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Exeem "Successor" to Suprnova Announced

After the demise of Suprnova, hype has risen over Exeem, the supposed heir apparent to the popular BitTorrent index. Today on Novastream, Sloncek announced it officially, but to me his announcement raised more questions than it did answers. Since the official exeem.com website still isn't up, I've got a few notes below. Thanks to several users on irc.suprnova.org, and Sloncek himself for answering my questions.

First, Exeem really isn't an extension of Suprnova as the hype might have you believe: the connection between the two seems more marketing than anything else. Sloncek has been hired to promote their product as the heir apparent to his popular website, but his involvement really seems to be almost entirely PR. It'll work obviously: my headline on this story mentions Suprnova, and so will hundreds of websites around the world in the coming days. "Yet another p2p app" would not create anywhere near the waves that "Successor to Suprnova Announced" will. I hope that people judge exeem by its own merits and not by its (clever) marketing.

Second, Exeem is pretty much what was rumored earlier: a blending of the tracker, the BitTorrent client, and decentralized indexing. It's Windows only. It's in beta now, and will be out at some indeterminate date in the future. It also has a rating and commenting system which appears to be somewhat rudimentary. It's unclear to me if the rating system will be as useless as other attempts, and I think this is the critical thing: Suprnova succeeded because the content available on it was verified and trustworthy. Suprnova was as much the work of a few dozen editors as it was a list of torrent URLs. So far no other p2p system has achieved that level of accuracy. Exeem supports magnet sites which is a start, but not exactly p2p either. And did I mention that it's adware?

Third, there's a mystery company. Someone is paying Sloncek. He won't say who, but there's a history in the p2p world of secretive development. Since Exeem is to be adware, someday it will have a billing address, which means the legal issues faced by predecessors like Napster and Kazaa will be forthcoming, which is of course why we have a mystery company that Sloncek won't talk about in the first place. We definitely haven't heard the last of this.

Personally I was hoping for more: source code and cross platform compatibility never hurts. These are the things that made BitTorrent a huge success. I guess I was hoping for a new protocol instead of just another Kazaa. I guess I was hoping for a monumental leap, and instead Exeem to be a more incremental step. I'm sure we'll learn more in the coming weeks.

13 of 608 comments (clear)

  1. Torrent trackers on Freenet? by Tet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can't help but wonder if BitTorrent is the application that finally pushes people towards Freenet. That would appear to be the obvious way of decentralizing it, without requiring platform specific software, and providing anonymity for both producers and consumers in the process.

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    1. Re:Torrent trackers on Freenet? by user9918277462 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Unfortunately Freenet is an incredibly inefficient method of data transfer. Remember it was designed with security and anonymity as top priorities, performance comes as a distant third.

      I was hoping for a more innovative p2p app, perhaps combining the advantages of VPN-type systems like WASTE or DirectConnect with the swarming efficiency of BitTorrent. Such a system would truly take the world by storm.

      At the same time it seemed obvious that Exeem wouldn't be such a system. From rumors circulating after the start of the closed beta (not a good sign to begin with) it became apparent that Exeem was just another closed-source proprietary network. It's really unfortunate but not at all surprising.

    2. Re:Torrent trackers on Freenet? by jr87 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      their are several problems with freenet...#1 it's slow as hell (at least when I tried it) #2 it has become a haven for kiddie pr0n #3 you become a node holding said kiddie pr0n because you have no control over what you cache.... I think freenet is a good thing overall...but I cannot justify being a node on freenet because I do not feel right helping traffic kiddie pr0n... now if a mass exodus occured that marginalized these people I would feel better...but atm their is a helluva lot of kiddie pr0n on their...

    3. Re:Torrent trackers on Freenet? by uberslack · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you surf the web? Do you use IRC or any chat service? What exactly does bittorrent, a web or IRC server or client do to make sure that no one is using it to distribute child porn? What does any technology actively do to make sure it isn't being used to distribute child porn? *crickets* That's what I thought.

      You are free to have your beliefs, but that does't mean that they aren't absurd.

      You are right about the speed issues with Freenet though; I'll give you that.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid does not mean that the world is not full of assholes.
  2. Why would I care? by Alcimedes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So it's Windows only and adware. This is nothing like Suprnova.

    The parent article is a Troll.

