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eXeem Lite Public Beta Released
TheKarateMaster writes "Just days after the release of eXeem Open Beta comes eXeem lite 0.19 Public Beta. Much like with KaZaA, the official version of eXeem comes chock full of spy/adware -- specifically, cydoor. eXeem lite is spyware free and free of bloat -- and free. Version .20, which should fix a few minor bugs, is expected 'in next coming days.' (read: soon)"
Which is only good news as the poliferation of spyware is just a waste of everyones time and and invasion of privacy.
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the official version of eXeem comes chock full of spy/adware -- specifically, cydoor
Can this above comment be explained? I downloaded and installed eXeem, it did not appear to include any spyware whatsoever. It certainly did not come packaged with Cydoor. What's the deal here?
Replace "Better call my tech boy genius neighbor!" with "Better call my ISP! They can fix anything! They will fix anything!"
Seriously. People call their ISP tech support whenever their PC gets slow, regardless if it's slow when they're actually using the Internet or not.
Anyways, back on topic. I downloaded the last beta lite version of eXeem, and I couldn't find a damn thing I wanted.
Surpnova asked for donations yes, but eXeem is unrelated to suprnova for all but publicity purposes - it was an existing development project which latched on to the recent publicity surrounding SUprnova (with its apparent approval).
I love Azureus because it is the most complete program ever done for Bittorrent but it's written in Java and with 500 MBytes of RAM, my computer crawls to death (I'm not trolling, it is the reality :(
In my language(danish, but it's probably the same n swedish and norwegian) eXeem is pronounced 'eksem' - which means 'Rash'.
Seems like they chose an appropiate name.
One of BitTorrent's strengths was that it was very difficult to spoof content. IE - If you trusted the tracker, you knew exactly what you were downloading. Given eXeem's new "everyone's a tracker" marketing, is it now vulnerable to spoofing? If a user posts a malicious file under an alternate name, what's to prevent everyone from downloading it? Are there safeguards to protect the network from being flooded with invalid files?
Functionally, how is eXeem different from other P2P clients? My idea of what goes on is; You do a search across all files shared on the eXeem network, pick a file you like, and start downloading from peers. That's roughly the same thing with Kazaa, etc. What's the advantage of using eXeem?
but the base BT protocol (and its implementation) was the revolutionary thing.
BT doesn't do anything that other P2P protocols like eDonkey/eMule already have been doing for years.
The revolutionary (social) idea was the centralized trackers, and if you take those away you have Just Another P2P App.
Often shady versions can be more reliable than legit stuff. How the thing is, for most people, this is in the same category as OSS. It's realeased by a group of people on the net, who knows their motivations? People love to scream about the safety of OSS but 99.0% of the people doing the screaming are doing it with their head in a bag since they either lack the ability to check the source, or just don't take the time. They are taking it on faith that the source is clean of bad shit, and that the binary on the site is a faithful compile of that source.
Well, of course, you would tell me that you don't have to check it, because others have. Lots of other people have taken the time to check it carefully, so you don't have to worry. If there was something nasty in the source, they'd tell the world, and they've verified that the binaries are faithful productions of that code.
Same thing applies here. People will install it, check it with virus scanners and anti-spyware utilities. Run an install logger that will tell you every file it installs and where, every registry change, etc. Then they'll look at that to see if there's any spyware. If not, they'll declare it to be ok. As with the OSS, it's a bunch of random strangers you don't know telling you it's ok. At a certian point, you fighure they can't all be lying.
However you don't know for sure any more with OSS than you do with something like this. In both cases you are relying on experts you'll never meet telling you something you can't personally verify. I mean I trust people when they tell me Linux is safe. I trust that there aren't any backdoors. But how do I really know? Maybe there's a backdoor, along with a note in the source to come join the cabal that rules the Earth, and that's why no one has revealed it. Hell it could be that there's a backdoor in the compiler (http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/) that exists only in the binary form, never in source. You don't really KNOW.
So, as with many things in computers and online, you put your faith in the masses. You assume that competent people will check this out and will tell the truth about it. You assume if there is spyware in it, word will spread and you'll know. You assume it to be safe because it hasn't been proved unsafe. Bad method, maybe, but we use it all the time.