers have complained that Shareaza's Gnutella implementation is outdated & that it wrongly sends tons of "Gnutella2" packets to clients that don't want them.

No kidding! (Disclaimer, IAA Gnutella Developer)

I myself am in the process of adding Udp support to BearShare, and right outta the gate, various Shareaza nodes begin blasting tons of unsolicited "Mike's Protocol Udp packets" at me.

Granted, there is a generic problem of random traffic when using Udp, but I don't see "random traffic", I see "lots of unsolicited Non-Gnutella, Udp MikeProtocol packets".

Grrr...
Not to mention the appropriation of the well-known name "gnutella" for a non-gnutella protocol.

No, in short, Shareaza is more a "jack of all trades" that never (IMHO) had really great support for any of the protocols it implemented.

From my own experience, at least, the Gnutella and BitTorrent implementations aren't that great, and tend to lag pretty severly behind the mono-network clients. Can't really speak from personal experience with the ED2k and MP side, though. For all I know, those implementations work well enough.

-dave-

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[myzz]

Shareaza code is based on MFC, so I wonder, whether it could be ported to wxWindows (which has similar interface).

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Jugalator]

Hmm... Why go through all the work to port it to the .NET framework when it wasn't developed for it in the first place.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[julesh]

Bram Cohen has complained that Shareaza's BitTorrent implementation is terrible

Do you have a source for that? I'd actually heard the opposite, that he was pleased to see support being integrated into other software.

Gnutella developers have complained that Shareaza's Gnutella implementation is outdated

I think that's one of the primary reasons for the open sourcing -- the original developer doesn't have time to work on Gnutella support and hopes somebody else will step in to maintain this aspect.

& that it wrongly sends tons of "Gnutella2" packets to clients that don't want them.

I believe that is related to a bug that was fixed a while back, when version 2 GWebCache servers became commonly available.

Would you prefer a client that picks a goal and makes it work amazingly well, or a client that tries to do lots of things so-so

I've never actually found a client that works better than shareaza, for me. I switched to it from limewire a while back, and was definitely impressed with the improvement in quality I saw. The UI is more intuitive, the application is more responsive and uses less memory (a critical feature for an app you leave running in the background all the time, as I do). While it seems that Gnutella has improved since I switched (it now returns results a lot faster than it used to), the support for the edonkey and G2 networks is very useful... G2 does provide a wider choice when searching for rare files, I find, and edonkey is very useful for downloading larger files that few gnutella users seem to have.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[aled]

is like Prejudice, great on your mouth, but you didn't tried nor analized its (possible) merits, just judged from the language it's written. How do you know it doesn't work?
Barf.

PD: I used Azureus BitTorrent client and is cool for me. Top 1 download in Sourceforge.net right now. It's written in Java also.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[edrain]

Some people might argue that communism isn't even a good idea on paper. :)

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Nahor]

Don't confuse C++ and "Managed C++". Managed C++ is a C++ like language that is compiled to run on a .NET virtual machine. Regular C++ doesn't need a virtual machine to run.

Visual Studio .NET supports both regular C++ and managed C++.
If you see C++ and C# used together to describe a framework/compiler/..., chances are that it's really about managed C++.
I didn't look at Mono but if they say that they have a C++ compiler, it's very likely that they actually have a managed C++ compiler.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[thehunger]

Wouldn't that make it ideal for Mono?

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[FrYGuY101]

Granted, there is a generic problem of random traffic when using Udp, but I don't see "random traffic", I see "lots of unsolicited Non-Gnutella, Udp MikeProtocol packets".

Most likely courtesy of Morpheus, as it were. But even still, Mike IS looking into the problem. Furthermore, the main problem you're having with the UDP is a result of Gnutella's UDP query hits having a poor design. Even your boss agrees

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[sameb]

Terrible may have been an extreme (although not entirely incorrect) choice of words, after looking for a source. The exact quote is:

---
The third and newest of the methods is the Bit Torrent support that has been added to the newest of the Shareaza betas. Bram Cohen the creator of BitTorrent told Slyck that in his view Shareaza's implementation was not perfect. Based on comments he had read he said that "the shareaza author doesn't understand BitTorrent's tit-for-tat algorithms at all" and therefore "the client is unlikely to be able to offer as good performance as the official one." He also slammed Shareaza for not speaking to him saying no one ever told him anything about Shareaza's support.
---

from mp3newswire.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Adam Fisk]

This is perpetuating a common myth, namely that connecting to multiple networks translates into access to more files. It's a myth that makes sense on the face of it. It breaks down on the level of the searching protocols, however, and it's a myth that programs like Shareaza and Morpheus use as a marketing gimmick to get users to try their programs. Why is it a myth? It's a myth because all p2p networks have physical limits that prevent searches from reaching beyond certain numbers of computers without overloading the bandwidth capacity of every node on the network. "Gnutella2 (aka Mike's Protocol)", Gnutella, eDonkey, FastTrack, etc all face these physical limits. All of these networks are highly advanced at this point. The eDonkey and Gnutella search architectures in particular are extremely efficient. The MP architecture seems pretty good, but it's not specified very well and will require someone plugging through the source code to really have a look at how good it is. FastTrack is probably trailing all of the other networks at this point in terms of search efficiency. That said, none of these network are able to search beyond a million or so nodes for a given (rare) file simply because there's only so much bandwidth to go around, and we've already extracted most of the big efficiencies to be tweaked out of these architectures. The only way connecting to more networks can result in more files is if a client acts as a leech, if it connects to a network and sucks resources from it and contributes no resources back. This is precisely what Shareaza does with Gnutella and eDonkey. It connects as "leaves" to both networks to ensure that it does not have to contribute any resources while leeching off the other users of those networks to get files. Yick! Same thing the Morpheus folks do. Don't get me wrong, Mike is clearly a talented programmer and Shareaza has lots of great features, and Mike's generally a nice guy. These kinds of behaviors are just a little obnoxious though, and doesn't tend to make Shareaza any friends. I don't work for LimeWire any more, by the way. These are my own, completely independent views.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[Mycroft_VIII]

While Shareaza only connects as leaves to non-g2 networks, it can still return positives to those networks for files it has.
While idealy it should be able to hub on multiple networks, it still adds to the other networks in terms of somewhat bridging across the networks for files more common on other networks.
I've seen it time and again where a search will return many results from one network, but not others. As more and more files are migrated into shareaza they become available to a wider number searchers.
The parent poster claims it doesn't create greater access to files, yet his own logic leads to the conclusion that it does. And from personal experience I can only say that I can find far more file with shareaza than any single protocal client I've tried. As far the leach argument, well that's not a necessary conclusion. While not acting as a hub for all protocals (just g2 and afaik accepting g1 clients), that's meerly an matter of implementation not necessity.
Multi-networking is fairly new to shareaza and has just come out of 'beta' with 2.0 so it's still a bit early to simply write it off for not comming out the gate with a robust collection of features to support all these networks. Now that shareaza is gpl it'll be easier for it to play nicer on these networks.

Mycroft

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[goatan]

It does ed2k as good as the next client Gnutella and G2 work fine Bit torrent is rather ropey (haven't used a BT client that wasn't) but still works and it happily uses a good 80% of my bandwidth (500 kbs). I would prefer a client that does a lot of networks as well as any other client that use those networks, which shareazza does although it still has some bugs in it (what P2P client hasn't?) and requires far more tuning of the options than most to run fast, but it is as fast as the next P2P client and connects to more. Limewire spent all of a week on my computer because when run side by side or separately Sareazza beat it on download speeds almost every time.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[goatan]

This is precisely what Shareaza does with Gnutella and eDonkey. It connects as "leaves" to both networks to ensure that it does not have to contribute any resources while leeching off the other users of those networks to get files

Strange but my uploads are normally 50% faster than downloads on eDonkey and Gnutella download/upload are about the same, maybe you used an older version. From what i know about eDonkey is that you get punished for donloading and not uploading making it impossible suck resources without contributing some? That's just what i had presummed anyway never looked at it in depth.

Re:anybody compiled it yet

[juhaz]

Might, or might not be easy depending on how hard Shareaza pushes MFC limits.

wxWidgets (as it's now called after MS did their trademark lawsuit thingy) is due to it's nature obviously the lowest common denominator between mfc and gtk and whatever else it supports as a back end and may not have all the features of one if any one of the others doesn't support it.

a message from the riaa

[Anonymous Coward]

when you use file sharing apps the terrorists win

Re:a message from the riaa

[the_riaa]

Stop speaking for us, idiot. [That's our job.] -the riaa

Re:a message from the riaa

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

when you use file sharing apps the terrorists win

No, the terrorists win if they can plant the bomb and the counter-terrorist can't disarm it in time, or if they can kill all the counter-terrorists.

Re:a message from the riaa

[Doctor O]

Bull. The terrorists win if the counter-terrorists fail to free all hostages before the round time is over. ;)

FWIW, Counter-Strike seems to be the only situation in which "eliminating all terrorists" or "eliminating all counter-terrorists" work. Maybe someone should tell Dubya and Osama. Might shell in a copy of "War Games" as well.

