BitTorrent's Loss is eDonkey's Gain? 437
MrAndrews writes "According to this BBC article, users in South Korea, Italy, Germany and Spain are using BitTorrent less frequently these days, after lawsuits by the movie industry. However: "While the use of BitTorrent has fallen, file sharers have moved to an alternative network called eDonkey". "
Funny... (Score:3, Informative)
Where did you live... (Score:5, Informative)
quality over quantity (Score:5, Informative)
eDonkey (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Funny... (Score:2, Informative)
The blurb on the methlab site advertises a very low CPU usage, but that's obviously only for the PG software itself as all the work seems to be done by iptables... YMMV.
PeerGuardian; false sence of security (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian [wikipedia.org]
Re:Funny... (Score:4, Informative)
PeerGuardian 1.x was known to 'occasionally' balloon with its CPU usage from time to time, which was a shame. PeerGuardian2 is just fine though; been running it for at least six months (iirc) and never had it higher than 1%.
Why is this news? (Score:2, Informative)
Different purposes... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, now you need to be patient. This is where most people fail. It may take you a solid 90 days to download something old or obscure from eDonkey. It is not an instant-gratification network. Just let the sucker run and it'll come down in its own good time. Let the client software worry about it. I've fished out all manner of content from there that was impossible to find on bittorrent, usenet, or IRC. Old Mike Oldfield concerts, a mint copy of Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis, dozens of old TV shows... average time to download something like that is around seven days. The torrents of the old Dr. Who TV series (every single episode, 26 seasons) took nearly three months. It was around 212GB of data, of course.
You may want to make sure your firewall can handle a couple thousand connections. If your p2p experience is always sucking hind tit, that might be the cause of your problems. That little Linksys router isn't capable of doing it. Well, maybe if you put linux on it, but why bother when distros like m0n0wall, ipcop, and smoothwall exist? It helps loads if you prioritize ACK, DNS, and any small packets.
Re:Where did you live... (Score:5, Informative)
eMule is a popular client supporting the eDonkey network.
eDonkey2000 is the official eDonkey client.
eMule also supports the decentralized Kad network [slashdot.org], which is a Kademlia [slashdot.org] implementation.
The official BT client also use a Kademlia algorithm for its trackerless torrents, along with Azureus. No implementations are necessarily compatible.
Re:Good Riddence. (Score:3, Informative)
Work that one out
my P2P round-up (Score:5, Informative)
IRC is also slow and a pain in the ass - too interactive (they frown at automation), too many different ways of doing things and you have to deal with a bunch of pricks that want you to be grateful that you part of their little circle of piracy - too juvenile. Does anyone really still think, "OOH! look at me, I'm a PIRATE!"??
Gnutella is very nice for MP3s and small files - the biggest you want here is a music video perhaps at 50megs or so, there doesn't seem to be much large content like movies. With the swarming ability that the clients have these days, downloading can be AMAZINGLY fast - why does eDonkey get more attention than Gnutella? Everyone should put large content files on Gnutella - do it, now! ;) gtk-gnutella is a nice linux client. It's not as pretty as Limewire, but nicer on the ram, etc.
Bittorrent is the second fastest way that I've seen for downloading large content files, even DVD collections, say, of emulator games come rather quickly, usually approaching 60% of top download speed or more once it throttles up. The downside is the scrutiny at the moment, made worse by the fact that you must leave your download open - that is, you need to keep your client running even after you download the file to share with others - not doing so will get you "punished" in various ways by the sites offering this stuff, sometimes by not allowing you back. This also means that for a large DVD type download, you have 5 gigs of data on your drive much longer than you want - at least it's a problem for me. Further, unless you want to run the client forever, you need to set your upload rate pretty high. On my 1.2Ghz machine, bittorrent takes a toll in resources as well...
The fastest way to download something is via the newsgroups. Yup, the oldest way is still in some cases the best (it's not P2P, but it fits in my rant anyway). The downside here is for good news service, you have to pay, while the other methods are free.
