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BitTorrent's Loss is eDonkey's Gain?
MrAndrews writes "According to this BBC article, users in South Korea, Italy, Germany and Spain are using BitTorrent less frequently these days, after lawsuits by the movie industry. However: "While the use of BitTorrent has fallen, file sharers have moved to an alternative network called eDonkey". "
I was under the impression that eDonkey is what everybody uses for file sharing these days, and that BitTorrent was mostly used for software distribution (Free and Open Source, mostly).
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
shhhhhh
I moved from bittorrent to IRC. Now that's progress!
You can't handle the truth.
... that the movie industry moguls had played Whack-a-Mole at the amusement parks before and learned something. Guess not.
...the last 4 years? That sounds if nobody ever heard of the ed2k network - now known as eMule / Kademlia...
Confused, the MPAA and RIAA have begun massively suing farms all across America.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
One might say that bit torrent is losing ground, but in what sense? The number of GB moving back and forth? the number of times you use it everyday for same purpose? Files found on bit torrent tend to be of higher quality and larger size compared to those found in eDonkey network? eDonkey network has files from 1K to several gigs. And torrent files also usually tend to be more legit than those found in eDonkey (as in falsely named, not always but sometimes and corrupt). So it could be that people are using torrents to download a movie using one step, compared to in eDonkey them having to download several copies at a time or simply redownloading since the first copy that was downloaded was not the right one. And admit it, the process for downloading a movie in both these networks are simple, but eDonkey is defintly easier (I don't think so, but many others do) so wouldn't the majority simply choose the easier one?
What I don't get is why the post doesn't provide link to some information about eDonkey network and some clients to use. I know it can be found on the Net within seconds, but why not make the article more useful.
I would hardly call being the #1 filesharing network a "gain", with the ??AA's being all lawsuity.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Let me get this straight - these people are moving ON to edonkey/emule? Most people who do filesharing started off on eDonkey and then switched to Bittorrent for the speeds it offered.
At least, that was the impression I came to after I tried to use eDonkey for a while. After a half dozen or so downloads, I finally said screw it and went to Blockbuster.
I figure, in a way, I'm doing Blockbuster a favor. I typically watch movies only once or twice, so I'm just taking their "No Late Fees" policy to the extreme. They are pretty clear that the return refers to the rental, and doesn't terminate your right to view. So I figure as long as I don't distribute I can maintain a moral ambiguity long enough to justify ripping the movie and returning it, on time, to watch when it's more convenient. That way, unlike with a movie purchase, they have the hard copy to rent to someone else, and it's back in the store the day. As long as I don't distribute, it seems to be exactly the same as established precedent law on time shifting.
Flawed logic, perhaps, but a nifty bit of justification I'd say.
Never confuse volume with power.
If they keep *telling* the various special interest groups what we're using to rape their respective industries, no fucking wonder there are new rounds of lawsuits every time large groups of people jump from one sinking ship to another...
Bastard media, be on our side for once.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Often thought of as a means of evading the anti-piracy wings of corporations and groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, PeerGuardian offers little actual protection against the threat of prosecution. Users of Bittorrent often tout the application as a means of protection, but it offers little more than a false sense of security. Whilst anti-piracy organisations and groups will not be able to connect to peers or seeds using PeerGuardian, these peers and seeds are still broadcasting their IP addresses for anyone, including anti-piracy groups, to see.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian
PeerGuardian 1.x was known to 'occasionally' balloon with its CPU usage from time to time, which was a shame. PeerGuardian2 is just fine though; been running it for at least six months (iirc) and never had it higher than 1%.
Use bittorrent for popular, fast downloads. Once the torrent gets old, nobody is seeding anymore, and it dies off. That's when you fire up your preferred eDonkey client and go browsing. Things tend to persist a hell of a lot longer out there. That bullshit about the files being polluted and corrupted is a myth, as well. Since you can preview them instantly as they are downloaded, it's easy to spot the crap files if you manage to find any.
Of course, now you need to be patient. This is where most people fail. It may take you a solid 90 days to download something old or obscure from eDonkey. It is not an instant-gratification network. Just let the sucker run and it'll come down in its own good time. Let the client software worry about it. I've fished out all manner of content from there that was impossible to find on bittorrent, usenet, or IRC. Old Mike Oldfield concerts, a mint copy of Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis, dozens of old TV shows... average time to download something like that is around seven days. The torrents of the old Dr. Who TV series (every single episode, 26 seasons) took nearly three months. It was around 212GB of data, of course.
You may want to make sure your firewall can handle a couple thousand connections. If your p2p experience is always sucking hind tit, that might be the cause of your problems. That little Linksys router isn't capable of doing it. Well, maybe if you put linux on it, but why bother when distros like m0n0wall, ipcop, and smoothwall exist? It helps loads if you prioritize ACK, DNS, and any small packets.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
Why does slashdot keep letting the cat out of the bag? The first rule of P2P is don't talk about P2P.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
I downloaded so many of them, that virtually spent all my time burning them to CDs and DVDs.
Eventually I realized that I had no time left to actually watch any of it, so I deleted all my collection.
Now I have more time, but no movies to watch.
IMO is the whole tracker/seed deal. This part should have been made transparent to the point that users didn;t have to see or understand it. I personally never saw it as being that good of a system in the first place. It is not elegant nor does it lend itself to people using the software as it is intended.
The whole BT thing is a good idea for software releases and large files people are looking to download from a single site, say I go to a distro site and have a choice of FTP/HTTP/BT but to use it for P2P is just useless in my eyes.
The whole Zen "the interface is no interface" thing was a little unsettling too as I had no idea that my downloads were being slowed by my firewall back when BT first came out until I used a version that showed that there was a problem.