Re:a message from the riaa

[Anonymous Coward]

do the terrorists win if i download the movie 'the net'? i mean, it is a virtual (haw haw haw) instruction manual for stopping terrorism!

do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[musikit]

don't get me wrong... i am all for OSS. i run linux and mac etc. however if the wire protocol is open wouldn't it be easier for RIAA/MPAA/USGOV/ISPs to look at the data and block certain traffic/file names to "cover their own ass" or have evidence to prosecute you?

musikit equips tin-foil hat.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[yokimbo]

Wouldn't it be easier, as OSS, to thwart RIAA/etc attemps to mess with it. When you've got a determined community vs RIAA, I'm in favor of OSS.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[BiggsTheCat]

Well, Shareaza's protocols were already open; the Gnutella network spec and eDonkey network spec are already documented, even if the code isn't available.

The big boys generally don't look at the data coming over the wire since it's too much of a hassle. It's far easier if they actually participate in the network and then watch who downloads from them.

If you're really paranoid about it, though, you could engineer some crypto into the networks... assuming you can trust your peers and they agree to the same crypto. Security by obscurity of protocol rarely works.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[eldacan]

Given that mldonkey is here, open-source and implements most of the P2P protocols, this release will not make a big difference.

By the way, mldonkey is really a great project! Its client-server approach is very handy to download in the background and control downloads remotely.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[sameb]

You'd prefer security through obscurity?

Open source clients & protocols, like LimeWire (on Gnutella) have made huge advances in the level of file-sharing, forcing other proprietary apps to play catch-up (and, in this case, probably playing a big part in making Shareaza go open source).

The same logic behind wanting voting machines & encryption schemes to be open source applies to wanting p2p networks & clients as open source.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[GoPlayGo]

Security through obscurity is no security.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnutella is already an open standard

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[alexo]

I tried running mldonkey twice (admittedly, win32 platforms) and both times it killed all internet access on the machine.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

if the wire protocol is open wouldn't it be easier for RIAA/MPAA/USGOV/ISPs to look at the data and block certain traffic/file names to "cover their own ass" or have evidence to prosecute you?

If you're not doing anything wrong, than you have nothing to worry about.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Alwin Henseler]

Sure, P2P apps can be useful, and the platform/OS you run them on shouldn't really matter.

But I can think of at least a couple of reasons to want OSS versions: Think the same reasons we use OSS in the first place. And for another, ridding yourself of that spyware shit that comes with many P2P filesharing progs for W*n***s

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's far easier if they actually participate in the network and then watch who downloads from them.

Wouldn't that make my downloads legal, since I'm downloading with the copyright owner's permission :) ?

What I think many people miss is that you don't get in trouble for downloading, but for uploading. They participate in the network and watch who's making stuff available that they own copyrights to

Just trying to clear up this (very common) misconception...

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that it's not wrong that my dick's in your mouth? OK Sanchez.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[jpmkm]

That is the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on slashdot. I am proud of you.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[ratpack91]

no not really

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[McDutchie]

I'm not sure what the question was, but the answer is no.

Next!

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you shouldn't download P2P apps from the RIAA? ;-)

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Naffer]

I must have been the only person who saw that first line and thought I saw
"You'd prefer security through obesity?"

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

"probably playing a big part in making Shareaza go open source"

Yes, I think you are right. Either they plop a whole bunch of resources trying to compete with open source P2P applications, or they release their project into the open so it can be updated for free.

It was smart of them, and people like Netscape, to open source their software before it was too late for them (i.e. the open source alternatives totally surpassed them and they are left with a useless application).

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny seeing you astroturfing. Here's a disclaimer: LimeWire is a company that sells a shitty Java Gnutella client. Gnutella's "steering body" couldn't mandate wiping its ass, so Mike created Gnutella 2 and LimeWire's owner cried about it.
Well this douche is a LimeWire shill.

Shareaza (developed by one guy) already does more than LimeWire. Yes, that's right, this astroturfing douche couldn't, with his "open source" might, compete with the work of a single man. And his ineptitude had nothing to do with Shareaza becoming free software.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bizarre claim. What if all the bytes of a transmission were XORed with consecutive bytes from Book IV of Paradise Lost? That would be pretty obscure. And, I'd say, because of this, fairly secure.

Re:do we really want OSS P2P apps?

[networkz]

You can monitor any protocol.

1. Run FileSharing app and share something you own the copyright too.
2. Open NetMon tool.
3. Read off list off incoming IP addresses.

No need to know anything about the protocol, but now you can trace every single person!

So...

[MoneyT]

Does this mean the program is about to get better or worse now that everyone can put their hands on the code, because last I used it shareazza was shitty as hell, and wouldn't let me turn off outgoing streams when I wanted to.

Re:So...

[BiggsTheCat]

It means that if you don't like the way it works, the onus is on you to fix it the way you like. You can't just blame the company anymore.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if yours is the general consensus then it's likely the developers took this action to save the project. I hope that isn't the case because most of the projects I've seen take this route end up doing absolutely nothing besides showing a few posts and a 'to do' list in RTF format on a site like SourceForge.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Company"?

It was one guy. Michael Stokes. That's it. It was his pet project that he doesn't have as much time for any more.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

His was not the General consensus. At any given time, about 50k-80k people are using Shareaza. If it was that bad, why would they use it?

The developer (Singular) opened the source because he has a new project, and not as much time to spend improving Shareaza.

Wow

[Nascar_Geek]

And Worst Program Name of the Year goes to: These guys - for "Shareaza"

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that the app itself is just as crappy. I was hoping to hear that Shareaza was to be abandoned and forgotten, but no such luck.

Re:Wow

[DrEldarion]

Which is exactly why they made it open source. Their software sucks so they need help from outsiders.

Re:Wow

[lordDallan]

I always thought the name was a play on Scheherazade, the heroine from "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights".

Kind of like she told a thousand stories, there are a thousand (metaphorically) adventures in P2P downloading awaiting you, oh humble user.

Re:Wow

[tunabomber]

Yeah, but what popular filesharing app DOESN'T have a vomit-inducing moniker?

KaZaA - Might have been good, but then they alternated that case of the letters to make them look all quirky and fun.

Morpheus/Grokster - Embarrassing misuse of hacker lingo.

All the other *ster's - just ripoffs of Napster, which wasn't the greatest name to start with anyways.

WinMX - Oooh! That name is so creative! No other piece of software ever used the Win prefix in its name to denote that it runs on Windows!

eDonkey and its variants - now thats a dumb-"ass" name

Gnutella - named after a hazelnut spread with the approximate taste and consistency of crankcase sludge- with a "GNU" thrown in to keep RMS happy.

KCeasy - Is this a play on the name "Ken Kesey"? Even if it isn't, I believe these people were on acid when they decided they would add their software to the long list of open source apps with cryptic, semi-acronymical names. Yes, I'm talking in your direction, giFT.

Re:Wow

[Evangelion]

Yeah, but every time you start this up, don't you have to take what's left of your library, and go play an entire subgame before you can continue?

Re:Wow

[JabberWokky]

All the other *ster's - just ripoffs of Napster, which wasn't the greatest name to start with anyways.

Yeah, but it was named that because Seth Green was taking a nap when Shawn Fanning stole the source from him (which all fit on a single floppy!).

--
Evan

Re:Wow

[FudgePackinJesus]

eDonkey and its variants - now thats a dumb-"ass" name

That's it... commence beat-down.

Re:Wow

[42forty-two42]

That's not stealing - it's copyright infringement. When will people learn?

Re:Wow

[chgros]

(which all fit on a single floppy!)
How many projects do you have whose source doesn't fit on a floppy??
e.g. : bittorrent source = 230kb (compressed)

Re:Wow

[iceperson]

How do you know he wasn't one of the 6 people who actually bought a 'super" floppy. Those held 100 or 120 Megs I think.

Re:Wow

[julesh]

Their software sucks so they need help from outsiders.

Have you actually used it? I find the user interface about the best of all the available non-spyware systems. It uses less CPU and memory time than most others (which _is_ important for a network server app). It works well on 4 different networks, each of which represents a different philosophy of how a P2P network should work.

I really don't see what people have against it, other than political issues dating back to a bad choice the developer made when he chose the name 'Gnutella 2' for his own improved network, a system that is (at least partially) backward compatible with Gnutella.

Re:Wow

[Jahf]

Nothing is simple. This depends on how the source code was used afterwards.

Making the theoretical assumption that he might never have used the code or distributed it, it is not a crime at all (except perhaps accessing a computer without authorization, probably illegal).

If he distributed it without using it, it is copyright infringement.

If he used the source to create derivative works but did not use the source code directly, it is not copyright infringement. That is theft of intellectual property and possibly a patent violation.

If he used the source code directly in a derivative work then it could be a combination of the above.

Re:Wow

[Rysc]

"Yeah, but what popular filesharing app DOESN'T have a vomit-inducing moniker?"

giFT.

