Last month Sharman Networks’ plans on a paid KaZaA were revealed here on Zeropaid. Here is a word of warning for those planning to crack it, and also some other interesting information on KaZaA.
According to a well informed source, Sharman is planning to release “Kazaa Plus” this month (October), priced 15 USD. It was planned for release last month, but was for some reason delayed. As claimed before, it would allow the user to click on the “Search More” button in Kazaa (which allows you to find more results, presumably from other supernodes) 15 times, as opposed to only 1 time in the free version, and of course would have no ads.
But more importantly, this source claims that a company called GX Tech created a security code for Kazaa Plus that would make it hard, and dangerous, to hack. KaZaA Plus should be able to detect SoftICE and other hacking tools running on the user’s system, and report to Sharman’s servers… It is therefore recommended to take precautions if ever trying to mess with Kazaa Plus, including making sure you’re not connected to the internet.
But there’s more into it. Each time someone purchases Kazaa Plus online, a downloadable installation file would be compiled on the run, on Sharman’s servers, with unique information (which would be connected with your supplied information when purchasing KPlus) inside Kazaa Plus’ executable. So even if someone manages to hack and distribute KPlus, the hacked version would contain a unique ID of the original buyer, and would allow Sharman to track him down (wether they do anything with this or not I can’t tell, but they probably could).
Now, I don’t know how far this information is true, but Sharman is probably getting serious with this. And you should also beware of what exactly you write here in Zeropaid – Sharman are probably reading these very lines, like anything else on this website.
Some other things on Kazaa: Sharman are still paying FastTrack for getting new versions of the FastTrack protocol, which is written in VC++ and is planned to move to .NET sometime in the future.
But Sharman doesn’t have access to the FastTrack code. They hardly have any information on how FastTrack works at all. This means that the only people who control the 3 million users wide network are still the two Dutch guys who first invented it.
And here’s something I couldn’t figure out – If you have Kazaa (or Kazaa Lite) v2, you’ll find in your registry a CacheHost (and also CachePort and CacheDiscoveryTime) entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareKazaaTransfer . It wasn’t there in previous versions… What are those Cache hosts?
And now for the last thing. Chip of Diet KaZaA lately released DietK 2.0 betas. The first beta was available on the DietK.com forums for a short time, and I have downloaded it then, but quickly Chip was notified that Sharman Networks is watching his website, and wants to find out how his program works in order to block its usage. That’s why Chip decided to choose by himself who should be trusted as a beta tester and only give the beta versions to these guys, until Kazaa Plus is released (for those of you who forgot, Chip agreed that this version of DietK would be completely free when released, there would be no need to “donate” to get all its features).
The second beta was released to those who were first to show up on a chat channel published in the forums (Chip probably assumed that only those who view the DietK forums a lot, would find that out by time). I don’t have the second beta as I didn’t get there in time. However, I did hear of people distributing those beta releases to the public.
So I just want to say to people who consider distributing closed DietK beta – Don’t do that! We don’t want DietK to be blocked in future versions of Kazaa, do we? I understand that many of you want your network to be as free to use as possible, but since FastTrack is a closed network which prosecutes anyone who tries to reveal how it works, those who know how to crack it must try to keep a low profile for now.
Anyways, this got me thinking – do you think some kind of an open knowledge base of all the “secrets” and tricks already known to a few people about Kazaa and FastTrack should be published?
Consider this might mean those tricks would be fixed or removed by Sharman and FastTrack, but they might also give a start point for developers who wish to try and enhance the p2p experience of 3 million users.
