ZeroPaid.com » ed2k http://www.zeropaid.com Sun, 12 Feb 2012 22:53:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The Limewire Loss, Where to From Here? (Alternatives to Limewire) http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89210/the-limewire-loss-where-to-from-here-alternatives-to-limewire/ http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89210/the-limewire-loss-where-to-from-here-alternatives-to-limewire/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 17:05:37 +0000 Drew Wilson http://www.zeropaid.com/?p=89210 LimeWireQuestion

With the loss of Limewire in court earlier this month, many are reflecting what was Limewire and the developer behind it. The next question is, where do we go from here should Limewire fall under the waves of time?

Limewire was an "old school" app for a lot of people. It's rise to popularity can be traced clear back when Kazaa started to fail as a premier app for file-sharing. When Kazaa more or less fell to the way side, many users turned to several other apps. It may be one of the bigger moments that the file-sharing community was split in several directions. Users went to either Limewire or other Gnutella applications, eMule or eDonkey2000 on the eDonkey2000 network, WinMX, Shareaza which is connectible to the Gnutella2 network or the earliest of stages of BitTorrent via the mainline BitTorrent client if users were lucky enough to hear about it at the time. If you believe some sources, the recent loss in courts spells the end of an application that many chose as their main app for file-sharing for years. It's hard not to see this as the end with the developer facing a multi-million dollar fine at this point. According to an article on CNET, Mark Gorton was working on getting a deal with record labels to turn Limewire in to a legitimate service. Unfortunately, the RIAA views him as the next Bernie Madoff ripping people off. How one views Gorton may depend on how much of each side of the debate you believe. One can't help but remember how Napster could have been an amazing business model if a deal were simply worked out - how similar is that to Limewire's case today? Rather than finding ways to work with technology, the copyright industry is merely stamping out any signs of change to offshore sources where it is significantly harder to get at. How many people are willing to believe that once the RIAA has killed off all the file-sharing, that it'll then magically make an overwhelmingly attractive business model online given the experience of DRM and the majors ability to covertly slit the throats of the competition thanks to an overwhelming monopoly rather than the ability to produce a decent product? Given past experience with file-sharers, it's very easy to see how this huge loss for Limewire will ultimately mean very little to file-sharers in terms of being able to share files. It's then easy to see that the only thing this lawsuit solves is quite possibly ruining a few people's lives - those who were close to the development of Limewire. It's important to remember that Limewire merely connected to a network. It's not as though killing the app means killing the community. The difficulty is in trying to figure out where displaced file-sharers will go after. Some will merely find the latest Limewire client and continue file-sharing anyway. Others could easily just switch to Frostwire so as to keep to the familiar, but still know that development is happening to keep the app prestine. Some file-sharers might take a bit of a leap and jump on to eMule. Since the eDonkey2000 application is now defunct in terms of development. In fact, one might suggest that a similar situation happened with the war between the two major apps that connected to the ED2K network. One was open source (eMule) and the other was closed source (eDonkey2000), but both connected to the same network. eDonkey2000 (the app) was forced to shut down, but eMule is still around with an active community of developers working on mods of the eMule application. Some suggest that eMule being open source has been the reason it's stayed alive for so long. Just remember that if you have to connect to the ED2K network (since eMule connects to the Kad network as well which is serverless), then get your servers from a trusted source - though it is a good way to get connected in to Kad. Then there is WinMX. Yes, after all these years, there is still an active community of WinMXworld. Typically, users can connect to WinMX via the help of WinMXWorld where patches can be retrieved to get the client and network working again. There is also Shareaza. It's a client that can connect to multiple networks at once. While not really recommended for connecting to ED2K servers, there's still both the Gnutella and Gnutella2 networks which is active with users. Since there was a domain issue, potential Shareaza users are better off going to the Sourceforge page instead to get their client. With a strong hashing system, it's really hard to pollute files as seen on the FastTrack (Kazaa) network. If BitTorrent users are screaming "BitTorrent! BitTorrent! Will someone please think of the BitTorrent! As an alternative of course!" at this point, yes, BitTorrent is theoretically an alternative, though not as compatible of an alternative to the other P2P apps simply because of the structure of the networks. Many users either use Vuze or uTorrent. The question is, what sites to use? If some like to work on getting access to their files, then there's always a plethora of private sites. Unfortunately, public sites have been increasingly hard to get. There's ThePirateBay where, after multiple attempts to shut the site down, the site continues to live. There is also the ISOHunt search engine that recently seems to be legally forced to block US residents these days *cough*proxie*cough*. Let's not forget the fight club of file-sharing, UseNet. Oops, I talked about UseNet. What about IRC file-sharing clients? It's unclear where Limewire users will go if they do choose to go elsewhere. Still, after going through so many alternatives, once can't help but be reminded at just how unwinnable the war on file-sharing really is. Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.]]> LimeWireQuestion