Seriously. It's called "gift" and one of the things you do with it is upload. It's also an acronym for the real name, which is more descriptive. It's easy to remember and appropriate if you think about it.

The only down side was the name clash with the GNU Image-Finding Tool, but they have switched to gnuift, so all is well.

Re:Wow

[adam mcmaster]

Gnutella - named after a hazelnut spread with the approximate taste and consistency of crankcase sludge- with a "GNU" thrown in to keep RMS happy.

Except Gnutella isn't part of the GNU project, so I would imagine it wouldn't make RMS very happy.

Re:Wow

[JabberWokky]

Current project: 1.6megs core source, 677k for core plugin modules (not counting their associated graphics and documentation files). Counting graphics, documentation, source and demo files, it comes to a whopping total of 141megs. That includes all the screenshots for the documentation and such as well.

Of course, if you include all the past versions in the vault, it goes up.

--
Evan

Re:Wow

[Jaysyn]

It was Seth's floppy too.

Jaysyn

Re:Wow

[ElliotLee]

Imation SuperDisk. 120 megs.

Re:Wow

[yarbo]

bittorrent sounds kinda cool

Re:Wow

[Mycroft_VIII]

Yeah, to bad it was the betamax of floppy replacements. I installed one on my brothers computer back when they still existed and before there was a clear winner between it and zip disks. And before cd-r simply ran both down in a dark alley like a cheesy mob/spy movie;)
It had backwards compatability with floppies and more space (120meg vs 100 for zip), just didn't have the marketing. If they'd only advertised more and droped disk prices to just $1.00 or so.... oh well now we've got dvd burners and soon dual layer, then blu ray, then who knows.

Mycroft

Re:Wow

[Dasher42]

You haven't commented on Limewire, and I think the reason is that it's actually a catchy name.

Re:Wow

[n6mod]

Have *you* actually used it?

It's a CPU and memory PIG, and the bandwidth limits have *never* worked for anything but G2.

They need the help...no question about it. I gave up on the unified app thing and went back to Azureus, Acquisition, and eMule.

Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, so finally I can get all the eyecandy and visual effects of Linux mixed with stability and performance of WinXP.

Re:Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

Eyecandy? Right, and I bet you drive a Pontiac Aztek, and like it.

Whatever - you'll get cheap mod points parroting the usual Slashdot lines, though it appears you lack the whorish nature required to add them to your real account.

But mixing one GUI style with another is just plain stupid. It's stupid because it makes a window's title bar difficult to find, so it's bad for the user. And it's stupid because compared to Windows XP, Shareaza looks like ass. Maybe the idea is to expose the ugliness of Linux without requiring a long and boring OS install?

Re:Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

"woooosh"

(sound of the joke flying rigth over your head)

Re:Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the joke you didn't make. The one you'll claim to have made in the absence of any other response. Face it, you're a parrot craving approval.

Nice Thought, but...

[Nuclear Elephant]

Can Windows users really be trusted with source code? I mean look what happened to Windows when that service pack code got out - it became a completely crappy piece of...oh wait...can Windows developers really be trusted with source code?

Re:Nice Thought, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't you be taking a call to help some partial-birth AOL user reconfigure their modem init strings or something? Go away, wannabe.

And Soon...

[Azureflare]

NOT on sourceforge.net. As soon as the DMCA notices arrive at sourceforge, it'll be taken down.

This should be quite interesting to watch. Personally, I stopped using P2P apps because there's nothing I want these days. Also, I got one of those friendly notices from the MPAA, and I realized, that it seriously wasn't worth it.

Any software I want, there's a free alternative for linux. None of the music that is coming out now interests me, so this p2p app is completely unappealing.

Re:And Soon...

[Otto]

Shareaza doesn't do anything illegal. Doesn't contain any copyrighted code. There's no basis for a DMCA notice. It's just a P2P application, like many others that are also on sourceforge.

Re:And Soon...

[danigiri]

Correct me if I'm wrong but..., do the very P2P programs themselves violate any of the DMCA stuff?

I think not, last time I checked giFT was available...

Now that I mention it, wouldn't it be more easier/feasible/comfortable to just write a plugin for giFT? To avoid and get rid of crappy WIND32 UI mannerisms, avoid GUI porting and just fire Poisoned (or whatever) away?

dani++

Re:And Soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like emule and those many bittorrent clients?
They are on sourceforge and not taken down...

Re:And Soon...

[tunabomber]

NOT on sourceforge.net. As soon as the DMCA notices arrive at sourceforge, it'll be taken down.

Yeah, except FreeNet is still alive and kicking on SourceForge, despite all the publicity it's gotten. So is DC++. There are also many other filesharing apps hosted on SF that I won't even take the time to name.
About the only thing Shareaza has to worry about is getting its donation box shutdown by PayPal. -If they plan to have a donation box, that is.

Re:And Soon...

[bigberk]

Any software I want, there's a free alternative for linux. None of the music that is coming out now interests me, so this p2p app is completely unappealing.

I agree with what you say. In the *NIX world, all the software we need is free. I don't need to buy from $corp, in fact I don't even need to steal from $corp. My desktop Linux installation is compatible with my hardware, and works fine.

Pop music has been a big disappointment for me, so now I only listen to my campus radio stations. I don't buy CDs from $industry, and I don't download their music online. The $industry registers lost CD sales as Internet piracy, so they're either ignorant or deceptive. Either way... they're screwed in the long run if many do what I'm doing.

I think this is the appropriate way to have an impact. It's legal, ethical, and even healthy for capitalism.

Re:And Soon...

[Chyeld]

You've obviously never searched for P2P on Sourceforge, have you? HINT: Sharezilla won't be lonely.

Re:And Soon...

[Anenga]

As soon as the DMCA notices arrive at sourceforge, it'll be taken down.

Just like eMule (Or BitTorrent for that matter), right?

Re:And Soon...

[PMcGovern]

If we (SourceForge.net) receive a DMCA request, which doesn't happen often, we begin a process outlined in our Terms of Service. We don't remove the project forever, only for a length of 10 days after the project admin has submitted a DMCA counter-claim.

With the project 'PlayFair', the project admin never submitted a counter-claim...and hence the project was never restored.
BTW: We host many p2p projects on SF.NET today.

Pat-
Pat@sf.net
SourceForge.net

Re:And Soon...

[latroM]

The code is copyrighted but licensed under the GPL. Without copyright there isn't any legal basis on the GPL. There is copyright in every piece of software, be it free or non-free.

Re:And Soon...

[Otto]

Fair enough.. Read that as "copyrighted by anybody other than the author who put it under the GPL in the first place" if you like.

Re:And Soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Also, I got one of those friendly notices from the MPAA, and I realized, that it seriously wasn't worth it... so this p2p app is completely unappealing."

I am sure you feel bad you were caught, but I think it is very limited of you to think P2P is only for copyright infrindgement.

Even if there were no games on it I'd still use it (for free music that artists put out them selves, free software too, and especially porno ;).)

Re:And Soon...

[Jungle guy]

Very unlikely. Two of the most popular downloads on sourceforge.net are P2P applications that run on Windows - eMule and DC++. P2P programs are not ilegal, altough they can be used on unlawfull maners. Like guns.

That's funny

[writertype]

Because every time my friend uses Shareaza, he tells me that there's quite a bit of other content GPLed there too: music, games, movies...

Shareaza 2.0: Open Source

[Compholio]

Not to be cruel, but what makes Shareaza so cool that someone would go to the trouble to port it when we already have gtk-gnutella (http://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/) that supports Shareaza?

Re:Shareaza 2.0: Open Source

[athakur999]

A quick look at gtk-gnutella's page shows that it only supports Gnutella. Shareaza supports EDonkey, BitTorrent, and it's own Gnutella2 as well, and can swarm your download across all four networks.

Great!

[alokeb]

Yet another way of getting your ass busted by RIAA!!

Re:Great!

[MikeCapone]

Or to show the RIAA that their business model is outdated.

Winelib.

[numbski]

I know what everyone's thinking right now.

d00dz! Build it for [Linux|*BSD|OSX]!

Either lots of recoding needs to be done, or if you're REALLY lucky, it'll build using Winelib.

I'd be interested to know if the latter works. ;)

Re:Winelib.

[IamTheRealMike]

No, you can't (easily) build this with WineLib, as it depends on various proprietary things like the MS platform SDK tools (mktypelib/midl), MFC etc. Wine has replacements for some of these things, though not MFC.

There isn't much point to porting things to WineLib though in a case like this. There are only limited places where you may want native UI - for instance the settings window you might want to port to GTK - but you can do that using a DLL meant to be compiled on Linux using Wine then using the MSVC++ produced EXE binaries.

The rest of the GUI appears to be almost totally themed, and I must admit it's very pretty.

