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Kazaa Loses P2P Crown To Edonkey
I(rispee_I(reme writes "According to the network population stats at slyck, FastTrack (home of Kazaa) is no longer the most populous filesharing network. Top honors now belong to edonkey, a network of German origins. (Most edonkey users connect with emule, a gpl client for Windows)."
If you're in a hurry, try something else.
I was looking for PS2 Linux a while ago, and the only place I could
find it was on eDonkey. 10-15 people shared it, so I started the
download, and went out to buy a USB keyboard and mouse. After letting
eDonkey run for about 1 week, my brand new and unused keyboard+mouse
had collected enough dust, so I gave up and uninstalled it in frustration.
The same day I found a guy on a DC++ Hub that had the two DVD iso's online.
Downloaded them in a couple of hours, and had the thing installed on my PS2
a little later the same evening.
eDonkey may have lots of users and files, but MAAAN it's slow!
I'm not sure why the link goes to slyck.com instead of the actual news story, but the direct link is here
This is bad news, I've come to associate with edonkey as having zillions of files - but no one sharing them. That's why it's slower than pondwater, even on dialup. Now that word is spreading, this terrible quality will only deteriorate.
ed2k won't be #1 for long.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
My all time favourite client for accessing eDonkey, Gnutella, Gnutella 2 and Bitorrents, all in one shiney app is Shareaza. This is one great client that I've had wonderful success with. I recommend it as easy to use and very powerful.
Haven't heard of Kazaa Lite Resurrection?
now, as far as speed, like many people have mentioned, it can be slow. I'm sure I'm over simplifying, but think of ed2k the same as BitTorrent, only instead of the queueing of bandwidth being for only one single file, it is for your entire list of files. It can take quite a long time to complete downloads, but knowing that you're going to get a nice, uncorrupted file makes it worthwhile.
eMule, the open source variant, contains many enhancements over the standard eDonkey client, and there are numerous mods in circulation. this can include Fakelist databases, ip to country checking, and the ability to tweak your bandwidth usage. there is also a web-based and mobile (cell phone) client built in so you can monitor your eMule from anywhere.
It should be noted that there is a Legal Content Database hosted by the project, containing links to freeware/shareware and public domain stuff.
look at the number at the bottom on the suprnova.org website:
181473 seeded torrents (295138 total), 2594211 seeds & 4043961 downloaders (6638172 peers), on 1317 active trackers
I have no issues with emule speed; just open up your upload pipe and it should go quick enough. I normaly cap my download pipe in an hour or so.
The main reason I use eDonkey2000? ed2k links. You can click on a link that has a MD5 hash of the file you want from an HTML file and it immediately places the download in your eDonkey queue without having you to search for the file yourself. It's great for finding file releases that have a lot of sources, thereby quickening your download.
Currently FastTrack and eDonkey are the two top peer to peer networks. In almost every conceivable way, eDonkey is better than FastTrack. The reason FastTrack is popular at all is because it was the first decentralized network to pick up steam after the demise of Napster. They quickly rose to 4 million users, far above every other network.
But after decentralization, no new features were added. Instead, lots and lots and lots of spyware was bundled into the Kazaa Client by Sharman Networks inc. Kazaa Lite, the popular non-spyware altnerative, was shut down by this same company. Several DMCA notices were issued to sites hosting Kazaa Lite.
In the long run, a better client will supercede a poorer client once word of mouth gets around. And eDonkey far exceeds Kazaa with these features:
Hashing (fingerprinting, prevents fake files)
Swarming downloads
ed2k link sites (fingerprint information on specific files in the form of html code)
No spyware (for eMule)
Lots of different clients to choose from
In short, Sharman killed off their network by spending way too much time generating ad revenue, and not using that revenue to improve their client. There have been no important feature additions in years. This day has been long time coming.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
industries will start targeting ed2k and its associated clients next
That's already happening. I've seen several notices from MPAA and BSA regarding people using edonkey (I get copies of the abuse email). Usually for entire movies (600+ MB).
No sig
eMule is perfectly compatible with the edonkey network (at least in my experience).
It only enforces the sharing of data, as you are limited to download at maximum 5x faster than your upload and you are priority based, which means that you have a unique ID and when you upload to someone, you gain points. Hence, the more you uploaded, the more points you have (those credits are only local with the persons you uploaded to) and the higher the priority in those people's queues.
I upload more than i DL (DSL. I have spare bandwidth...) so my downloads are quite fast.
