It didn’t take long, but it seems that the eMule development team has released a new version of eMule.
Sometimes, it takes a long time for a new version of eMule to be released. Other times, it takes only a couple of short months. In this case, it only took two months for a new version of eMule to be released.
“Barely two and a half months have passed,” writes the eMule development team, “and yet another new eMule version is on the horizon. 0.49b continues to complete the agenda of its predecessor in the 0.49 series. This means further optimizations for Kad and more important immunity against recently researched routing attacks, several improvements of the GUI for Vista users, a new UPnP implementation, easier connecting to Kad for new users and fixing of an important bug which slipped into the last version.”
The updates fixes numerous security issues and bugs, but maintains the major improvements from the previous version. A changelog was also released. Here are some of the highlights:
- Added a new search method option “Automatic” which lets eMule choose which search method to use. eMule will select either Servers (Local) or Kad, based on which network we are connected to and some other indicators if connected to both networks.
- Implemented a special nodes.dat version, which is more suited for mass distribution without causing significant additional traffic for the included nodes. This hopefully allows us to add a nodes.dat to the installer, so that new user can connect to Kad without having to connect to servers or downloading a nodes.dat themself
- Implemented an alternate method to estimate the total user count in the Kad network, which is not based on our local routing table. Its experimental and only shown in the network dialog (double click the world icon in the status bar)
- Several changes were made to Kad in order to defy routing attacks researched by University of Minnesota guys [Peng Wang, James Tyra, Eric Chan-Tin, Tyson Malchow, Denis Foo Kune, Nicholas Hopper, Yongdae Kim], in particular:
- Kad contacts will only be able to update themself in others routing tables if they provide the proper key (supported by 0.49a+ nodes) in order to make it impossible to hijack them
- Kad uses now a three-way-handshake (or for older version a similar check) for new contacts, making sure they do not use a spoofed IP
- Unverified contacts are not used for routing tasks and a marked with a special icon in the GUI
- Fixed: Memory leak in context menus.
Perhapse the biggest improvement was the second item in the highlights because a concern for some eMule users was that if all the servers shut down, will people have to get a nodes.dat file so they can get connected to the Kad network?
Basically, Kad works by users connecting to an IP address on a network. When that user connects to that IP address, others can connect to the network by connecting to the users IP address. Often the simplest way to connect to Kad is simply connect to an ED2K server which will frequently have plenty of users connecting to the Kad network as well – thus making it easy to connect to the Kad network.
If you don’t connect to a server, you can download a nodes.dat file which contains a number of IP addresses. When a user uses that nodes.dat file, the hope is that one of those IP addresses, at least, is connected to the network so as to establish a connection in the network. Afterwards, eMule just remembers several IP addresses so that if the client is shut down for a period of time, it just looks up those addresses when it is started up again at a later time.
It appears that this improvement bi-passes all of this and allows users to simply connect to the Kad network without either having to download a nodes.dat file or connect to an existing ED2K server. It seems eMule keeps getting better and better.
Related Posts
- eMule Version 0.49a Released
- eMule MorphXT Gets an Update – Version 11.0 Released
- eMule version 0.19a Released
- eMule Plus v 1.0 released
- eMule 0.20b Released
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It takes forever to download stuff from eMule. Any tips on how to speed things up?
Here’s a tip switch to µTorrent and delete that emule garbage from your harddrive