BTW Shareaza already works ~ 95% under Wine, there are one or two bugs that would not be hard to fix or work around from inside the app. If anybody wanted to begin making it native they could do. Just ask on wine-devel for details (you should have a good understanding of windows+linux)

Remote access

[xsupergr0verx]

A new, very comprehensive "remote web access" feature allows full remote control of Shareaza's searches, downloads, uploads and networks from any web browser.
That's what I am most excited for. Checking your downloads and searches while out of town for a few days or at school. Very useful indeed

Re:Remote access

[NiteHaqr]

Try the following combination

Linux
SSH
screen
btdownloadcurses

Been doing it for ages........

Re:Remote access

[garcia]

Checking your downloads and searches while out of town for a few days or at school. Very useful indeed.

Mostly for claiming that it was someone else that used your computer to do all that illegal downloading, not you. Right?

Re:Remote access

[xsupergr0verx]

eMule support?

Re:Remote access

[dabadab]

MLDonkey (an E-Donkey 2000 client) had web and a telnet interface for ages.
(The telnet port is bound to localhost, so it is accessible only locally (so it is not a big, gaping sec. hole))

Re:Remote access

[KJE]

There is a great little BitTorrent web client that lets you manage your, uh, Linux ISO downloads from the web:

BTManager.

Re:Remote access

[Sho0tyz]

Try mldonkey. It's had most of these features for ages. Remote access via web or telnet , supports several networks including edonkey/emule, bittorrent, kazaa/fasttrack, soulseek, gnutella, and probably some other obscure ones that I've never used. It's been opensource since day one.

Re:Remote access

[Lotunggim Ginsawat]

Why need 4 when Internet Explorer will do just fine?

API

[KoriaDesevis]

If the API used by P2P apps is open and documentation for it is readily available on the net (e.g. Gnutella protocol), does releasing this app as open source really prove much? The original Gnutella's source is still available and I would think this would be simpler to follow (was more of a simplistic implementation)...

Hey, I won't argue with making it OpenSource, I think it's a positive thing either way. In this case, though, I don't see too much benefit if the goal is to create spinoffs. If the goal is to have community recommendations, that might be a little more beneficial...

Re:API

[betelgeuse-4]

Community bug-fixes would be very helpful. Although Shareaza was a good program when I last used it, there were some problems with the BT implementation.

Re:API

[julesh]

The original Gnutella's source is still available and I would think this would be simpler to follow (was more of a simplistic implementation)...

And it wouldn't connect to anything if you tried to run it today. Gnutella has moved on. The protocol has been refined, extended and revised. Modern Gnutella clients only accept connections from clients that understand the Ultrapeer/leaf node distinction, and prefer connections from clients that implement newer search strategies.

There are open source implementations, but I doubt any are significantly simpler than shareaza's.

Also, shareaza has an excellent user interface, superior in my opinion to every other P2P app I've tried.

In this case, though, I don't see too much benefit if the goal is to create spinoffs. If the goal is to have community recommendations, that might be a little more beneficial...

I think the idea was that the sole original developer was snowed under with feature requests, and he's hoping some other people might step in and take some of the work off him.

I might be trying my hand myself, I have a few ideas on how it can be improved, but there are issues that need to be resolved (e.g. it requires a more recent version of Visual C++ than I have to compile it).

Excellent!

[Otto]

Now, hopefully, someone can fix the whacked out BitTorrent implementation.

It works okay, but the way it uses the temporary files is just wonky. It downloads everything into a temporary file and then splits or copies the file when it's completed downloading. While this is fine in theory, in practice the problem is that the act of the splitting/copying is heavy on drive use, slows the whole system down, and generally is a PITA to deal with. Furthermore this makes it difficult to use other BT clients with the files, if you happen to want to use a different client in the middle of a download. You have to manually split the temp file apart using a separate tool or manually create a temporary file for Shareaza to use for the torrent.

Why it can't use the standard create the files as you go method I don't know. I think it's because he just worked the protocol into raza using the existing codebase like the temporary files.

Re:Excellent!

[Cryogenes]

On the other hand, this method saves HD space. If you start a download of a 1GB file with some other programs, such as emule, a 1 GB temp file is created immediately. Shareaza's method requires only as many bytes of HD space as have been downloaded so far.

Re:Excellent!

[Otto]

True, but at the same time, when it's done downloading, now you need twice as much drive space, at least temporarily, for it to copy/split the temp file into the original file.

Re:Excellent!

[Woy]

On the other hand, this method saves HD space. If you start a download of a 1GB file with some other programs, such as emule, a 1 GB temp file is created immediately. Shareaza's method requires only as many bytes of HD space as have been downloaded so far.

Not necessarily true. In the latest versions of windows (with NTFS5) you can use sparse files, which are files in which large zero-filled parts of the file are not allocated to disk space, hence not "wasting" it before the download ends.

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs-sparse.htm

Re:Excellent!

[tilk]

Not true. Ever heard about sparse files? The file can be 1 GB in size, but use just a few MB of disk space - unused blocks are filled with zeroes and not allocated on HD. That way, you don't need to do any post-processing for completed downloads. And you have the ability to preview incomplete files too. Of course, your filesystem must support sparse files to do this - ext2 and xfs, and probably many other linux filesystems, NTFS 5 can do it too.

Shareaza is great...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used Shareaza for over a year and it has yet to fail me. It's the best winxp gnutella client and has great edonkey and bittorrent support. However, I would strongly suggest that windows users use another client for those services. It's a great program for people who are new to p2p.

This has been a long time coming...

[sgtsanity]

Ever since the first few releases, people have been bugging Mike about releasing Shareaza as an open-source client. I guess he finally caved in. Now to use Shareaza to download... linux distros. Lots of ... linux distros!

Re:This has been a long time coming...

[Zardus]

linux distros. Lots of ... linux distros!

So that's what they're calling porn nowadays... :-)

MLDonkey

[ptaff]

Before you consider trying Shareaza, have a peek at MLDonkey. A nice multi-interface multi-protocol project done in Python that supports all that Shareaza supports and more.

Re:MLDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true, mldonkey is done in Ocaml.

Re:MLDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

In Python ? I thought it was in Ocaml...

Re:MLDonkey

[mmport80]

But the GUI sucks. giFt (with the fastrack plugin) and apollon kick ass.

Re:MLDonkey

[ptaff]

OCaml indeed, my bad.

Must wish unconsciously it was made in Python :)

Re:MLDonkey

[GargoyleMT]

Sure, but MLDonkey isn't usable on at least one of those networks: DirectConnect. Some MLDonkey versions report 11 megabyte shares, but don't let users download the file list. It seems the MLDonkey DC core needs some attention.

Re:MLDonkey

[Turmio]

MLDonkey written in OCAML, not Python.

Re:MLDonkey

[Orion Blastar]

Nice but no native binary Win32 port to download, plus the GUI is an extra download and not as easy to use as Shareaza.

It needs two external libraries to download and compile as well.

I doubt the average Windows User wants to compile a file sharing application and run it as a TSR Daemon and use a web Interface or external GUI interface to it.

Compile it all into one binary package, thow in a setup wizard to update system files, and you might have a deal there.

Re:mlDonkey

[julesh]

mlDonkey is, I'm afraid to say, practically useless. It's hard to install, has a very poor user interface, and while it supports more networks than Shareaza, it generally doesn't support them as well.

Re:MLDonkey

[sirReal.83.]

I've been using MLDonkey for about 9mo now, and I couldn't be happier. It runs as a daemon in the background, so I don't have a fancy GUI repainting constantly while I'm doing other things. There's also a boatload frontends to it, from telnet and web-based (built-in) to Windows-native to GTK+ to KDE. Here is a better summary of the interfaces.

Since the core is separate from the interface, you can administer your core from other hosts. Just run the interface and specify a hostname. For example, multiple people in a household can all share one MLDonkey server and order downloads from their workstations.

And yes, it does support more networks than Shareaza.

Re:mlDonkey

[Sweetshark]

It's hard to install,
True.
has a very poor user interface
Which user interface? I think Sancho is great.
while it supports more networks than Shareaza, it generally doesn't support them as well.
Not in my experience with mldonkey 2.5.16 ...

Re:MLDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you use p2p apps to play with the user interface or to download files? Why is the user interface important at all? So long as you can start and stop downloads, monitor progress and perhaps search for stuff, what else is there for it to do?

Re:MLDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Except OCaml pwns Python.

Re:mlDonkey

[julesh]

Which user interface? I think Sancho is great.

I only looked at the default one. I'll admit I had forgotten that others were available.

hile it supports more networks than Shareaza, it generally doesn't support them as well.
Not in my experience with mldonkey 2.5.16 ...

I can't remember what version I tried, it would have been up-to-date about 9 months ago, but the problems I had with it were that it wouldn't upload files on the G2 network, and didn't seem to be capable of downloading the same file from multiple networks.

Re:mlDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

What's hard about 'emerge mldonkey'?

And 'emerge kmldonkey' for a really sweet GUI that kicks some serious donkey behind?

(Substitute 'emerge' with 'apt-get install' if you're bent that way.)

Re:MLDonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that! And be sure to check out kmldonkey for a *great* GUI!

Re:mlDonkey

[julesh]

Neither of these programs run under windows.

Or, come to mention it, are installed on the version of Linux I use.