And overnet CANNOT be shut down. The creators have 0 control over it and it does not have ANY server. Even if the guys programming it were to stop tomorrow, the network would live. Nothing can close it except limiting the clients' traffic. To close edonkey, you would already need to close ALL the servers... good luck with that! (although the bigger ones are certainly easy targets)
eDonkey started it all. eMule took the eDonkey idea and made a better compatible open source client. the eDonkey devs (MetaMachine?) got upset that they could no longer make money from the ads in their old closed source client, or sell an ad-free version as they're still offering. at some point MM came out with "hybrid" which added a serverless network and various other things, including Horde, which is like swarming with smaller chunks IIRC. this was after eMule go popular i think. anyway, the two sides have pretty much been at war, although most of its on the ed2k side, and i think the eDonkey devs have been trying to break compatibility with eMule, favour their own clients, etc. this fails because eMule has over ~90% of the "market" and many many developers. there are also other clients which can connect to the network, including mods of eMule, but they can't do much damage as few people use them. I may have got some details wrong but i think this is roughly right.
Someone actually involved will probably see this and explain in much more detail, i haven't really cared too much.
Suggest you start using eMule, it's great and the developers are good honest folk who seem to be interested only in technical excellence (just read the changelog!).
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
Why Shareaza?
- Gnutella support
- Gnutella2 support
- Edonkey2000 support
- BitTorrent support
- Free!
- No Spyware.
- Open Source. Really!
Where do I get it? Download (via Sourceforge:UMN)You're talking about Freenet, which is still around, but unpopular because it's dreadfully slow (among other reasons). You can't "encrypt" IP addresses because the program has to know what the actual IP address is for all the computers it's talking to; otherwise it couldn't reach them. The only solution is to proxy content through several hosts, making it impossible to track which host originated the content. That's part of what makes Freenet so slow.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
eDonkey is definitely not about speed. Bittorrent usually end up with much faster downloads. I consider it as my "archive" ressource. It's way easier to find old and obscure files on that than on bittorrent sites.
One feature I particularly like about eMule is that it supports both server-based operation and decentralized Kademlia (a kind of distributed hash table) searching. The two systems work together nicely and usually end up with more sources than one one of them.
Yes, forgot about Freenet, but that is not actually the one I was thinking about. I remember somthing that looked a lot like Kazaa or Emule (in ms windows), but was supposed to include encryption and private IPs. Can't remember the name for the sake of my life. The little I saw, it actually looked pretty decent, only problem was lack of "material".
But your explanation of why it hasn't caught on seems to apply to my home made theories on the drawbacks. Thanks for clearing that up.
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The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
>eD2k rewards people for uploading, but seems to >reward people for sitting in queue better.
it rewards for not capping your upload in the software, but if you use an outgoing traffic limiting thing at the router the software knowns no different. i get the same dl speed if i'm giving my full 40k up (ack) or limiting it to 5k~10k
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Bittorrent is no better than vanilla FTP for "file sharing"! You can't hide your illegal activity behind it because it only works best if you PUBLISH [it better be legal!]what you're offering for download...exactly opposite of Kazzaa & such. Bittorrent isn't designed with "privacy" features...nor is it designed to catalog what you want to share. It's purly a distribution mechanism to ease the bandwidth issues... i.e. it's designed so the legal publishers can distribute files w/o paying enourmous bandwidth fees...think of it as "paying" for the download by sharing with the next person...
Bittorrent is to allow sites with large files to BENIFIT from the /. effect!!!
A lot of people don't realize you have to punch one or two holes in your firewall in order for Edonkey to work at good speeds. It's true that Edonkey is generally slow, but I think the impression that it is "ass-slow" comes from having to configure Edonkey to work through firewalls or suffer grave consequences.
Once Edonkey has you recognized as "Available", then speeds will start to pick up. Yea, you won't get 200kb/sec. downloads, but you'll get 30k/sec or so, and will be able to find stuff you can't normally find on Kazaa and other networks.
I use Edonkey in a set-it-and-forget-it way.
Now that Edonkey has a bittorrent plug-in, things are even better. Bittorrent is still (IMO) the fastest way to get files (if you can find a good torrent), but Edonkey does something very nice by allowing you to download a file from Bittorrent peers AND Edonkey peers simultaneously... that's pretty neat! I'd like it if they develop that plug-in even further.
A couple of things you need to understand about the technology before you immediately jump out and declare it to be "slow".
Firstly, you need to open several ports on your firewall to ensure you have a "highid", which is, for our purposes here, a measure of your connectivity to the network and therefore your usefulness as an uploader.