Still, with a service like Easynews, you get 3 week retentions - meaning, a "post" stays alive for 3 weeks. Advances like par and nzb make this much easier and more reliable than it has been - it's almost too easy now. An nzb file points to specific articles in specific groups. For anyone familiar with this process, with nzb, you can avoid the old norms of subscribing to groups, downloading headers, searching for content, marking your choices, and telling it to download. Web pages such as binsearch.info allow you to use a web interface to select your content, and will then generate an nzb file for you.
With a broadband cable connection, you can download DVD sized content in about 2 and a half hours from the groups. Some ISPs still come with news feeds, but they usually aren't worth bothering with. My ISP has retentions lasting just a few hours, with a 1gig/month download limit.
So, IMHO, use gnutella for MP3s, short popular video clips/music videos and other smaller files (since there isn't much large content to be found). For anything larger, use the newsgroups if you have a good news feed. If not, try your luck with bittorrent.
Use the donkey only if you can't find it anywhere else and if speed isn't a problem. Oh, and avoid downloading from IRC...
Of course, I only download legal content :) Legal MP3 files, or copies of files I already own, or emulator ROMS of games I already own, or DVD collections of abandoned ROMs, Linux distributions, or tv shows that I already pay my Cable provider for, etc.
Re:Funny... (Score:3, Informative)
However that was *over a year* ago - we picked up 2 new major contributors and the copy you see on that page is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT VERSION, written in C/C++ that uses ip_queue to filter the traffic.
The script was a thing I posted on our Forums, was never posted on the front page (to my memory).
Try it, you'll see it's a lot better.
This should give you an idea of the CPU usage:
root 5729 0.0 0.4 13312 2196 ? Sl 12:00 0:00 peerguardnf -d -c
Still incomplete, but I'm sure some more work will bring it up to the standard of the Windows version.
That said, the safety of Bittorrent over eDonkey is questionable, I'd say that neither is safer than the other. A big dose of common sense is helpful in both situations - stay away from suspicious torrents and servers.
Just look at some friendly *MediaSentry* owned eDonkey servers - http://blocklist.org/ip/1143410646 [blocklist.org]
We're not totally sure what they're being used for, but I imagine setting up their own servers allows them to keep logs far more easily, although they'll still have to get some data from you for it to stand up in court.
Re:I agree -- PGLinux is junk (Score:3, Informative)
The final version will have a GUI and all the prettiness you would expect, but until then we have to deal with one problem at a time.
Any help the OSS community feels like giving us, the codes on our CVS...
peerguardian.sourceforge.net
edonkey/emule is SLOOOOOOOOW (Score:5, Informative)
Also...that network is swamped with script bots that download EVERYTHING. I shared out a folder I had with OLD device drivers and out of date software...files that nobody should want. They were being downloaded in a short amount of time which leads me to believe that automated software probably contributes to the slowness.
Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:4, Informative)
To an extent, but it's not tightly coupled in all areas of the law.
While not binding at all, this sets a european precedent
IANAL, but I think that would be the case only if the decision was based on a European law, implemented by all member states.
Each member state is free to have their own laws which do not contradict any European laws. Hence the hoo-haha here right now with our (British) govt wanting to introduce laws which may breach the EU Human Rights laws. They simply can't (legally), but that doesn't stop them from trying..
Notoriety = Bigger Target (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:3, Informative)
Even if the decision was based on European law it wouldn't set a precedent for the UK (it might be "persuasive"). And most of Europe operates a civil law system which doesn't recognise the concept of "precedent" in the same way as English or US law.
Also NB the European Convention on Human Rights is nothing to do with the EU - it's a creation of the Council of Europe, which is an entirely separate body (and includes a tonne of other countries, e.g. Russia). The UK could abrogate from the Convention if it wanted to - the controversy is whether the UK is free to overrule particular parts of the Convention, but otherwise remain a party to it.
Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:2, Informative)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0364343/ [imdb.com]
Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Subject to 107 through 122 (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct here, which is why the fair use portion desporately needs to be tested in the courts, even though I don't want to be the one that has to do it! If it's fair use, than in this case the DMCA ought to be tested as to whether it's preventing fair use, and whether that's really legal.
