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Gnutella v.56 Out? 69

Posted by Hemos from the i'm-not-dead-yet dept.
GnutellaFanBoy writes "If you said Gnutella is dead gnutella.nerdherd.net would like to tell you otherwise. Currently a version .56 is available for download. If your wondering who is still developing gnutella, read this excerpt from their FAQ: In the interest of protecting those involved, it can only be said that these versions are being produced by someone with access to the source code. No, of course they're not official in the gnullsoft sense, but let's just say that they're legitimate. I would certainly expect more versions, since we've already seen several materialize. Also of intrest is the protocol specs are out, and people are working on *nix ports. "
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Gnutella v.56 Out? More

Gnutella v.56 Out?

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  • Have coders got any sense at all? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I mean this project was stopped on the basis of legal grounds, and you would have thought that its programmers would have stopped then, if only to avoid them and their company being sued into oblivion. Gnutella is obviously going to be exlusively used for pirating music, distributing pornography and dubious material like race hate propaganda, pro-life information and so on.

    Given the advice of their parent company's army of highly-paid lawyers I would have thought the sensible thing to do would to have stopped there. I mean, it's unfortunate and all that, but given the (likely) threat of jail, it's only a piece of code. So what do they do? They carry on coding it, but "anonymously". Oh, very clever, that's going to keep them safe when the RIAA sues them for aiding and abetting piracy on the net.

  • Re:This is just a wee bit bad. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I agree with you completely, and unauthorized copying is only going to become easier and more widespread as net penetration and bandwidth increase. IIRC, bandwidth is increasing 40 fold each year (maybe it was 40%...).

    But you have to come up with a new paradigm now, not later! If creators of content stop making money, they stop making content. It is as simple as that. I don't know what the new paradigm should be, and you didn't suggest one either. Some people are trying adverts, but from my perspective, they don't seem to be working. Personally I hate them, and block and filter out all adverts that people try to send my way.

    Anyone else on /. smart enough to think up a new paradigm that will work? My 2c is that it will somehow involve the massive economies of scale that are inherent to the net.

  • I don't think I've ever been so COMPLETELY misunderstood in the years I've been posting here. I guess when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.


    --
  • Throttling would be NICE, but is way more complicated to add than something much simpler, say, limiting the number of connections per ip, and the max number of people leeching off of you, and how about the limiting the number of people routing through you. I don't know how many times I woke up in the morning to find out that I providing routing for 40 some people, which is about all the poor upsteam of my cable modem could handle. :) Which would mean I had upstream bandwidth left to share any of my files.

    ---
  • I mirror some programs for friends etc.
    Have a look here [thepharaos.net].

  • Gnutella is obviously going to be exlusively used for pirating music, distributing pornography and dubious material like race hate propaganda, pro-life information and so on.
    <VOICE style="redneck">
    YEA! I bet it works like that there intranet thingy I heard about on the "Christian Broadcast Network".
    </VOICE>
    Geez people, let's not try and turn the internet into Sesame Street. I know I'm feeding the little troll, but people buy into this crap.
  • Well, was it released under an open source license? Yes. Is it a decent program? Yup. Sounds legitimate to me. Perhaps you could enlighten me on how much more legit one can make OSS software, 'cuz I'd sure like to make sure my open source program is 'legit' too. I'd like to make sure the SPA doesn't come and bash my door down for having illegitimate open source software on my harddrive...
  • In theory, the idea of a decentralized shared library, is a nice idea. In practice, by design, this program is for sharing .mp3's, and other multimedia filetypes. The bulk of which are in circulation illegally.

    And by designing this app, and marketing it for these filetypes, it rapidly turned into that being the only purpose that people were using it for.

    I suppose it could be used to share documents that a totalitarian regime frowns upon. But a geocities site could do much the same, with much higher reliability. And something that is focused on distributing simple text files/html docs is going to be alot less likely to have script kiddies swarming all over it.

    And the way that the search algorithyms work on Gnutella, it's impossible to get much of an idea about what a file is. The web is a much better medium for distributing most documents. It lets you show connections to a document, with information that provides clues as to relevancy, at the point of the link to the file.

    It just seems to me, that programs like Napster, and Gnutella exist solely so people can set up a warez/mp3 site, without actually getting storage space, and setting up a real ftp site. I have yet to see an application of this type, being used for much else.
  • Oh, that's right, you're the idiot who said..