With the loss of Limewire in court earlier this month, many are reflecting what was Limewire and the developer behind it. The next question is, where do we go from here should Limewire fall under the waves of time?

Limewire was an "old school" app for a lot of people. It's rise to popularity can be traced clear back when Kazaa started to fail as a premier app for file-sharing. When Kazaa more or less fell to the way side, many users turned to several other apps. It may be one of the bigger moments that the file-sharing community was split in several directions. Users went to either Limewire or other Gnutella applications, eMule or eDonkey2000 on the eDonkey2000 network, WinMX, Shareaza which is connectible to the Gnutella2 network or the earliest of stages of BitTorrent via the mainline BitTorrent client if users were lucky enough to hear about it at the time. If you believe some sources, the recent loss in courts spells the end of an application that many chose as their main app for file-sharing for years. It's hard not to see this as the end with the developer facing a multi-million dollar fine at this point. According to an article on CNET, Mark Gorton was working on getting a deal with record labels to turn Limewire in to a legitimate service. Unfortunately, the RIAA views him as the next Bernie Madoff ripping people off. How one views Gorton may depend on how much of each side of the debate you believe. One can't help but remember how Napster could have been an amazing business model if a deal were simply worked out - how similar is that to Limewire's case today? Rather than finding ways to work with technology, the copyright industry is merely stamping out any signs of change to offshore sources where it is significantly harder to get at. How many people are willing to believe that once the RIAA has killed off all the file-sharing, that it'll then magically make an overwhelmingly attractive business model online given the experience of DRM and the majors ability to covertly slit the throats of the competition thanks to an overwhelming monopoly rather than the ability to produce a decent product? Given past experience with file-sharers, it's very easy to see how this huge loss for Limewire will ultimately mean very little to file-sharers in terms of being able to share files. It's then easy to see that the only thing this lawsuit solves is quite possibly ruining a few people's lives - those who were close to the development of Limewire. It's important to remember that Limewire merely connected to a network. It's not as though killing the app means killing the community. The difficulty is in trying to figure out where displaced file-sharers will go after. Some will merely find the latest Limewire client and continue file-sharing anyway. Others could easily just switch to Frostwire so as to keep to the familiar, but still know that development is happening to keep the app prestine. Some file-sharers might take a bit of a leap and jump on to eMule. Since the eDonkey2000 application is now defunct in terms of development. In fact, one might suggest that a similar situation happened with the war between the two major apps that connected to the ED2K network. One was open source (eMule) and the other was closed source (eDonkey2000), but both connected to the same network. eDonkey2000 (the app) was forced to shut down, but eMule is still around with an active community of developers working on mods of the eMule application. Some suggest that eMule being open source has been the reason it's stayed alive for so long. Just remember that if you have to connect to the ED2K network (since eMule connects to the Kad network as well which is serverless), then get your servers from a trusted source - though it is a good way to get connected in to Kad. Then there is WinMX. Yes, after all these years, there is still an active community of WinMXworld. Typically, users can connect to WinMX via the help of WinMXWorld where patches can be retrieved to get the client and network working again. There is also Shareaza. It's a client that can connect to multiple networks at once. While not really recommended for connecting to ED2K servers, there's still both the Gnutella and Gnutella2 networks which is active with users. Since there was a domain issue, potential Shareaza users are better off going to the Sourceforge page instead to get their client. With a strong hashing system, it's really hard to pollute files as seen on the FastTrack (Kazaa) network. If BitTorrent users are screaming "BitTorrent! BitTorrent! Will someone please think of the BitTorrent! As an alternative of course!" at this point, yes, BitTorrent is theoretically an alternative, though not as compatible of an alternative to the other P2P apps simply because of the structure of the networks. Many users either use Vuze or uTorrent. The question is, what sites to use? If some like to work on getting access to their files, then there's always a plethora of private sites. Unfortunately, public sites have been increasingly hard to get. There's ThePirateBay where, after multiple attempts to shut the site down, the site continues to live. There is also the ISOHunt search engine that recently seems to be legally forced to block US residents these days *cough*proxie*cough*. Let's not forget the fight club of file-sharing, UseNet. Oops, I talked about UseNet. What about IRC file-sharing clients? It's unclear where Limewire users will go if they do choose to go elsewhere. Still, after going through so many alternatives, once can't help but be reminded at just how unwinnable the war on file-sharing really is. Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.]]> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/89210/the-limewire-loss-where-to-from-here-alternatives-to-limewire/feed/ 27 Spanish Judge Rules Not-For-Profit P2P is Legal http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86666/spanish-judge-rules-not-for-profit-p2p-is-legal/ http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86666/spanish-judge-rules-not-for-profit-p2p-is-legal/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:51:13 +0000 Jared Moya http://www.zeropaid.com/?p=86666 First time a judge in the country has clearly stated that "P2P itself does not violate any rights," says attorney Carlos Almeida-Sanchez.