Re:MLDonkey

[WWWWolf]

(Huh? giFT with Fasttrack is like Windows with Apache: Something that works beautifully but that doesn't quite fit in the marketed picture =)

Try mldonkey's g2gui (done in Java with Eclipse SWT toolkit). Very slick, beats the hell out of the default GTK+ 1.x GUI. The only problem is that it's slightly slow to start (at least for me). I totally dropped xmule and went with mldonkey after this, there was no excuse not to =)

And mldonkey folks are apparently working on adding support for giFT frontends (Yay! Do searches from giftcurs! *drool*) and also support for OpenFT!

You miss the point

[Azureflare]

Sourceforge isn't going to debate that. If the DMCA notice arrives, they'll shut it down. Do you think they have the money/legal team to defend against lawsuits/questionable issues? I'm sure we all agree that the DMCA/lawsuits shouldn't be used against P2P apps. But we need the money to argue back...

Re:You miss the point

[Otto]

If the DMCA notice arrives...

There's no *basis* upon which they can send a DMCA takedown notice.

A DMCA takedown notice states, under penalty of perjury that the material in question is copyright infringing material and is owned by whomever is sending the notice.

Sending a DMCA notice to someone is a legal document stating that the material you're bitching about is, in fact, owned by you or somebody you represent. If you don't in fact own that material, you just committed perjury and can be held liable for that.

If somebody were so stupid as to send SF a DMCA notice for Shareaza, which is *known* to have been entirely written by this one guy who's putting it out there (he wrote it from scratch, he should know), then they'd be liable for a pretty easy countersuit.

It won't be taken down anytime soon, methinks.

Re:You miss the point

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, Otto just schooled your ass son!

Re:You miss the point

[Alsee]

A DMCA takedown notice states, under penalty of perjury that the material in question is copyright infringing material and is owned by whomever is sending the notice.

NO IT DOES NOT.

For example the Dumbasses at Universal Studios (copyright holders of the movie U-571) did a general search for mpg files with 571 in the name and tossed off a pile of bogus DMCA takedowns such as this:
Title: U-571
Infringement Source: FTP
Infringement Timestamp: 2/22/2003 12:15:00 AM
Infringer Username: None
Infringing Filename: 20571a.mpg
Infringing Filesize: 349336000
Infringers IP Address: 209.237.233.141

And what is 20571a.mpg? It is a PUBLIC DOMAIN 1956 safe driving video. You know, those ultra cheezey highschool driver ed videos.

The takedown notice was totally bogus, but Universal Studios was NOT guilty of perjury. The only part of the notice that is under penalty of perjury is claim to be (or represent) a copyright holder of *something*. Universal Studios truthfully claimed to be the copyright holder of the movie U-571.

There is no 'under penalty of perjury' for the claim that the target of the notice has any connection to said copyright at all. And even if the target of the notice is in fact related to said copyright, there is no 'under penalty of perjury' for the allegation that the target is infringing at all.

The 'penalty of perjury' clause is a meaningless joke. I can state that I am the copyright holder of this post (true, under penalty of perjury) and issue a takedown notice on your post, or even on your wedding photos.

The DMCA was literally written by lawyers employed by the publisher's lobby. This deceptive 'penalty of perjury' clause is but one of *many* absurdly lopsided portions of the DMCA.

-

Also worth pointing out

[asv108]

Limewire 4.0 recently came out, its been a GPLed OSS project for years. The Limewire teams works with the Gnutella Dev community to create open standards, and the limewire servent runs on all major platforms out of the box.

I think its great that the Shareaza dev decided to GPL his code but it does not make up for the gnutella2 fiasco and domain hijack.

Re:Also worth pointing out

[andymar]

I just tried Limewire 4.0, last time I used it is about a year ago. I must say I'm very impressed, it starts faster, a more responsive and cool interface, and downloads seem quicker. Very nice work ! Must..mode myself up. Can I do that ?

Re:Also worth pointing out

[julesh]

Don't be ridiculous. The domain wasn't "hijacked". Nobody owns gnutella, therefore there isn't anybody who had any more right to it than he did.

OK, so he should have been more open with what he was doing. I think he likes to surprise people. That one just didn't work out quite as well as this one should do :)

Re:Also worth pointing out

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, did LimeWire invent Gnutella? No. Did any self-appointed 'community' that never does anything invent Gnutella? No. Did they trademark Gnutella? No.

Mike created a better protocol than Gnutella uses various ideas that had been floating around but weren't going anywhere.

Frankly, all that link shows is how much of a oversized douche LimeWire's owner is.

Small correction

[Anonymous Coward]

don't get me wrong... i am all for OSS. i run linux and mac etc.

Just a little correction. MacOS is not open source or free software.

Kudoes and all; but,...

[Like2Byte]

It's .NET source.

From the vcproj file:

VisualStudioProject
ProjectType="Visual C++"
Version="7.10"
Name="Shareaza" ...

Ugh.

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[CaptainTux]

While I haven't looked at the source yet, the snippet of the project file you posted IS NOT an indication that it is written in .NET. This appears to be a plain old Visual C++ file. Visual C++ != C# or any other .NET language.

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[alexo]

> It's .NET source.

No, it is not.

> VisualStudioProject
> ProjectType="Visual C++"
> Version="7.10"

That's the version of the environment.

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it fun showing all of /. just how stupid you are?

Well I had fun anyway, keep it up!

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[Threni]

>It's .NET source. ...

>Ugh.

Do you have any technical objections to the .NET architecture, or is this just MS bashing?

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, we're bashing m$, don't ruin it!

Re:Kudoes and all; but,...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine I will use Mono to move this to Linux.

Stop modding this funny. I am serious

Azureus

[Fuzzy_Nuts]

The Azureus Java Bit Torrent client allready has an add on for remote webadmin http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php? plugin=webui

WRONG

[Anonymous Coward]

MLDonkey is written in Ocaml! Not in python...

A couple notes

[Tweaker_Phreaker]

Shareaza is heavily dependent on MFC libraries and so it will probably be a while before any ports pop up. For those wondering why anybody would want a port of Shareaza, well it has support for four file sharing protocols (Gnutella, Gnutella 2, ED2K, and Bit Torrent) and can simultaneously download parts of a file from each network as long as it has the needed hashes. So instead of running several clients to download all the files you want from different p2p networks, you can just use one program to do it all.

Re:A couple notes

[Sweetshark]

well it has support for four file sharing protocols (Gnutella, Gnutella 2, ED2K, and Bit Torrent)
add opennap, soulseek, fasttrack (kazaa), directconnect, http, ftp and ssh downloads and you end up with mldonkey - supports multiple GUIs too ...

Re:A couple notes

[Tweaker_Phreaker]

Shareaza's developer(s) are committed to only supporting protocols that are open and support full file hashing so that there aren't a bunch of corrupted files spreading around the network. For that reason the main branch will never support most (if not all) of the protocols you mentioned.

Re:A couple notes

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP? Um. Hi. Shareaza's done that since it started. It's a prereq for being on Gnutella.

MLDonkey, however, has a bunch of pretty big bugs in a lot of its networks, and can't swarm cross-network. Period (Though you forgot overnet, which MLDonkey supports).

SoulSeek is centralized and hosted on a server which is already overloaded, so if Shareaza were to add it, odds are NOBODY could use it.

Re:A couple notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Direct Connect (DC++) supports full-file TTH hashing (same form as G2 - Bitzi modified-Tiger Tree Hash) since 0.307, a feature which was contributed from BlackClaw's BCDC++ and which became stable in DC++ 0.400 (it's in the mainstream source). The latest Reverse Connect actually uses that too, so yes, DC has secure multisourcing.

However, it's serverbased.

Anonymous moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, Spineless

protocol

[hey]

Would be better if they just published the protocol!

Re:protocol

[Ukonu]

The protocol is already published at www.gnutella2.com.
It's a partially done wiki but the majority of the info's there.

If it is based on .Net

[Orion Blastar]

There may be a way to port it using Mono?

Re:I created a Linux port

[bsDaemon]

you know you're a sick bastard, right?

WhoCareZa!

[wardk]

YAP2P?

hope this doesn't divert quality OSS developers from truly useful products.

ps: does this source code come with the all-important built-in hooks to gator?

Re:WhoCareZa!

[CritterNYC]

YAP2P?

hope this doesn't divert quality OSS developers from truly useful products.

ps: does this source code come with the all-important built-in hooks to gator?

Shareaza is a decent multi-protocol P2P program for Windows. It's BitTorrent and Gnutella handling is a bit borked, but hopefully open-sourcing it will help. And it's one of the P2P apps that never included spyware.

Re:WhoCareZa!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shareaza never came with any kind of spyware or ad-ware, if you downloaded it from some other site, then sorry, but it's your own fault. There's some sites trying to sell Shareaza, and others are bundling ad-ware on it.