    Frankly, I don't necessarily see why there should be any defined expiration of the copyright.

    Nice to see that you can keep a discussion logical, and civilized. Rather than explaining anything as a counterpoint to what I said, your only response, was a personal attack. How insightful. It would kill you to advance the conversation?

    The Internet makes control of digital media impossible. Deal with it.

    So simply because an enabling technology exists, that gives you the moral mandate, to copy whatever you want, without any concern for the rights of those that labored to create it? In short, might makes right. How charming, that you have such a neo-fuedal sense of civilization.
  • Just as a minor point, some cable systems use DHCP, and apparently PacBell DSL is starting to use it as well.
  • The refernce to legitimacy, was regarding who's releaseing the stuff. It's a reference to the fact that these versions are being released by the legitimate developers. Rather than someone throwing together a hacked up version of a clone, and calling it Gnutella .x.

  • "The only reason that I can think of, that people love stuff like this, is it's so much more anonymous than even an FTP site."

    Are you saying anonymity is not a legitimate feature? I disagree. What if you're living in a police state that prohibits distribution of documents demonstrating its violation of civil rights, or a corporation's suppressing potentially important negative information about a product by suing anyone who hosts a file, regardless of the merits of a case? (From what I gather, though, Gnutella doesn't give total anonymity anyway, so, I suppose that's a moot point.)

    Apart from that, however, I like the idea of a decentralized, virtual "library" in which to locate files. I don't need this if I know someone with a copy of a file; OTOH, if I know the filename but can't locate it anywhere (say, an old version of a program that happens to work better with my system), I can check the library.

    phil

  • Actually complete protocol specs have been available since March 22. Clients are already in semi-functional order for Linux and Win32, in every language from C to PHP (note that noone has taken on the IBM 370 port yet).


    CapnBry
  • The source code for "GNUtella" will only be released when the authors go from simply making hollow threats to release the software under the GPL, to actually following through with it.

    GNUtella isn't free software, and it won't be free until they Show Us The Source. And does anyone here think AOL will really let the Nullsoft people do that without sending a platoon of lawyers to stand on their throats?

    How come the GNU project [gnu.org] people aren't pitching a fit over their trademark here?

  • Using the word "routed" to describe the way GNUtella forwards search requests is... shall we say... cheritable. Some of us think 'routing' is what happens when you are running a protocol that runs a real routing algorithm, e.g. Bellman-Ford or Dijkstra. (Do the Nullsoft people even know how real routing algorithms work, or did they all learn to code by watching Star Trek: the Next Generation?)

    And while we're on the subject, I think "peasant-to-peasant" might be a more colorful and accurate way to describe the way GNUtella agents actually interwork... considering the way they trash the commons.

  • On the other hand, the protocol suffers from a number of scalability flaws, and the "open source community" appears entirely uninterested in fixing it. Instead, all the effort appears to be channeled into developing ports and clones that are interoperable with the Nullsoft implementation-- an implementation that is proprietary and considered by AOL to be a trade secret.

    If the effort to develop an open protocol for a searchable distributed file storage and transfer system were to launched by-- say-- an IETF working group, then I would be inclined to agree with the idea that it is an "open source community project."

    Until then, I don't see it as anything even remotely resembling a free software project.

  • Well, I'd say something in the middle, like a 33.6 or 56K modem, would be most likely. Fast enough you'd believe someone would try to DL over it, slow enough that you wouldn't want to try to DL from them. And even then, ping time may prove a dead giveaway.
  • I am one of the people who help out the newbies in the channel and I try to post to /. each time some new news comes out but it never is accepted. I can only do what I can.
  • 2) Loss of efficiency over local networks.

    I agree, but Gnutella wasn't built for local networks.

    3) TCP is horrible for single-packet queries and responses.

    TCP was used to get around firewalls. I can run Gnutella on port 80 and that would allow just about anyone to connecto to me and use gnutella. One example is all the universities banning napster by blocking at the firewall.

    No part of the spec shows how to stop deep loops

    My TTL and Max TTL do a decent job at preventing "deep" loops. The client also tracks a hop count. A packet starts out with a ttl of 7 and each hop subtracts 1 from the ttl, and adds 1 to the hop count. So, if somehow, a packet gets to me with a hop count over my max ttl, I do not respond and do not forward the packet. The client also remembers the last few seconds worth of searches and can determine if I've already responded to that search and drop that packet.