  3. ironic by cRueLio · · Score: 5, Funny

    you can already find cracked copies of the latest version on *gasp* bittorrent sites :)

  4. Interview MP3 by Z303 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Link to a torrent of interview as an MP3.

  5. Anonymous bittorrent already exists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    With all due respect to the Freenet team, they have done a lot of good work, but the network isn't designed for things like bittorrent. What you need is a low-latency network like TOR or i2p. With that said, anonymous Bittorrent already exists, its available to work on the i2p anonymous network. Just go to the i2p website, , install the software and then click on this: There are already bittorrent trackers on the i2p network. Why this hasn't been on slashdot is beyond me.

    1. Re:Anonymous bittorrent already exists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      Damn does the markup suck on slashdot. Anyway, here are the URLS:

      http://www.i2p.net

      And once you have i2p running, then you want to go to this i2p site:

      http://duck.i2p/i2p-bt/

  6. beta screen shots by typhoonius · · Score: 5, Informative
  7. Anonymous BitTorrent is already available. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've seen /.'ers suggesting freenet as possible {il,}legal content distribution method. I'd like to disagree with this methodology.

    There is already a working way to have anonymous BitTorrent - using Onion Routing protocol. It's great for privacy concerned netizens and if more people set up Tor Servers, Tor would gain critical mass needed to support both tracker AND data connections for BT.

    Most of torrent clients supports Tor out-of-the-box, as tor is nothing but socks proxy for your programs. Torifying various applications is really a snap and there is a detailed guide on how to make Azureus BT client work flawlessly with Tor (see section 2.2 Totally Anonymous BitTorrent).

    Currently, the only concern for the Tor authors is the fact, that the Tor network may not be able to handle the amounts of traffic, bittorent is able to generate.
    However, if each one of you would set up a server with couple of kbps spare bandwidth, the tor network would immediately start scaling up.

    Since BT relies on multiple (slow) transmissions occuring at the same time to create the "torrent effect", even if all the transmissions pick different routes trough tor network (taking slight performance hit), the overall performance of BT would remain unchanged.

    There is also a very important aspect of tor. It allows you to create hidden services. Basically they are accesible via bogus URLs (like LKbalkbsflKflasbd.onion). The anonymity of the server is assured. More about hidden services at this address.

    So, before you let the *oids start reinventing the wheel (and charge an arm and a leg for it), do your bloody homework and use what's already there :)

    PS. tor is free software.

  8. EXEEM SUCKS (READ) by Space_Soldier · · Score: 5, Informative

    eXeem is a piece of shit. Not only that it will have adaware and spyware, it is also a "lock-in". You will only be able to use it on SuprNova. They have modified the torrent file. It is missing a lot of dictionaries ("key -> value"), and dictionaries that should have been subdictionaries start directly in the file. For example "files" is not in "info" it starts with it directly. This torrent changes were unnecessary. Also, the "announce" and "announce-list" are missing. eXeem has a hardcoded url of a tracker of all the peers on eXeem. The original seeder of a torrent acts as a tracker (so SuprNova won't have to host torrents), but eXeem is in no way decentralized because of the tracker that keeps in contact all the eXeem users (it does not care about torrents, just eXeem users). So, all you have to do is to kill the main server, and all the users of exeem will be disconnected (this happened when suprnova died). THIS IS WORSE THAN THE WAY TORRENTS ACT NOW. EXEEM IS HYPE AND A WAY TO MAKE MONEY. IT SUCKS! I think the best way to decentralized BitTorrent, is to have trackers that are decentralized IRC server style. If you people want something decentralized and a little bit of BitTorrent, get G2 (Gnutella2) and add BitTorrent's tit-for-tat to it.

  9. sold out ? by eyegee88 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, the "mighty" owner of suprnova closed his website.
    Very nice.

    He advocates this new technology.

    Who said the MPAA/RIAA did not stuff him some "funds" to provide the people some nice software
    (ie: adware) that cleanly informs those nice
    associations with the ip address of every peer/seeder. Think about it.

    who did say the new software does not harvest ip
    addresses and nicely hands em over to some place
    accessible to the MPAA/RIAA ?

    I do not know about you, but I am convinced some
    donated funds from MPAA/RIAA could change the mind
    of any site owner to join the " side"

    just 0.02 euro