Secondly, you must understand that eMule uses a "credit" system. Your place on other people's queue is not simply determined on a first come first served basis. You continually jostle with other people in queues for the upload/download position. Some of the key helpers for getting a good spot in the queue: Good credit rating. If you upload a lot of stuff to the network, you will have good credit and you will quickly reach the front of the queue. Your connection speed, especially uploads, will help you. Whether you are uploading to the person you are downloading from will help. Whether you have a high-id or not (high-id's are very important!).
eDonkey/mule is a long term download program, and should not be confused with bittorrent or DCC. Once you've been online for a while with eDonkey, you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
eDonkey was targetted a few months ago, if you remember Sharereactor. It was similiar to Suprnova, except instead of hosting torrents it hosted just an ed2k link with a filename and the hash. Aparently posting the hash is an infringement.
Learn something new.
Filetopia
It's the application I was thinking of. It seems to be operated by a company and not released as open source. It uses "bouncers", which I read as proxys for privacy. It also has encryption and compression built in. Looks pretty nice at a glance, but I guess it still would have the mentioned speed problems, if you value your privacy. And the privacy is, afaict, dependent of who is running the proxy/bouncer you are using.
Not quite the holy grail yet, but...
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The combined human population is enough to feed every living tiger for app. 28000 years.
Make sure your firewall is setup properly (if you don't have the right ports forwarded it's sloooow).
eMule is not the fastest thing out there but because of the unique file ID's and the comments function I am always downloading exactly what I al looking for. Also, I never get file errors on big ISO's etc.
Overall though I prefer Torrent but the variety of stuff isn't there.
see what happens when you let anyone grab the code
Look for the string "// don't be a lamer" (that's from memory) in the emule source. That's where you can set your upload/download ratio.
I used eMule for a long time (yeah, with a mod as I mentioned above) and it was good. BitTorrent, though, is way better. I have to share and I get quick results. Sharing is good, but when you send out 10x what you bring in then you get PO'd and edit the source as I mentioned above.
Trolling is a art,
You get higher priority to download from users that you're uploading to. The system is set up so that people trade file chunks with each other that each person is missing. Uploading more gives you overall higher priority to download.
The "5-10 times" is highly exaggerated. Usually, I'm uploading about 1/3 to 1/2 of what I'm downloading, which is right for this network.
eDonkey has always been the premiere place to download large binaries. You just don't find good 800+MB files on Kazaa or anything else. Often, you can determine the validity of a file on eMule just by doing a search and sorting by availability. The highest availability is always (in every case I've tried) exactly what I'm looking for. eMule even highlights high availability hashes with blue.
Shareaza clients (rather their users, but I have heard Shareaza is set not to share by default) usually don't follow accepted P2P sharing standards so many bit torrent sites I know of will snub/ban you for using that client. FYI, get a real BT client and share. Also, other P2P clients like iMesh that also used the FastTrack network were sued by the RIAA and settled even though the law has come out in favor of decentralized networks. However the caving in (plus the virus filled, mislabeled and low amount of seeded files on FastTrack) has driven most old users of those apps to the newer BT clients. I am quite happy with my BT so I won't be rushing off to emule or edonkey anytime soon ;D
If you're on a Mac, you'll be using mlDonkey. I don't think it has these nice things, however. Contrary to the story submitter, I'd recommend aMule for Linux. I think it has those nice eMule features. Some time in the not-so-distant future they promise to have a working OS X version too.
Lalala
I think that you are thinking about this http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/technicalDetails.s html
I try it from time to time, but it lacks content. That will change when it becomes more popular. There was a story about mute on shashdot before.
Set up your broadband router to prioritize regular or ToS MINIMIZE_DELAY packets above MAXIMIZE_THROUGHPUT packets, run mldonkey EGID mldonkey, and set your box to reclassify stuff from EGID mldonkey programs as MAXIMIZE_THROUGHPUT.
You can use your full outbound connection, keep it constantly saturated, and it won't affect web browsing or gaming performance at all.
May we never see th
Users also operate the servers on Edonkey2000 and KaZaA, although there appears to be less community-organisation and restriction surrounding their networks. With Edonkey2000, the program remains connect whenever you are online, so you may be vulnerable to hackers, as the program will not operate from behind a firewall, but there is no spyware. KaZaA on the other hand has built in spyware, which will deter many potential users.
Edonkey2000 is a unique peer-to-peer sharer in its transfer system. Files are hash identified and transferred in "chunks". This means the donkey can identify identical files even if they have been renamed, increasing the potential of downloading the entire file. Because of the hash identification files can be uploaded before they have completed downloading - the "chunks" that have been received are immediately shared. Files propagate quickly over the donkey network, and the automatic resume feature has high success even after a reboot. One thing to remember though - check there is room on your incoming folder drive for the entire file - you can only change it by completing or cancelling all your downloads, and you don't want to miss the last few chunks of your file. Although this ingenious file sharing system means the donkey is reliable for getting entire files the downloads are very slow - you have to have a lot of patience.