Spain, though part of Europe, seems to be worlds apart as the only country that has realized the difference between piracy and illegal file-sharing.

For Raul N. Orejuda Garcia, Magistrate Court judge of Mercantile number 7, ruled recently that "P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, does not violate, in principle, any right protected by the Intellectual Property Law."

In particular, he said that P2P transfers are not one of the "clear and specific behaviors that the law forbids, in particular reproduction, distribution and public communication without authorization."

The case was part of a suit brought by a coalition of the country’s entertainment industry against eD2K website elrincondejesus, the owner of which rightly pointed out that it only provided links to content much like Google or any of the other search engines out there.

“As you know Elrincondejesus.com never had advertising (or has now)," he said. "I’m innocent and the only thing that I have done is provided links to other sites, like thousands of search engines in the world.”

The case is certainly a departure from the ruling against Swedish BitTorrent tracker site the Pirate Bay which made the same argument, but was convicted for the facilitation of copyright infringement nonetheless.

“Adding a work or video recording to eMule, that has previously been converted to a computer file, compatible with that program, is not an act of reproduction,” reads the ruling. "Copying is not a profitable use, or collective, as these two terms refer to the subsequent use made of the work once downloaded, after the copy. "

The court also says that illegal distribution requires something "tangible" to exist, like a website, and on which the actual sharing must occur. This doesn’t happen in P2P where the transfer of data occurs between individuals.

It recognizes the possibility that unauthorized public communication, or distribution, of copyrighted material may have occurred, but that it’s difficult to prove being that it "may well be possible that the file-sharing was with one person."

The case echoes a similar ruling by Spanish Judge Paz Aldecoa back in November of 2006 who found that since there was "“no talk of money or any other compensation beyond the sharing of material available among various users" then P2P didn’t therefore violate the tenets of the country’s copyright laws since it was only about obtaining "copies for private use" which is legal.

It may also bolster concerns by the Congressional Anti-Piracy Caucus which placed Spain on its “2009 International Piracy Watch List." It complained that “P2P piracy is widely perceived as an acceptable cultural phenomenon, and the situation is exacerbated by a government policy that has essentially decriminalized illicit P2P file-sharing.”

Is making a distinction between those who download for profit and those who don’t really decriminalization? We always take into account the motives behind crimes and punish accordingly. That’s why we have various degrees of murder, theft, and even assault vis a vis "hate crimes."

Why should P2P be any different?

Stay tuned.