I don't care that it's BT implementation sucks, I just use another BT client, but it performs really well on Gnucella2 (also supported in Gnucleus and GnucDNA), and ed2k support is pretty good.

not .net

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to let you all know, Shareaza is not a .net program;)

From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[aardwolf204]

Shareaza wants to be the Gaim or Trillian of P2P, however they only support open-spec networks like edonkey, gnutella, and bit-torrent. From the FAQ on their Wiki

Will you add support for Kazaa?
Short answer: No.
Long Answer: Kazaa's network, known as FastTrack, is a closed network and requires hefty licensing fees to have access to. Shareaza is a non-profit/free project and thus can not pay for access to another network. If Shareaza reverse-engineered the network protocol, then it could be shut down because that is illegal.

Basically, Shareaza could either pay thousands upon thousands of dollars a month to connect to FastTrack, or use it illegally and live with the high possibility of being sued by the operators of FastTrack for even more money.

However if it can keep all of my bit torrent downloads in 1 easy to manage window with universal bandwidth management it may be worth it for just that.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[Otto]

However if it can keep all of my bit torrent downloads in 1 easy to manage window with universal bandwidth management it may be worth it for just that.

I like Shareaza. It's swarming across multiple networks is a cool feature. But for BT downloads, it's not quite there yet, although it has potential.

For managing multiple BT downloads, the current app I use is Azureus. Written in Java, but nonetheless a good application with a lot of features. And far, far faster at BT than Shareaza.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[Anonymous Coward]

If having a universal bandwidth cap is all you need, try Azareus (might be mispelled). A bit heavy on the resource use if you have an old machine, but the best bittorrent client I've used so far.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[Chris_Willman]

Don't really have time to research, but last time I checked, The Poisoned Project, an OS X P2P app, supported FastTrack, and it's perfectly free. I doubt they pay for FT licensing.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[42forty-two42]

However if it can keep all of my bit torrent downloads in 1 easy to manage window with universal bandwidth management it may be worth it for just that.

You already can.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[Jameth]

Try mldonkey and Azureus. Either fulfills your needs, both are open source. As of the last version of Azureus, both are stable and fairly fast. (Azureus is in Java, so it will eat a bit more memory that the competition.)

Azureus is kickass for BitTorrent, while MLDonkey allows you to combine every network out there (no, really, it supports DirectConnect, FastTrack, Gnutella, Gnutella2, Soulseek, AudioGalaxy, Open Napster, BitTorrent, eDonkey, and a couple others I cannot recall). MLDonkey also allows itself to be run remotely, and if you set it up right it is ran as a daemon on your own machine, so it keeps going even if you kill the GUI.

Re:From the FAQ: Not compatible with Kazaa.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Azureus w/SafePeer on a PII-400 w/128 MB RAM and a 5400 RPM HD running W98SE, SP1.5, and the latest Sun JRE (1.4.2_04). Runs just as fast on that machine as on faster machines, and it doesn't even come close to taxing the system AFAICT. Just don't pre-allocate HD space, and you won't see any slowdowns on slow machines (although you might want to move the data off the drive and defrag more frequently).

Note for download newbies: On fast machines with fast hard drives, yes, pre-allocate space (to avoid fragmenting your HD). The slight pause you'll see before downloads begin is generally well worth the additional convenience and reliability (aspecially with clients like Azureus).

hardcore

[t_allardyce]

Shareaza is just very very sexy all the way from the loading screen to the speed graphs :P the only annoyance, is that kazaa makes you get used to clicking 'search' from the transfer window and going back to your last search, while on shareaza it makes a new search and you have to click the old search tab.. just a minor thing, and of course source-code means you can change it blah blah :)

Sharezilla vs. KazaaLite

[Leadmagnet]

Why would someone use this instead of KazaaLite?

Re:Sharezilla vs. KazaaLite

[julesh]

Because it's free software, rather than an illegally hacked version of a spyware infested POS that uses a network where only the start of a file is hashed therefore downloads can become corrupted or hijacked easily.

giFT

[Anonymous Coward]

giFT also has a client/server architecture. Try these easy steps:

1) Run giftd.
2) run one of the many clients on many platforms (including web) to attach to the server.
3) ???
4) Profit!

Try TermSvc or VNC

[aardwolf204]

If you are running Windows XP you can open TCP port 3389, or forward it to your machine from your router, and connect to it remotely using remote desktop (Terminal Services). The client can be found here . If you are using another OS or would rather use something more free try VNC. Personally I like Tight-VNC as it offers the ability to add jpeg compression.

I often use either of these to check my Bit Torrent downloads from work. Once you start using it you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. Sometimes I find myself VNC'ing into a computer in the other room on my network at home just because sometimes I'm *that* lazy.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[hattmoward]

Also see UltraVNC. They're making great strides in VNC performance. :)

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[matticus]

You're that lazy? I find myself VNCing to my desktop machine (connected to my TV 3 meters away) when I watch a movie to pause it or turn up the volume from my laptop over wireless so I don't have to get up off the couch.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[tunabomber]

Yeah, VNC/Terminal Services/X forwarding will work, but I'd expect that the remote access protocol that Shareaza uses is lightweight enough such that it could work over a low-bandwidth connection, such as that of a 56k modem or cellphone. For more authenticity I'd love to pirate MP3's from, say, the deck of a sailboat via a Sidekick.

Yarrrgh!

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[Anonymous Coward]

UltraVNC is indispensible to me when running Windows (because its performance is excellent, though stability isn't the best), however you'll find that TightVNC is recommended far more often because UltraVNC only runs on Windows, whereas TightVNC is cross-platform.

Luckily, all VNC servers & clients are [supposed to be designed so that they are] cross-compatible with each other when using basic (or shared) features.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[fostware]

Bah! Terminal Services (RemoteDesktop)is barely usable over 56K.
TightVNC isn't close, even with ssh and/or JPEG compression.

Still, 50K of web page is gonna be faster still :)

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[Destoo]

Try Media Player Classic (also on sourceforge) with web interface turned on.

Works great.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[smyle]

TightVNC isn't close, even with ssh and/or JPEG compression.

Ummm... ssh is for encryption, not compression. It should not have an effect on bandwidth (assuming they're compressing before encrypting).

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[fostware]

SSH handles compression as well, so in this case SSH compression is a valid option for speeding up terminal sessions.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[juhaz]

SSH can have compression but it's pretty generic, and probably does not get already better (and optimized for image data) compressed tightvnc stream any smaller. Quite probably it actually grows it a bit.

Re:Try TermSvc or VNC

[qbert911]

I connect to my work box (sitting on a fat .edu pipe) from my little house in the woods at only 24K.
Using (Tight)VNC I have no problems at all checking my Azureus and Emule progress...

56K barely useable?

(I was going to rant about the poster not having enough patience,
but if I didn't surf the web on a fat pipe at work every day I would be singing a different tune.)

mlDonkey

[Sweetshark]

gtk-gnutella isnt exactly the most powerful p2p-client for linux. I think right now mldonkey is - and mldonkey has more to offer than Shareaza.

No anonymity - therefore useless

[TerryAtWork]

I have to say this again - the RIAA is hiring stooges to go on these things and look for their music. If they find it, they dl it from you, get your IP, run it back to you and sue you.

Any P2P without anonymity is useless.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[Kenja]

"Any P2P without anonymity is useless."

Translation: Any P2P without anonymity makes it possible to get called on my actions. I don't wana break the law if there's a chance I could get caught.

So much for the civil disobedience argument.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[julesh]

There are uses of P2P networks that the RIAA can't complain about, you know.

I, for one, share free & shareware software and public domain fonts.

Plus the networks are used by pron sites to advertise their content.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[tukkayoot]

Any P2P without anonymity is useless.

Hardly. First of all, it's virtually impossible to create a functioning P2P network that offers true anonymity. My understanding is that even Freenet is not truly anonymous (it just offers a few layers of anonymity that could be peeled away if you're determined enough?), and it's also my understanding that Freenet's usability is not up to most peoples' standards (aka, "useless".)

Second, it's not as if everyone who shares music infringing on the RIAA's copyrights gets a lawsuit brought on them. As a percentage, very few do. So if you're willing to accept the risk of the small chance that the RIAA does pick you to sue, then it's not useless.

Third, there's a lot of stuff you can share on these networks besides material copyrighted by members of the RIAA/MPAA, including a tons of infringing and non-infringing stuff.

My P2P client of choice at present is eMule, which doesn't offer a shred of anonymity. I'm not particularly worried about the RIAA and MPAA because I don't download the MPAA's movies and download/share very little of the RIAA's music (mostly older, rarer songs, b-sides and the like... stuff I highly doubt turns up in their searches to catch people for sharing). I share/download a little software via P2P. The bulk of what I download are TV shows (Firefly and Farscape specifically, lately). So, despite eMule's total lack of anonymity, I have to say I find it very useful.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[Anonymous Coward]

However, they can NOT prove that you shared that file with more than 100 people. Unless they themselves hired 100 people to download it. If you only share each file with five other friends, that's well within fair use, is it not?

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[TerryAtWork]

Nope. I got a letter from Rogers who got a letter from the CRIA that I was sharing on Dalnet on IRC and had given a (that is ONE) copy of their music to one of their little spies.

