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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
... 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
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.
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.
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.
Thats brave! I'd just buy the flippin cd's rather than risk a $15,000 fine!
Actually I have, you presumptuous jackass. When they release;
- Seasons 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Frasier;
- The Daily Show complete run from 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005;
- Scrubs seasons 2, 3 and 4;
- The West Wing seasons 5 and 6;
- the entire run of Top Gear;
- the entire run of The Wonder Years;
- the entire run of Parker Lewis Can't Lose;
- not to mention about a dozen Japanese dorama series
on DVD, then be sure to let me know; I'll buy them.
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