Direct Connect is a slow downloader as well. Users with a lot of files to share can get access to servers restricted to broadband users, which speeds transfers up a little, but one again you don't wouldn't want to be on a hurry. Direct Connect users a direct file transfer system and also has an auto-resume feature which completes file downloading from any user with the file. Direct Connect doesn't uniquely identify files and will not recognise variations in file names like Edonkey2000. On-the-ball users can rename their file and continue downloading from a new source if they identify it by the file size with a name variation.
KaZaA downloads files from various sources at the same time, to speed up the transfer rate. The software downloads a file from several sources and the pieces are reassembled into a single file on the receiver's drive. Like Direct Connect and the donkey, KaZaA has a reliable resume feature if a transfer is interrupted, however like Direct Connect resumes will only recognise sources with identical file names. Users report KaZaA is one of the speedier peer-to-peer sharers, but once again, patience is in order, and broadband users will get the most from this program.
All three programs have search features. Edonkey2000 has quick searches, and also offers an availability search, although the value of this is questionable. Direct Connect users can search particular hubs for material and although some users report it is time consuming going from hub to hub, the program does have an option to search the entire network. Direct Connect's sloppy interface has made this feature hard to find for some users. KaZaA has various search options and users report it is quick and reliable. Download times are shown with search results. KaZaA will also allow you to search for files not only by name, but by any keyword found in the stored description of the file. When files
AdsJunction.com Ad Network
Some times it does... this mule must have forgot that Mules can't have babies...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2399773.stm
I just finished downloading an obscure cartoon "The fantastic adventures of unico.avi". It took almost three weeks, but it was not available ANYWHERE else (torrent links were busted as well). eDonkey reported only 3 sources, but over time, new sources popped on to give me critical bits of the file.
Now, I see that it is widley available and I think the eDonkey method of distributing files is to be credited for this. I personally leave my client running overnight just to repay those that helped me get that file.
I'm probably not making sense... overtired and sick. My point is: eDonkey is very good - patience can be very rewarding with this client.
It has seldom been pointed out, but there is a good advantage coming with this slowness:
Files can easily live on the net without anyone having the entire file on their harddrive!
Many odd and unusual files can be retrievable for years after anybody stopped keeping a share of them. As long as at least 10-20 people are trying to download it, there is a fair chance that they together have all the needed parts and they will stay on long enough for new people to join in and start downloading so no part of the file disappears completely.
Sure, this is true for any smart P2P network that can start sharing before download completes, but with faster networks such as BitTorrent you much easier get incomplete files since everybody is downloading/sharing it for a much shorter time, decreasing the likelihood that the downloads overlap sufficiently to keep the file alive.
That isn't to say that eMule doesn't have incomplete files, but they are usually the result of the original provider having taken them away too soon, before all the parts of the file had spread enough.
I have found the eDonkey client better then emule, mlDonkey and shareaza. With the bittorrent, fasttrack, ftp, http and g1 plugin the speeds you get are vastly better. As well I always like overnet better then the edonkey network and I never found kad that good.
A few things about newsgroups:
1. You have to pay. While it is rather irrational compared to the time you save, many people spend more time (=money) pirating stuff than it is actually worth. It is like the people driving half-way across the country to an "opening sale" or to use their coupon.
2. Newsgroups per se is easy enough. Binaries in newsgroups are still full of annoying details, like mis-id'd multi-parts that flood the group, and newbies don't understand to join anyway. In addition, you typically need several other programs (a PAR/PAR2 program + rar comes to mind) in order to use those files.
3. There's typically no "fire-and-forget" solution. You download the parts, realize you don't have enough PAR files, grab some more, try again etc. If there's not enough PARs, noone knows you're still missing parts and would like someone to help you out unless you actively posts. Whereas on most P2P networks, you put it on download, and it comes out when it is done, sooner or later.
4. Peers don't fill your missing pieces. P2P is full of people that did nothing to share their files, while on newsgroups you're completely dependend on someone to actively repost. If you were offline or your server had a hic-up or something, you're likely to have missed it. In my experience, full reposts are rare.
5. News servers keep a permanent log of all your POSTS. Yes, all of them, including the so-called "anonymous" ones. Usually, that means they don't log what you read. Personally, I don't feel too comfortable with that, considering they also have my billing info.
6. You're completely limited to what is pushed out, unless you actively request something to be posted. While P2P networks in general have a large variety of old and new files, newsgroups are mostly concerned with new files. This is natural, as they are designed for one-to-many transfers, but it also means it is difficult to get something just you want.
--
Not to get anyone down, I use newsgroups myself (actually I cancelled last month, different story), but they are far from ideal.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings