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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.
Well now we know that 36.40% of the polled PCs are infected with a real ecosystem of viruses.
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!
I always thought gnutella was crap, but I totally disagree with your labelling of emule. Emule is fantastic for obscure content, and content that is too old to be seeded on any torrent.
Also TFA mentions the emule network as edonkey, ignoring the distributed kad network which is an opensource triumph, that further helps to locate rare content.
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.
"Pirate schools"?! Do you go to HAAAAARRRRRRRRvard?
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
Fourthed. It's like having a library full of all the world's media at your fingertips. Any book. Any song. Any movie. Anything, from anywhen. It's there. A couple of years ago I found old BBC episodes of "The Tripods". Totally camp. Aired in the '80's!!
I didn't download anything, and I never have, however. Because that's wrong and will destroy civilization as we know it.
.there is enough of everything for everyone.