[PC via TF]

jared@zeropaid.com

]]> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86666/spanish-judge-rules-not-for-profit-p2p-is-legal/feed/ 2 eMule Version 0.49b Released http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9681/emule_version_049b_released/ http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9681/emule_version_049b_released/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:18:49 +0000 Jorge Gonzalez 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.

eMule Download page

]]> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9681/emule_version_049b_released/feed/ 2 eMule MorphXT Gets an Update – Version 11.0 Released http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9501/emule_morphxt_gets_an_update__version_110_released/ http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9501/emule_morphxt_gets_an_update__version_110_released/#comments Mon, 19 May 2008 08:08:54 +0000 Jorge Gonzalez Usually when a major update happens on a main project of an open source program is live, any modifications (mods) end up going through an upgrade as well. This is exactly what has happened with one of the most well-known mods in the eMule community – MorphXT.

When a developer opens the source code to their software – especially for P2P software – a number of interesting things can happen. One of the interesting things is the possibility of fork projects or even modifications. One of the major features in the eMule community is the numerous spinoff projects that are being released, continually developed, and are well-used by tens of thousands of users.

Of course, the question newcomers generally raise is which one to use. The general rule of thumb is that if a user is new to the client and protocols of eMule, a user should stick with the original version. Once a user has gained a sufficient amount of experience using the software, that’s when they may want to test drive modifications, or mods. eMule mods won’t make downloading faster, but they do offer numerous advanced features that eMule generally doesn’t offer – at least offer in the short term as some features do, in fact, wind their way back to the original version.

One mod, which also was recently updated, is eMule MorphXT. Leuk_He, the main developer of the mod recently announced the release of the latest version of Morph XT.

“It contains some stability improvement from out newest team member[fafner],” leuk_he said, “and a whole bunch of other tweaks you can read in the changelog.”

The changelog:

18-05-2008
Compiled with visual studio 2003 sp1.
should also work with vs 2005 sp1

Merged to 0.49a [Stulle]
CHANGE:update libping to 1.28 (which is same source as 1.27) [leuk_he]
CHANGE:update CxImage to 6.00 (we use the rather complete lib) [Stulle]
CHANGE:update cryptolib Version 5.5.2 (9/24/2007)
FIX: clients downloading during large file completion stuck with ‘stalled, reading from disk’ [fafner]
ADD: spreadbars to history [fafner]
ADD: percentage client already got in QueueList and UploadList [fafner]
ADD: chunk number to chunk details in UploadList [fafner]
ADD: Show much verbose info on content-> mediafinfo.dll (if you disable advanced options mediainfo_RIFF for avi files…)
ADD: (BETA!) download ack overhead used in in upload calculation
ADD: show if server obfuscation key is available
FIX: use part.met.bak files instead of hardly ever seen valid part.met.backup files. [leuk_he]
ADD: experimental support for visual studio 2005 sp1. See readme. [fafner/rapid mule/leuk_he]
ADD: alpha support for vs2008, make very sure to read the readme.
CHANGE: reduce some cpu under wine [leuk_he]
CHANGE: Using a different method to create captcha due to new version of CxImage lib [Stulle]
CHANGE: FriendSlots now saved in 0×03 (0×2 occupied by official) [Stulle]
REMOVED: SafeKAD (the Officials did a big step in that direction) [Stulle]
REMOVED: KAD optimizations (what ever :P ) [Stulle]

Official homepage
Sourceforge Page

Users who want to install eMule for the first time should use the Installer. Users who are updating from a previous version should download the Binaries (file labeled “bin”), unzip the package in the eMule directory and replace all of the files.

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/tech_news/eMule_MorphXT_Gets_an_Update_Version_11_0_Released’;

]]> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9501/emule_morphxt_gets_an_update__version_110_released/feed/ 0 German police lock up AND sue eDonkey file sharers http://www.zeropaid.com/news/6440/german_police_lock_up_and_sue_edonkey_file_sharers/ http://www.zeropaid.com/news/6440/german_police_lock_up_and_sue_edonkey_file_sharers/#comments Tue, 23 May 2006 19:03:48 +0000 Chris German police have filed criminal charges against more than 2,000 people accused of using the eDonkey file-sharing network to share copyrighted music illegally, the recording industry’s trade group said Tuesday.

The legal action, which will also include claims for compensation under civil law, is “the biggest single action against illegal file sharing,” according to the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

]]> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/6440/german_police_lock_up_and_sue_edonkey_file_sharers/feed/ 6