    We're looing at an averate of 243 connections going through each computer.

    The system is currently running 2200 users and I have 5 connections. My total bandwidth used is about 5kB/sec for searches. Never does 2200 people directly connect to me. Only those 5 people talk directly to me, and never does 2200 people search at the same time. Yes it does use a lot of bandwidth for searching, but 5kB/sec is not that bad for this type of system. You can't really improve on that without some sort of centralized server. Gnutella is a broadband application. If it was meant for dialup, we would have seen in long ago. It is not that complicated that it couldnt have been done.
  • NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is suprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

    I need to do my laundry
    Please send $3 to:
    Jon Allen
    p.o. box 308142
  • Well, even though a big-company-strongarm cloud is hanging over the original project, the protocol has been fairly disassembled and there are working clones out there - so even if the gnutella program itself may never have it's source code revealed, there are working C, C++, Visual Basic, PHP, Delphi, PERL etc. clones of it which -are- open source. The protocol uses HTTP and other widely used conventions - this truly is already an open source community project alreasy, whether or not the "official Windows" Gnutella source code is ever revealed or not.
  • It just seems to me, that programs like Napster, and Gnutella exist solely so people can set up a warez/mp3 site,

    Oh, that's right, you're the idiot who said..

    Frankly, I don't necessarily see why there should be any defined expiration of the copyright.

    But you are getting closer

    I suppose it could be used to share documents that a totalitarian regime frowns upon.

    You just haven't figured out what those are yet, have you?

    --

  • Yep, yur gonna wanna watch out fer dem derr trolls. They ben' all up in my still, and feedin' 'em only makes it wors'n't'wuz.

    --
  • Everytime I stop a download on Gnutella, Windows blue screens. As much as I'd like to just say "Oh Windows is just being a POS as usual." I have to blame gnutella. Oh well, it is still in it's early formation. It will get better once it reaches 1.0 and goes open source. I'm curious to know if anyone else is having that same blue screen episode.

    -PovRayMan
  • If you read the FAQ, it also refers to Gnutella as a "servent" in a "servent-to-servent" network, because any Gnutella can be either a client or a server for other clients, with no pre-arranged restrictions...

    um, isn't that what a "peer" is? a node in the network that doesn't have a pre-arranged server or client status?
  • Try choosing a plausible value, like 14k or 28k... I don't think anyone is gonna be fooled into thinking you're running Gnutella over a 1200 baud connection (unless there's a C64 port of Gnutella out) :)
  • It's loosely a knock-off of Napster. Maybe. Kinda sorta.

    See it as a napster for ALL files (not just MP3's) without a central server, instead all the clients act as connection relays.

    Greetz SlashDread
  • Not only is this not true GNU software in that they're not releasing the source code ("until 1.0"), but it's not anything spectacular. There are frequent comments about how the system is unsuccessful. Also, there are other programs, posted on freshmeat, that do the same thing.

    Chris Hagar
  • a slashdot reader posted this in one of the comments of an article and got moderated down for some reason.

    Perhaps because the article didn't have anything to do with Gnutella? Just a guess.
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.

  • Actually, it could be that they're making a play on the word "Nutella", which is a wonderful hazelnut chocolate spread that can be found all over the globe (at least in Northern Florida and Eastern Germany).
    You never know, eh?
  • Is to continue development of this 3l33t program. The source will self-destruct in five seconds.

    Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?

  • So, in order to slow down the number of folks trying to download from my machine, I need to set my speed to a T1? ;-)

    Slowest Dang T1 I've ever seen!

    CSG_SurferDude
  • If you're on a 33.6 modem, you're already throttling bandwidth :-)
  • Note to CmdrTaco, change title of site from "News for nerds. Stuff that matters." to "News for closed-minded open-source zealots who will attack anything that isnt open source as if Lucifer himself made it".

    If you dont find something interesting, then dont read it. If you dont like something, go someplace else. You didnt like windows, so you went to linux (or something open-source like it). You went somewhere else. There are other news sites which have news for geeks. Although most of them dont havbe the nice comment systems for people to abuse and flame though. (yes i know this is a flame) And dont get me on the "lucifer himself" thing. I'm atheist, i dont believe in God, or Satan, or anything.