They didn't even approach me, they went straight to my ISP to get me kicked off.

I didn't get kicked off, but I was through with IRC sharing, and later capping made it all moot anyhow. I can hardly WAIT to see these people hammered by the Internet.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[paganizer]

I posted a relatively long post on this farther down the thread, but Freenet is working pretty darn good right now; If you want to see how it's supposed to function, give it a try quick before they bust it with a bad build again.
Using the main access tools - FUQID & FROST - it's searchable, with near instant messaging, and downloading speeds that can sometimes match eMule.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[Peter Eckersley]

The fact that you got a threat letter doesn't mean that you were infringing copyright. The CRIA calims it was infringement, but that doesn't mean a court would agree.

In most countries, sharing even one copy of a file over a p2p network is not fair dealing/fair use. Over IRC, however, if you know the person at the other end, it might be.

The story in Canada is different. The law at this precise moment appears to be that almost all p2p sharing is legal because of the levies you pay on blank CDs, iPods, etc.

Your government is about to change that and make file sharing illegal, unless you do something about it.

Re:No anonymity - therefore useless

[meringuoid]

(it just offers a few layers of anonymity that could be peeled away if you're determined enough?)

You'd have to be really determined. I suppose that if you managed to get GCHQ or NSA to help out you might be able to break Freenet's anonymity, but if you're just a recording industry cartel you don't have a prayer. It's not just a matter of requesting a file and suing whoever gives it to you, because you don't know if they're the originator, or just someone passing along the data you requested from somewhere else in much the same way your ISP does.

mldonkey

[Sweetshark]

mldonkey has it all - and more ...

Re:I created a Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

Please help out a newbie. I tried this and Windows said "the system cannot find the path specified"

Which GUI?

[Sweetshark]

I use the webinterface here, but sancho is a very good mldoney GUI.

And here comes the RIAA's illegal hacking...

[TyrranzzX]

and the MPAA's, and the porn industries, and virus writers. This will be a good test of the viability of open source solutions for real-world security applications; real corporations have real economic incentive to destroy the networks, and now that the source is out and the lock is off, they're sure going to try.

So says the king of tin-foil wearing freaks of nature!

nope

[ragnar]

Shareaza gets second place. The dumbest name has to be SubEthaEdit. I like the program, but I can't recommend it to anyone because I hate to write the name or say it.

ed2k link

[fasura]

ed2k://|file|Shareaza_2.0.0.0.exe|2617678|7e7dca19 e42f10d609e0aeddc7735d69|/

Re:Better question

[techsoldaten]

Oh, how could this be a viable open source project without your support, Overly Critical Guy? People might as well write Shareaza off completely since you're not going to bother.

Your words set me straight. I am on my way to the police right now and will turn myself in for all those nefarious mp3s. Ensuring fair play for copyright owners (and massive corporate profits gained through questionable means) is what being a good corporate consumer is all about.

M

P2P interoperability

[harmonica]

What I care about is interopability.

The first problem you run into when trying to make different networks interoperate for swarming downloads is the fact that they (almost?) all use different hash types and different block sizes (last time I checked).

It would be nice to send several query commands with block hashes to different networks, something like

/GET 9765..9432
/GET ac45..657d
/GET 3a55..65c5
...

and receive those blocks from wherever they're available.

Re:P2P interoperability

[I(rispee_I(reme]

that is exactly what shareaza does.
once a download is running, search for the file. you can add sources from any network shareaza supports (a number which i predict will increase, swiftly.)
also, each network can be turned off with checkboxes, so if you don't like torrent/ed2k/gnutella/g2, you don't have to use them.

Developer Quitting

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason it is being open sourced is because the developer, Mike, is no longer going to develop Shareaza. He is trying to remove all ties from Shareaza for some reason. Unless someone steps up, there is currently no development plan moving forward since there are no developers.

Re:Developer Quitting

[julesh]

I don't think you're right. The statement from him when he released it doesn't suggest this. In fact, he said:

Of course I still have some strong views on which direction Shareaza should be going, and what kind of features I want to add - but now that can be part of a bigger picture, rather than the only picture. [emphasis mine]

Re:Developer Quitting

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think he is giving the domain names to some alpha team members? He has a job now and wants to rid himself of the project.

Different hash methods

[Otto]

Shareaza takes account of this to some degree. It calculates all the various hashes and shares these with other clients on the Gnutella2 network. So if you search for some file and find a client on Gnutella2 with that file, you'll get all the various hashes for that file when you tell it to download it. Then it can search for and download that file across all the networks.

It also works with BitTorrent, to some degree. A lot of recent torrent making utilities have added support for Shareaza's method of inserting these hashes into the torrent itself (it's backwards compatible too), and using raza to download these torrents will let it search for and download from the other networks as well.

It can also do trackerless torrents, although that doesn't get a lot of use as yet. Download a torrent using raza and it'll send a search out on the G2 network for anybody else who happens to be downloading the same torrent, and they'll become BT sources for each other, no tracker needed.

Re:Different hash methods

[harmonica]

Shareaza takes account of this to some degree. It calculates all the various hashes and shares these with other clients on the Gnutella2 network.

Not bad, but this is far from an ideal situation. It wastes resources (CPU time for hash creation, hash value storage). What's worse - I guess nobody looking for a particular file will have all the different hashes, only one set. Only Shareaza users with all plugins switched on can respond correctly to all queries they could theoretically satisfy, which reduces potential uploaders. The nice thing would be to have one standard hash type and block size. There could still be competition among P2P client makers, but interoperability would be good for every user, no matter what their preferred client is.

Re:Remote access - eMule

[Anonymous Coward]

eMule and it's many mods already have a great implementation of this, allowing you to search for files and add new downlaods to the queue all via a web control panel. there is even a cellphone based controller.

mlDonkey has multinet swarming support

[Sweetshark]

Shareaza is, for now, the only application that support multiple network swarming downloads.
Wrong!
A new MLdonkey unstable core has also been released last night, bumping it up to version 2-5-devel-6, featuring full multinet swarming support and lots of other improvements.
source

Try a magnet link instead:

[Otto]

magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:2XPWQISMWDXSCOD4SDXZKXELH7 3KPXG6.YYFG355UD6K7SQVHIVWHSKF6BLDD5BH4W6EPA5Y&dn= Shareaza_2.0.0.0.exe

Magnet links are much better in the long run, as a lot of P2P apps are starting to support them, and they are a more open standard. See here: http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/

Re:Try a magnet link instead:

[Anonymous Coward]

But why link the installer instead of the source?

It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[zymano]

Quit using Kazaa or you'll get busted! The Mpa is living on that network. Try Imesh or ES5 !

Check these links.
Article about Anonymous Filesharing.

Some more program links

Mute program

Gnu filesharing

EarthStation5

Stop the Mpaa ! We have a right to checkout software before we buy.

Re:It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[Anonymous Coward]

Shareaza doesn't use Kazaa.

Re:It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[42forty-two42]

Stop the Mpaa ! We have a right to checkout software before we buy.

A) You don't, and B) the MPAA make movies, not software. You're thinking of the BSA.

Re:It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[jb.hl.com]

Silly rabbit. iMesh is just the FastTrack network under a different name.

Re:It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[Anonymous Coward]

Close, but not quite. iMesh has hooks into FastTrack, but it actually does have its own network.

Re:It's NOT ANONYMOUS Filesharing ! Try these !

[Lord_Dweomer]

Before using EarthStation5, I highly suggest everybody read up about their current state of affairs.

Imesh correction

[zymano]

Don't know if they have anonymous filesharing.

I meant Filetopia. The URL is on one of the links.

good luck.

VNC is better

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC Remote Desktop on XP isn't an actual desktop remote control application in some ways. When you log on your local user is logged off and new Remote Desktop user session is started. So you lose access to any apps that you started when you were at home which is a huge flaw. I want actual access to my Dekstop as I left it, not some new accoutn. You can check if downloads are done but you can't control the apps you left running. That's why I use VNC because when you log on your actually controlling the desktop and are not logged on as a seperate remote user. Also fyi as the other person mentioned UltraVNC pretty much kicks the crap out of all other vnc clients out there including TightVNC which isn't really that tight compared to it. Its and Excellant remote admin tool with nice addons like a Chat client and File Transfer manager.

Re:VNC is better

[aardwolf204]

Windows XP SP2 is supposed to have Mira technology which from what I've read sounds like the terminal service server on Windows Server 2003 where you can have up to two simultanious connections as well as the localhost controlling the machine. This is for those LCD displays that you can undock and use on the couch wirelessly, part thin client, part tablet pc. I've been waiting for this feature for that exact reason. Whenever my girlfriend calls me needing tech support she likes me to use VNC rather than Remote Desktop as she can see what I'm doing and hopefully learn from it.

Link to source..

