Slashdot Mirror
1.6 Million PCs Track Popular P2P Clients
Hodejo1 writes "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all. Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News joined forces to analyze 1,661,688 PCs to track 152 unique P2P clients quarterly from September 2006 to September 2007. The result is a definitive list of the most popular P2P software in use. Topping the list by a healthy margin is LimeWire. 'In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month. With regards to market share — counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems — LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%'. Meanwhile, uTorrent has made huge gains during this period soaring into second place and posing a genuine challenge to LimeWire."
from the article:
"this technology is so easy a grandmother could use it"
As a 48 yo grandmother, and C programmer, I find that offensive.
An RIAA sponsored P2P called smash-n-grab? Or, stop-n-rob? Perhaps we could have one that really tears it with download-for-dollars?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
The story says that some folks tracked usage of P2P clients by analyzing 1.6 million PCs. It does NOT say that 1.6 million PCs track popular P2P clients, whatever that might mean.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
As a recent college grad (read: pirate), I'm amazed by the percentage of people still using crap like LimeWire and eMule. I would've guessed most people have evolved to uTorrent at this point. But, when you need to download a copy of "Achy Breaky Heart", I guess LimeWire is, sadly, your best option.
More than just which P2P app is most popular, I would like to get a report on which P2P app is the safest. Which one runs the lowest risk of being a trojan, spyware, or otherwise malware?
Limewire is popular. That's great. Do I want to install it?
Well now we know that 36.40% of the polled PCs are infected with a real ecosystem of viruses.
For one, these p2p clients tend to be breeding grounds for bad things. Aside from the RIAA and everything going on with the music industry as it is, the clients themselves are (if i am not mistaken) data miners, resource whores, and virus huggers (not to be confused with tree huggers).
Google (for me anyway) has been far more useful:
-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" mp3 "Your Title Here"
There are many more search parameters you could use, but that does the trick.
Something witty.
The huge gains are going to be in RIAA lawsuits. Do your part to keep uTorrent under he radar - install limewire today.
I'm amazed anyone is still using the Gnutella network. Have there been any improvements to it recently? Last I used it, probably 5 years ago, it was awfully slow. Both in searching and downloading, even edonkey was faster. Plus, it didn't seem useful for much other than individual mp3s. Again, on edonkey you could still find rars of full albums.
Of course, private trackers that focus on a certain niche of content (full albums, classic games, textbooks, etc) with quality control and ratios to ensure seeding are far and away the best. There's not a P2P app anywhere that can compare with what Oink offered. But torrents seem really underrepresented on this list. Limewire is on 36% of PCs surveyed, but only 28% of PCs surveyed had any bittorrent client at all? What gives?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
FTS: "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all."
In this case, the data set is very large, but still of dubious relevance.
The data was collected from the 1.6 million computers by an anti-malware software product I've never heard of, using techniques that would get it itself labeled malware by more reputable anti-malware products. A product that rates only 3 out of 5 stars at Download.com. From a company that rolled over when Gator sued them for calling their spyware "spyware".
Unless there is data to support the assumption that the rubes who blindly install and run PC Pitstop software on their Windows boxes are a representative sampling of the computer user community as a whole, I don't see how this announcement contains any meaningful findings at all.
I fine both Limewire and eMule to be far better than KaZaa, which I'm actually kind of amazed people are still using. Then again, people use internet forums for help in their personal lives.
Did the people who ran these programs realize they were reporting their P2P software to a survey? How many of them ran multiple programs and got reported more than once? I don't think they kind of users that would run these reporting programs would be the most sophisticated software pirates. That flaws the entire survey.
A HUGE thumbs-up for amule and Kad. I disable the ED2K network entirely.
I've never been able to find solutions manuals, reliably, anywhere other than on eMule.
"The Headline is Garbage"
Yes, and maybe the story is an advertisement. It would be much better if Slashdot editors provided a statement with every story that no one at their company took money to post the story.
I looked at the Limewire web site and saw what I think is an attempt at manipulation of people who don't have enough technical knowledge to evaluate the usefulness of their product.
Anyhow, the Azureus web site says it is "the most popular bittorrent client". Azureus is open source and free, and, in my experience, works just fine.
Something is fishy about Slashdot's Limewire story. Mmmm. Lime with fish. Except this is apparently rotten fish.
Read the article. Nobody reported their P2P software. PCPit stop recorded records of what applications were installed on any of the programs that they scanned. Pcpitstop.com offers free malware scanning and somewhere in there in fine print is something about recording your applications. Also they tried in varoius ways to detect unique programs so no matter how many times you ran it, it would only count as one.
I would say more accurately that it poses a major challenge to the RIAA/MPAA then to LimeWire, which is hardly going to suffer from the success of another P2P client/network.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
PCPitstop.com recorded this information by offereing free malware scans. The very first lines at their web site are "Is your PC acting sluggish? Are strange windows inexplicably popping up on your screen?" If you have Limewire installed you probably fit that category dead on. Of course they're going to use their free services to try and remedy it. People with uTorrent don't necessarily have that problem so no point to going there.. besides they already run anti-malware apps they got via torrents anyway.
Those 1.6million PCs are only those that suffered problems that wanted that free scan. It basically just tells me that 17.8% of all PCs with problems had Limewire installed.