    Eraser

  • Not everything one Gnutella is piracy. Yesterday I searched for 'txt' and found nice little, perfectly legal, zip file containing txt's of various ICQ exploits.

    As one of those coders (I just wrote a Gnutella IRC bot - go to efnet irc and /msg gnurd !help), I don't really see a problem. Sure there are a lot of pirates (read as "script kiddies that don't even know how to use scripts and OSS vigilantes" (there's, that's me flamebait -1 for the day)) that will abuse the system, but that doesn't make the system illegal. Irc is, in a way, a type of decentralized file distribution system. Go to #warez (or one of the less obvious more content channels), do a search or just wait for the spam. Then you create a direct DCC connection. There. That's gnutella but using a centralized network for decentralized file sharing. That doesn't mean irc should be shut down (it should be shut down for other reasons, I hate it, but I'm on it all the time, and writing leet-o gnutella irc bots :).

    Sue me for writing my bot, I don't care (actually, I kind of do now that I don't have legal insurance, but I do have Microsoft Stock..oh, wait...shoot..nevermind). My bot doesn't transfer files. It just provides a means of searching of vast "database" (I use that term lightly, gnutella cracks me up in a lot of ways) of files and returns results. Much like Google, but not nearly as cool.

    Now for the highly philosophical part of the post where I wax intellectual about the legal system in our country, drawing parallels between the corporate and individual world. By this point the previous paragraphs would have shooed away all the moderators, so I should be able to post this and not get moderated up. Ok, here goes:

    It seems to me that a good number of corporations are starting to get litigious simply because they don't want to deal with the responsibility of running a corporation. It's like in the private sector, someone's kid gets hurt by _________, all of a sudden that parent is *^&$% psycho and on a sue-happy spree. Excuse me, 1) getting hurt is part of life 2) where's your adult supervision? People don't want to take responsibility for their actions and instead turn to the not so efficient court system to solve their problems. This is most relevant to the DVD problem. The DVD consortiuum messes up, it was their responsibility to do something, they messed up, and now they're are suing all the kids on the playground that hurt their feelings. . In summation, people don't want to take responsibility for their actions, and they don't want to take responsibilty for their responsibilities. You smoked cigarettes for the last 10 years and now you have cancer? Ha! I can just hear the surgeon general chanting "Told you so". All those years you told your friends "I like the way it tastes. I can quit. Smoking a little won't hurt me. It's my &*^$%ing life I can do what I want." you now want to recoup from the Tobacco companies? Screw you! And the government (read: me the tax-payer) shouldn't have to pay for treating your ass either. (Side note: The tobacco companies should be regulated and controlled and basically dicked to hell and back. Screw them. They have preyed on society since the dawn of time and they should pay....but not because some ditz decided smoking was cool when she was 24 and ended up with cancer and a premature baby).

    Ok, that's it, I have to go to work. Stop suing people for your own mistakes, go play with my irc bot, but don't break him, he's still kind of fragile (I wonder what slashdot will do to his cache that I don't clean up yet), and moderate this post up. I'm going to go do the same on some other article.

    Cheers,
    Joe

  • I kind of got a kick out of the nifty rip of the microsoft.com site design. :)

    --

  • Its problem with their protocol. First of all, due to their exclusive use of TCP connections, we run into several problems.

    1) You have little to no bandwidth flow control, as they are relying on the operating system to run data back and forth.

    2) Loss of efficiency over local networks. On a LAN, bouncing packets around between many servers on the same subnet is a horrid waste; the packets can be sniffed, however, and the host identified nonetheless, with a straight tcp connection.

    3) TCP is horrible for single-packet queries and responses. Duh. TCP is for large data flow. Using it for single queries is just laziness, for those who don't want to take the time to code in data timeouts.

    4) Server recurrence: This is more a problem of the overall design, not tcp, but it related to #2. No part of the spec shows how to stop deep loops, which we know would occur very frequently in large networked environments such as colleges, and in groups of friends.

    5) Bandwidth flooding: The constant connection through several computers at once for every search is a *tremendous* drain which could be eliminated quite easily, especially on local subnets. Picture a max of 5 levels deep, and an average of 3 connections per client/server. And to make the math easier, no connections loop backwards. We're looing at an averate of 243 connections going through each computer (scaled by the percent of those people that are online). 243 times the traffic for just a direct connection, on every single packet that goes through. This is horrible. And unnessisary.