I still think there is a place for BT and software like it, but not for P2P filesharing. As much as I hate to admit it, I like having n00bs and clueless users on my system so I can access stuff easier and faster. BT was more for the tech savvy and they tend to be smart enough/greedy to never seed a download unless they happened to walk away from a download that completed.
I still pine for the days when Kazaa lite was not full of viruses/spyware/fake files and instead was a great easy quick system to get exactly what you wanted ASAP.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
to stop illegal downloading is to uninvent the wheel. Make ANY device that can digitize analog data illegal unless they are properly licensed by a *IAA authorized service provider. No home movies. No home recording, unless it is to analog media. In a sense make digitzers like stills. Anyone can make Whisky, its easy, unless the equipment to do so is illegal.
I have little sympathy for the *IAA. Do you think they gave us CD/DVDs because they gave us better quality, or because they increased profit? The fact that they were too miopic to realise that the same technologies that were dropping their bottom line could enable consumers to replace them is karmic.
The creators of optical media suing bittorrent et al, is like the great ship builders suing boeing and airbus. It shouldn't be allowed to happen. Artists need to stop looking for recording contracts and start looking for marketting contracts. You can still make money in popular arts, its just you can't expect to make money by selling digital facsimilies of that art.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
IRC is also slow and a pain in the ass - too interactive (they frown at automation), too many different ways of doing things and you have to deal with a bunch of pricks that want you to be grateful that you part of their little circle of piracy - too juvenile. Does anyone really still think, "OOH! look at me, I'm a PIRATE!"??
Gnutella is very nice for MP3s and small files - the biggest you want here is a music video perhaps at 50megs or so, there doesn't seem to be much large content like movies. With the swarming ability that the clients have these days, downloading can be AMAZINGLY fast - why does eDonkey get more attention than Gnutella? Everyone should put large content files on Gnutella - do it, now! ;) gtk-gnutella is a nice linux client. It's not as pretty as Limewire, but nicer on the ram, etc.
Bittorrent is the second fastest way that I've seen for downloading large content files, even DVD collections, say, of emulator games come rather quickly, usually approaching 60% of top download speed or more once it throttles up. The downside is the scrutiny at the moment, made worse by the fact that you must leave your download open - that is, you need to keep your client running even after you download the file to share with others - not doing so will get you "punished" in various ways by the sites offering this stuff, sometimes by not allowing you back. This also means that for a large DVD type download, you have 5 gigs of data on your drive much longer than you want - at least it's a problem for me. Further, unless you want to run the client forever, you need to set your upload rate pretty high. On my 1.2Ghz machine, bittorrent takes a toll in resources as well...
The fastest way to download something is via the newsgroups. Yup, the oldest way is still in some cases the best (it's not P2P, but it fits in my rant anyway). The downside here is for good news service, you have to pay, while the other methods are free.
Still, with a service like Easynews, you get 3 week retentions - meaning, a "post" stays alive for 3 weeks. Advances like par and nzb make this much easier and more reliable than it has been - it's almost too easy now. An nzb file points to specific articles in specific groups. For anyone familiar with this process, with nzb, you can avoid the old norms of subscribing to groups, downloading headers, searching for content, marking your choices, and telling it to download. Web pages such as binsearch.info allow you to use a web interface to select your content, and will then generate an nzb file for you.
With a broadband cable connection, you can download DVD sized content in about 2 and a half hours from the groups. Some ISPs still come with news feeds, but they usually aren't worth bothering with. My ISP has retentions lasting just a few hours, with a 1gig/month download limit.
So, IMHO, use gnutella for MP3s, short popular video clips/music videos and other smaller files (since there isn't much large content to be found). For anything larger, use the newsgroups if you have a good news feed. If not, try your luck with bittorrent.
Use the donkey only if you can't find it anywhere else and if speed isn't a problem. Oh, and avoid downloading from IRC...
Of course, I only download legal content :) Legal MP3 files, or copies of files I already own, or emulator ROMS of games I already own, or DVD collections of abandoned ROMs, Linux distributions, or tv shows that I already pay my Cable provider for, etc.
dahlek (will you squirm when you are pecked
If you are used to FAST bittorrent edonkey/emule is going to dissapoint you. For the most popular files it can take DAYS sometimes WEEKS to get a large file in the 100s of megabytes.
Also...that network is swamped with script bots that download EVERYTHING. I shared out a folder I had with OLD device drivers and out of date software...files that nobody should want. They were being downloaded in a short amount of time which leads me to believe that automated software probably contributes to the slowness.
107 is the four factor test. Again, I'm not a legal genious, so I'll refer generously to Stanford and the EFF for help in this matter.
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Personal use is clearly non-commercial.
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
In this case, the work is creative which is a point for their side.
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
In my case, it's a whole copy of the work, another point for their side, however it's a reduced quality copy which is a point for my side.
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
With Blockbuster's particular business model, I've already demonstrated it's actually MORE profitable for them to have me rent a movie rip it in 20 minutes and return it. As for future sales loss, that's not relevant to this argument because of a crucial factor - I delete them after I've watched them. The Supreme Court (Universal City Studios v. Sony Corp., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)) ruled that a time shifted copy does not deprive them of revenue, and that was for a broadcast, not even a paid rental as in my case. I firmly believe that the courts would uphold my arguement that I rented the media that it's on but bought a license to watch the movie. In fact, Blockbuster's terms and conditions does not stipulate how many times you may watch a movie that you've rented, it merely stipulates how long you can keep the media. I've time-shifted the right to watch the movie until after the media is returned, but that doesn't negate my right to watch it, and the Supreme Court upheld my right to time shift it.
Never confuse volume with power.