[Otto]

I just yanked the link right off shareaza.com. Didn't see the source link. But now I do. Here you go:

magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:IN4MI2IMDX5MGQ7JLROBWR34 XD CRX4TX.EZIFTU5AWZIHNIZOEKI2QK6PFP2MVH2LHCU3FZY&dn= Shareaza_Core_2.0.0.0.zip&xs=http://128.241.220.10 /shareaza/Shareaza_Core_2.0.0.0.zip

How can I take this seriously...

[IANAAC]

...What I care about is interopability.

The fact that it currently only runs on one platform pretty much nullifies the statement.

Re:How can I take this seriously...

[aka1nas]

No it just means that it is not available for multiple OSes. Let me put it this way, Shareaza is better enough than the other P2P solutions that it is the sole reason I haven't migrated my file/download server off XP and onto mandrake or debian.

Re:Wow :: the meaning

[r3ddr]

"Shareaza" looks to me like a Romanian slang for "you share";
I wonder if there are any Romanian developers in this project :)

[...I guess so...]

How 'bout a giFT plugin

[karlandtanya]

Instead of yap2pp

Re:How 'bout a giFT plugin

[FrYGuY101]

Because GiFT can't swarm across networks. Shareaza can.

dc++

[Anonymous Coward]

whoe cares about gnutella and co when there is DC++, the only app you ever need for downloading illegal shit :)

I only have one question

[WildBeast]

Does it have pr0n? :)

Complete w/ the spyware?

[FU_Fish]

Does the sourcecode come complete w/ the attached spyware (Gator, et. al.)? I don't want it if I don't get all sorts of worthless junk installed on my computer without my consent!

Re:Complete w/ the spyware?

[julesh]

I've been using shareaza for two years and have never had spyware installed by it. You must be confusing it with something else.

Re:I created a Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised he didn't get a single "Funny" mod.

"Yes! Package Manager (YPM)" put a smile on my face. :) Despite being evil, it's quite clever, assuming it's original. Google seems to think so.

New /. Poll...

[Anonymous Coward]

Worst P2P app name ever?

* Gnutella
* BitTorrent
* Kazaa
* Shareaza
* BearShare
* Napster
* Aimster
* Madster
* Bear Share
* eDonkey 2000
* CowboyNealTellaZaaSter

Re:Better question

[KnacTheMife]

"95% of P2P traffic is illegal piracy..."

so are you saying 5% of P2P traffic is legal piracy?

redunant fuckwit

err...redundant [NT]

[KnacTheMife]

NT

Re:I created a Linux port

[bsDaemon]

everyone who would have moded him, probably wanted 'insightful' and couldn't mod after overwritng their whole disk with the letter 'y'

Encrypt Files

[zymano]

if you do that then how could they sue you ?

Think about it.

Try Filetopia

Re:Encrypt Files

[FrYGuY101]

Uh. Think about this.

You download a file from somebody. They're sending you encrypted data. How do you use it? You decrypt it.

Now. Think harder. RIAA wants to sue Filetopia users. They download a song, decrypt it just like you did, log the IP, move on.

Encryption on a P2P network does two things. Jack, and Shit. All it does is prevent third parties from listening in, and it doesn't even prevent that if somebody is determined enough (Man-in-the-middle attacks).

Re:Encrypt Files

[zymano]

i will move more my p2p to es5 and filetopia.

I am using less and less kazaa networks except for low profile songs.

This is the wrong one to port !!

[Qwavel]

It uses MFC, which is fine for Windows apps, but makes it a poor candidate for cross-platform.

The fact that it is now OS means it should be very easy to make it work with Winelib (if it doesn't already), but that should be the extent of the effort.

If people want a cross-platform file sharing app (that is native to all platforms) then the best choice is probably something written with wxWidgets or GTK2.

Can anyone tell me what half decent, file sharing apps there are that use one of these cross-platform widget sets?

Re:This is the wrong one to port !!

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses MFC, which is fine for Windows apps, but makes it a poor candidate for cross-platform.

But now at least it can be ported to wxWidgets and turned into a cross-platform application.

Can anyone tell me what half decent, file sharing apps there are that use one of these cross-platform widget sets?

Not one of those you mentioned - but at least one P2P program (Limewire) is written in Java and simply runs cross-platform anyway. For the others... well take a look for yourself over on Bitzi.

Re:This is the wrong one to port !!

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/FAQ.html:

What language is BitTorrent written in?
Python. And it uses wxWindows for its GUI.

Shareaza is awesome

[Tobias Luetke]

This is an awesome project. Its coded by one person and one person alone, yet it probably spots the single best userinterface of any application on the win32 platform. It also has some incredibly smart features like trackerless bittorrent downloads (it uses a gnutella message to look for other peers over gnutella network, decentralized bittorrent ! imagine that ! ).

I have been corresponding with the programmer a while ago, since i have written a GUI filesharing tool myself we exchanged post mortems.
Very nice guy.

There are valid uses of P2P. Here are a few...

[Anonymous Coward]

I leave all my favorite OSS installation files shared out to people.

I leave all my warcraft III maps shared out to people.

I leave my music that was created by friends shared out to people.

UI matters

[tepples]

So long as you can start and stop downloads, monitor progress and perhaps search for stuff, what else is there for it to do?

Well, Aunt Tillie can't "start and stop downloads, monitor progress and perhaps search for stuff" using an inferior user interface.

Re:UI matters

[UserGoogol]

1) Don't use the phrase Aunt Tillie. You'll only encourage ESR.
2) He wasn't saying everyone has to use it. He was saying Slashdotters should use it. Software doesn't have to be good for everyone in order to be good.
3) MLDonkey is written in such a way so that the UI is very very seperate from the backend. It's not very hard at all for Some Guy to write a better UI for MLDonkey.

5 percent is legal justification

[tepples]

95% of P2P traffic is illegal piracy, and there is no legal or ethical justification.

The court in MGM v. Grokster (citing Sony v. Universal) found that your 5 percent of substantial non-infringing use is enough legal justification to warrant a judgment for a P2P software publisher.

Re:I created a Linux port

[Anonymous Coward]

Except their hard drives would have been filled with shareaza\n.

Not everybody can work a compiler

[tepples]

Don't use the phrase Aunt Tillie. You'll only encourage ESR.

As opposed to encouraging Mr. Stallman? Who (outside the FSF board) wants that?

He wasn't saying everyone has to use it. He was saying Slashdotters should use it. Software doesn't have to be good for everyone in order to be good.

Not everybody who reads Slashdot has access to a computer containing suitable hardware for a Free operating system. (For instance, I don't. I tried Mandrake 9.2, and X wouldn't find my ATI Radeon card in accelerated mode. In addition, Microtek Scanmaker 4800 series scanners are listed as completely unsupported in SANE.) Not everybody who reads Slashdot can program in a commonly compiled language.

It's not very hard at all for Some Guy to write a better UI for MLDonkey.

But it is rather hard for Some User to find an existing GUI for his platform. Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click GUIs, and apart from the official G2GUI (version 0.1), none of the seven listed clients advertises itself as being "for Windows." And still, where is the official or semi-official Win32 binary of the core? Go to mldonkey.org, click English, click downloads, click Core Binaries, and they're all for GNU/Linux, MorphOS, or FreeBSD.

Is it only me...

[c0ldfusi0n]

that's not inspired with the name of their primary download site (stealthspy.net)? If it'd be me, living in a world where P2P apps have previously fallen to the dark side (spywares and such), i wouldn't exactly host the setup file of my P2P app. But that's just me.

and it now can be remote controlled as a service..

[TeddyR]

and it now can be remote controlled as a service..

A new feature in RAZA2.0.0 is that you can now login to the application remotely and manage your downloads/uploads and do searches... :-)

Not Me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Imonna Live Forever!

Re:and it now can be remote controlled as a servic

[GeekDork]

So we're finally almost back to the good old Audiogalaxy times where you could feed your agent from anywhere via the AG server? Hell, that was the best sharing solution I've ever seen. Have a client/server running on your machine somewhere, and if you thought of something you'd like, you just got to the next terminal and queued it. By the time you were home, it was done.

That would IMO also be a good thing for a legal shop to have, but I guess they have their heads too far up their asses to actually implement something useful that doesn't screw the customer.

Wanna bet?

[Kjella]

It's not just a matter of requesting a file and suing whoever gives it to you, because you don't know if they're the originator, or just someone passing along the data you requested from somewhere else in much the same way your ISP does.

Ah except the ISP is protected by the Common Carrier clause, which you are not. Your behavior is quite ISP-like, but several requirements are lacking (registered contact address+++). Without that protection, ISPs and the like would be toast.

They can sue the makers of the tools (ever noticed none of them are on US soil?), what makes you think they're above suing people passing them a file or even a chunk of a file? Nothing, that's what. There's simply millions of easier and more mainstream targets to pick from, but if need be they'll sue people just running a freenet node.

Kjella

Re:Better question

[OverkillTASF]

Not 95% of MY traffic. There are plenty of places for legal links for files! My personal favorite use... distributing game patches, modifications, trailers, and all that jazz! If you're as hung up on contributing to legal uses for P2P technologies, check out http://GamePhilez.us , or one of the (many?) other sites with similar intentions.