    All of these issues are taken care of in Antioch... but that will be a while before release. For now, just bug the gnutella folk to support udp, and to use it to take advantage of subnets (again, you're not going to lose anonymity over local subnets - you never had it in the first place, due to packet sniffing. And, by writing your own udp packets (which we plan to leave as an option for those who run their client as root) you *can* give anonymity over the local subnet (fake source IPs and fake destination IPs, being 2 of them)). Just my 2 cents.

    - Rei
  • I can hear the guys at AOL already:

    Get thos guys from gnullsoft here!!!! NOW!!!
    And call those guys from the spanish inquisition, no even better get the mpaa+riaa+microsoft legal departments. I want to know who 'has acces to the source'!!!!!!!

    Grtz, Jeroen

  • Damn, that's a pollyanna view if I've ever heard one.

    --

  • I haven't had a chance to look over the protocol and specs yet, so until then, has anyone analyzed this for scalability? I'd be curious to see how this would project up a few orders of magnitude...
  • Would someone kindly describe in reasonable detail what the heck Gnutella is?

    Despite digging around its web site and reading numerous threads, all I can find is a vague sense that it's loosely a knock-off of Napster. Maybe. Kinda sorta. A product's home page isn't particularly useful if it doesn't tell newcomers what the product is and why they should care!

  • what was the previous ver number? i was surfing the other night at about 7:30 and saw this ver on a site and d/l'd it, then log in here today to see this . . . wierd . . .

    so my post is about what versions have been, who knows where source is, and what is latest dev build,
    -
  • Alright, thus far gnutella has made the front pages of lots of groups, but who actually was first responsible for this? Just curious. Nullsoft guys?! Oh well, i wouldn't mine getting my hands on some of those Linux guys to work on the Ya!Tow Linux. [yatow.com] NOw, that would be coool!

  • Make Requests here. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh well, I guess I should shut up and code then, shouldn't I? :)

    Unless you are already working on a clone, probably not. There are already a heap of clones under development. Take a look here [nerdherd.net].

    There is a gnutella chat forum at gnutella.nerdherd.net/phorum [nerdherd.net], and there is a section there for making feature requests too. I think the clone developers probably keep an eye on these.

    For anything else gnutella based, you can probably find the answer somewhere on gnutella.nerdherd.net. Just browse around the site a bit.

    BTW, .56 has been out for three or four days now. You need to speed up that back end processing Slashdot ;)

  • Yes, but do they have throttling implemented yet? So far I've tried getting on and in the span of a minute had 15 people downloading from me. I would like to keep at least *some* of my bandwidth.
  • You could try limiting the perceived line speed. Just reduce your line speed to a value of say 1 kb or something like that. Social engineering works suprisingly well.

    I suppose I could do that. I don't mind sharing my stuff, I just mind doing it for twenty people at once. :)

    Even Napster doesn't really do this well. You can make it so it only sends 1 file per person at a time, but end up with 20 people getting one file each. They need a global # uploads.

    Oh well, I guess I should shut up and code then, shouldn't I? :)

  • It's not your fault, but you've been seduced by the same "Shakespeare philosophy" that most everyone in the world has: that the people who make the best "art" are the ones either doing it for the money or making a lot of money from it. While it was for the Bard, in almost all cases this is just not true. What follows is pure judgement, but I've found that most of the things played on the radio, MTV, and recieving Grammies, blows. I don't know if I'm growing up, or what, but it seems like music has gotten just horrible in the past few years, especially w/r/t hiphop & "alternative" (whatever that is). Conversely, most of the music I listen to and actually enjoy is from rather obscure bands that no one has heard of.

    I'm not trying to be a too-good-for-the-mainstream elitist when I say this, but rather to prove a point: the best artists usually, nay, almost always, aren't making a ton of money. Look no further than the Billboard charts to see what I mean: both the Backstreet Boys & N'Sync, who literally have no - no - artistic talent (they were assembled, don't write their own songs, don't create their own dance routines, or even their own dance styles (we have Michael Jackson to thank for that), really can't sing, etc.) are raking in millions of dollars right now. Same with Ms. Spears and all the rest. I'm not saying everyone in big-time music is a sellout, but the first people to cry foul when MP3s cut palpably into their record sales would be the aforementioned.