The best news is to find out that your own P2P app isn't even listed. That might put you below the litigation radar threshold.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sept-07:
40.5% Gnutella
28.5% Bittorent
04.6% Ares
04.0% eDonkey
01.5% FastTrack
00.9% Pando
I have Acquisition (Limewire), I haven't used it in 3 years, but it's on my Mac.
The network Limewire uses is dead. And I mean DEAD. Search for anything, you will get spammed with results that are not what you searched for. It's been this way for over a year now.
As they say on late-night infomercials, "There's more!"
From the Limewire web site about "LimeWire Extended PRO": "New! Extend your PRO benefits! Get PRO for 1 year for only $34.95! Best Value"
Quotes:
"LimeWire PRO get turbo-charged" The free version is not "turbo-charged"? What is turbo-charged, in the case of a bittorrent client? Instead of blowing air, they blow compressed air?
"Fastest P2P downloads on the planet"
"Downloads from multiple hosts" What? What does that mean? That it's a bittorrent client?
"More Reliable Downloads"
"Connections to more sources"
I find it completely ridiculous that Shareaza isn't even on the list. It's completely inaccurate. This data can't be right! I thought it'd be #3 at least. It's the best one I've ever used and I know it's super popular. I mean I know a lot of really stupid people use Limewire but Bearshare and Kazaa beat Shareaza? That's simply incorrect.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Hmm... So there is a bit of sampling error here. Who uses PCPit stop, what demographic? I'm guessing these numbers are based on a rather limited demographic.
/. and finding that 50% of computer users run linux, and use firefox. It isn't generalizable to the general population.
Like scanning
If they could scan a truly random sample of computer users I would be impressed. And frightened.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Dont talk about Usenet...
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
uTorrent and Limewire are two very different beasts.
One is a BitTorrent client, the other is a self-contained P2P ecosystem. It's way easier for a norm to type something into Limewire's built-in search, than to register with a dozen BT trackers and figure out seed/leech ratios, upload quotas, ISP throttling/encryption and all those other fun things.
The fact that uTorrent is gaining so-called market share vs Limewire just means there are a lot of new BitTorrent users. It doesn't mean Limewire is losing much, nor is it at risk. I dread trying to explain BT to non-techies...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The important thing to look at here is why did Azureus lose so many users to uTorrent? The easy answer is that Azureus lost it's way. One day, I upgraded my client and it was this huge, bloated... THING.
I gave it about 15 minutes before I sadly shook my head, deleted it and installed uTorrent. It's a shame b/c there was a lot of things I liked about Azureus - especially those things having to do with individual privilege controls.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I feel sorry for the poor schmucks still using heavy p2p programs that are littered with spyware.
Proof that one in 3 people are complete idiots.
Bit Torrent you dumbasses, google it.
No point saying that here. Everyone knows about it. You'll have to post that info on forums like "What's Britney Up To?" or some crap like that.
I'm really surprised no one has mentioned Soulseek yet. I use it daily, and there's loads of obscure stuff on it. Sure, you can only download from one person at a time, the search function only checks file names and so on, but it's way ahead of Limewire IMO. Never tried eMule though.
Wow, I am surprised that gnutella is still popular. I remember using gnut client in Linux many years ago (early 2000s).
For kicks, I installed Mutella in my Debian box since gnut is outdated and seems to be dead. Now, I seem to be missing servers to connect. What are good sources to get servers to connect to these days? I want to see how good of files to find...
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Shareaza is crap. Everyone knows its crap.
its not even good crap that you might keep around to fill one little need now and then but otherwise hate because its crap.
its just crap.
However they do have a fanbase much like apple. rabid and totally blind to anything bad.
So they have done something right. But their program is still crap.
Some time ago I tried LimeWire - and gave up on it soon, because at least half of all search results were viruses disguised using the keywords that I was looking for. Even searching for nonsense such as saffsdfsdsfdafdsa produced long lists of so-called hits.
So I'd say there is a trojan, virus, botnet or whatever out there that can speak the LimeWire/GnuTella protocol and will try to infect you.
I'm guessing that this study did not look at the actual files that were offered. And what they "measured" was probably a botnet, instead of a supposedly popular tool.
I liked my next sig a lot better
There is no such program as "uTorrent". "mTorrent" would be closer to the mark. However, I cannot spell the name of the program correctly here because Slashdot strips out Greek letters like Mu, no matter how I try to input them.
That pretty screwed up! Isn't this news for nerds? Don't nerds use formulae with such symbols? Isn't Mu necessary as an SI prefix?
"...don't use IE to look at porn or download illigal stuff/cracks/ etc, and youll genrally be fine."
Yeah, tell that to my wife's 83 year old mother who is constantly getting her laptop infected, and she'll kick you ass all over town.
By the way, what dream world do you live in where you actually believe the foolish statement you made?
And I really think your silly question should have been, "Why am I under the impression that Firefox users think that "their" browser is the best".
I've used Firefox since it's original name (been so long, can't recall), and I've never touted it as the best browser, but it certainly has many useful extensions that the others lack.
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
You don't talk about ******!
Non-Microsoft-Windows users
1) generally don't have malware problems, and
2) can't run PCPitstop's malware.
My favorite (btdownloadcurses) din't even make the list!
My favorite runs on the Linux command prompt.
No locking up the X server.
Simple as can be, I can run multiple torrents by opening more command prompts.
It looks like the most popular torrent software is Windows compatible. Go figure.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Limewire? More like Crimewire. haha