Re:Great tarrgeting. (Score:2, Informative)
Blockbusters "No Late Fees" policy is a scam (Score:3, Informative)
Blockbuster is also taking the "No Late Fees" policy to the Extreme. Their "No Late Fees" policy is a scam. Read the Policy [blockbuster.com]. After reading this, am I supposed to feel sorry for them when someone rips the DVD for personal use?
If you don't return the movie within 8 days, your "Rental" automatically becomes a "Purchase". You then have 30 days to return the movie and get a refund for the "Purchase", but you still pay a $1.25-or greater Stocking Fee. Remember -- it's not a "Late Fee", it's a "Stocking Fee".
And that "FUSF Recovery Charge" on your DSL bill is not a "Fee", it's a "Charge" and is governed by different regulation.
Re:edonkey/emule is SLOOOOOOOOW (Score:3, Informative)
As someone who has had to rebuild old Windows 95 era machines, I have hopped onto P2P services in search of old device drivers for long obsolete hardware as kind of a last resort. Didn't have much luck though.
But yeah, if someone started just downloading them enmass then they are probably just a bot.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not going to answer every point, because there's far too much, and it strikes me that you know very little about emule/ed2k and haven't tried very hard to find out.
1) Setup and use is much too confusing.
Confusing? How? Did you examine the guide at emule-project.net? Or are you just assuming that because BitTorrent (BT) does everything for you emule will do the same?
Substantiate and justify this please. (Lists of servers are largely irrelevant. One server with a large number of users is enough. See +++ below.)
2) It doesn't "just work". Getting your client to connect to the kademlia network is a nightmare, ...
Kademlia (kad) is fully p2p, no servers. You need previously-known contacts to connect. Every time you download or upload a file part from/to a client which *is* on kad, your client records that person as a contact. When you start off, you have no contacts, you need to be patient, and in any case you dont have to use kad.
For the server method, you only *need* one server to start - your client will learn about other servers +++ from other clients as you exchange file parts. You can *google* for server lists too, if you must. There may even be a server list linked from emule-project.net
3) Downloads are slow.
Downloads are not *instant*. Yes, there is the queuing system. Please explain to me why you should jump ahead of everyone else who is already waiting for a file? The source's bandwidth is a limited resource. emule slices by time, I'm guessing BT slices by speed. Incidentally, if you are downloading a large, popular file, receiving several parts are once, emule can really eat bandwidth. It comes down to the number of people sharing a file, ultimately.
4) It is hard to search.
At least it *has* a built-in search facility. Different search results are caused by the nature of the search mechanism (more so for kad). The search is *not* an index (unlike, say, google). Also, emule tends not to do a full search if it quickly finds >50 unique matches. And the total number of unique matches is limited to 300. With BT, you're searching (fixed) index sites. emule has equivalents, such as the-realworld, osloskop, osiolek, if you care to look.
As a side note, the very presence of a file in an emule-visible place on your computer means it can be found by someone else through a search, by just the filename. By contrast with BT (I believe) if someone doesnt have a .torrent for a file AND publish it via some *non-BT* method, such as a website, you cant ever get at a file being shared. That is, ed2k provides a way to get the filehash (torrent) without *having* the filehash.
5) eMule "swarms" have tons of useless peers....In a BitTorrent swarm, EVERYBODY is uploading
You cant upload before you have parts of the file *to* upload, true of emule and BT. And with emule you *must* share/upload those parts you already have. The emule credit system promotes (through queues) those who upload (RTFM for details). You *could* modify a client to *not* upload, but it would hurt you, because you'll sit in queues for longer. Incidentally, emule doesnt have "swarms" per se. Overnet did.
Until *you* have parts of a file to upload, *you* are a "useless peer". "Useless peers" cease to be useless when they acquire file parts.
You dont think these two are connected? People *still* sharing things they got >6 months ago while downloading other things? (There is also no "seeding" per se on emule.)
I spent a week downloading a 90MB file,...
(sarcasm) You novice! (/sarcasm) Think for a minute about the bandwidth of the person(s) w