    In relation to what you said, namely "If creators of content stop making money, they stop making content," well, this is wrong. You make the flawed assumption that CD sales would simply dry up like a well, when in reality it has been shown again and again (anecdotally) that people who download MP3s find themselves buying more CDs. Hell, with all the progress MP3s made last year, Napster, Lycos creating an MP3 search, more bandwidth, CD sales still rose 10%. People want the convenience of a CD, or whatever will succeed them, and very very few people know or have the motivation to convert their MP3s to WAVs and burn them in comparison to how many are buying CDs as a whole.

    Without even getting into the issues of concerts and merchandise sales, I'd conjecture that it will always be possible for an artist to make money, even without "a new paradigm". But let's assume you are right for a moment; CD sales drop drastically and the business becomes a lot less lucrative - is this really a bad thing? I don't think so. The first people to cry foul at such a situation would be people who only care about the money - vis. the Spears, Simpsons, and N'Sync's of the world. And as I said above, I think they suck. That's my opinion, but it's also a lot of other ppl's. I hear it all the time.

    Artistry is a labor of love, not money, and history supports me. I'm hard pressed to think of a truly prolific (thus, talented) artist who was motivated purely by cash, fame, or legacy. Hawthorne, Van Goch, Beethoven, Hemingway, Hendrix, even the Beatles, in the end - more or less, none of them gave a fuck. The artists who would throw in the towel simply because a certain portion of their sales? Maybe they should find a new job, because I have yet to find one who is worth listening to anyways. Nail me all you want for the "small artist" just trying to eek out a living, but remember I'm assuming that CDs won't ever be phased out in favor of pirated MP3s, and I think I'm right. Me may reach a point (probably will) where a critical mass of people have the technical know and sufficient motivation to will this into a reality. But that takes time, and in that time will come new formats with more piracy protection, and the pendulum will swing back towards the record companies as audio piracy again becomes an obscure little hobby taken up by techies and poor, smart college kids.

    It will always be possible for talented people to make money showcasing their work, simply because a lot of people are willing to pay to appreciate talent - if you've ever spent a couple hundred bucks on front row seats for a Lakers game or tennis match, you know what I'm about. People will not pay for talent, and if your work consists or two or three marginally catchy radio singles and twelve turkey songs with little replay value, then MP3 will kill you, because people will get the same satisfaction from MP3 that they might from your CD (get who I'm talking about? hint - already mentioned them twice). For anyone that is worthwhile to listen to, that produces intersting, I say you have nothing to worry about.

    --
  • I recommend people take a look at the projects listed at http://www.cypherspace.org/links.html [cypherspace.org] and http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net].
  • Distributed stores that cannot be shut down or traced are important. But it seems to me that the Gnutella protocol has some serious problems with bandwidth management, security, authentication, and tracability. With the original Napster application, sharing MP3s, those where less important than when you start sharing executables and other content.

    There are several open source projects already trying to develop cryptographically secure, robust, distributed file storage and web services. Why not try to help out with those?

    Keeping it simple is generally good, but I think Gnutella is keeping it too simple.

  • I don't know about that. When I'm running Napster on a high-speed line, the servers that say 14.4 modem speed and have low pings are often the first ones I try--and ofttimes I'm rewarded with a 20-30K per second download. Damn, those are some fast 14.4 modems--I'd love to have the compression technology they must be using. :)
  • Gnut [umr.edu] is a version of Gnutella for UNIX and is quite excellent...it's updated quite frequently by it's maintainer, awesjosh, and works great on Red Hat 6 - some people are designing gtk interfaces to it.

    I have some pages on Gnutella and it's clones [wheres.com] as well, with a PHP search engine, relatively recent list of working hosts and so forth myself.

  • Hey, I put (flame in the tag).

    And what exactly was your argument again, oh yeah ..

    Frankly, I don't necessarily see why there should be any defined expiration of the copyright.

    and you we're saying?
    --
    o.k. flames aside (for now).

    I am defending the public perception of the people who code gnutella. If you are one of them, why are you doing this? I'm not, probably won't be. I did buy a CVS book this weekend, so we'll see. These people are doing this because they want too. The only things they need from you are praise, hopes, and bug reports. And cash when they sell it. This shit you can shove back up your ass.

    Your original flames against the people building the program..

    "GnutellaNet sure seems to be collapsing under it's own weight" (takes notice)
    "It's been over a week since I've had anything successfully download." (then move on, slowpoke)
    "I have been running it, but am quickly starting to realize that there isn't much point to it, anymore" (so go away)
    "once people leech the stuff" (what?!)
    "thus reducing the potential load on my machine" (would that be the load of all the developement tools?)
    "I know that the pages about the program, claim that it's a tool for filesharing. But be realistic. " (yes, maybe we should)
    "There are a million easier ways to share files, that are far more reliable. " (And you're not using them ..because..? {emphasis mine})
    "I'll email it to him. " (good, you do that. (power building {he's at 150K, Cap'n!))
    "Or I'll toss it onto something like FilesAnywhere. " (so you won't even link for me, eh?)
    "The only reason that I can think of, that people love stuff like this, is it's so much more anonymous than even an FTP site." (true, perhaps SSN's would be better as logins, twit (wonders if it's worth it {250K, I'm gettin' out of here, Cap'n})
    "On Gnutella, et al, nobody has to identify themselves at all." (some would call it freedom)
    "Just as a minor point, some cable systems use DHCP, and apparently PacBell DSL is starting to use it as well." (so minor as to be matched only by your usefulness)

    and then the kickers.

    "------ Count me grateful to MS. If they make it too easy to use, I'll have to get a real job."

    (insult everyone who thinks for a living, a weak joke perhaps, ...chuckle...)

    "I work with NT on a daily basis, because that's what the world uses. But it's just a tool." [slashdot.org]

    It's a tool, and so are you. So when I said you were an "idiot", I wasn't joking. Idiots abound in this thing we call the Net. It is my duty to help point out to other would-be idiots, what one looks like, and how, precisely, they should be treated.

    Did I say *idiot*, I meant complete fuckin' idiot, the kind of idiot that drools about lickin' grandma. The kind of shit-slurping dumbass that defends known felons. Didn't realize that, about your precious NT. Not only are they sick fuckin' thievin' bastards up there in Redmond, they're convicted criminals. And they still advertise on fuckin'TV DURING THE BIGGEST FUCKING COLLEGE BASKETBALL GAME OF THE YEAR!. So contortitionists like you can suck themselves off to that oh'so' grooovy beat. Fuck you and the bits you rode in on. Unicorn, your a thorn in my fine crusty ass, the only mythical thing about you is your intelligence and grasp of reality, find another virgin and maybe you can join the rest of us. The ones who don't take it up the ass all day and like it, begging for more, harder, bigger. How did you get around mommy's protection lock anyway? Aren't the Teletubbies on! Ohh, Inky-dinky-winky, he's my faavorite!.

    Q:Smarter, better, nicer
    A:All words I'd rather give to pile of whale dung that just raped my sister, shot my dog in the head, and got its MCSE, than to you.

    Now, if you weren't such an idiot, you would realize...(continued) [wahcentral.net]

    ..and that's all I got to say about that, 'cept for the .sig, which you also don't understand.

    (aaaaahhh)
    --
  • Seriously... THis thing just encourages software/mp3 piracy.. it makes it so easy that every little -joe-suburban-14-year-old-retard can now leech their very own copy of a Matrix Rip.

    It has the the potential to take the warez/piracy scene from it's quasi-underground status (IRC, FTP's, some web sites) and shove it down anyones throat that wants anything.

    PLus I'm more than a bit disturbed that I kept on seeing many many many searches for "britney spears naked" showing up on my search monitor..

    Sheesh.. damn kids today... frickin' raging perverts/warez jockeys, thats all they are...

    ---
    And that's my crappy opinion
    I don't spell check
    ---
  • Seriously... THis thing just encourages software/mp3 piracy.
    Welcome to the digital age - copying (not "pirating", there's no theft or violence involved here) can no longer be regulated. Deal with it. It's time to drop the idea of creators profiting from a state-granted monopoly on making copies, and come up with a new pardigm to support artists and authors.
  • But you have to come up with a new paradigm now, not later!
    Yes, I've been saying that for two or three years now.
    If creators of content stop making money, they stop making content. It is as simple as that.
    I don't know about that...I know many people who make make music, art, poetry without getting paid, myself not least among them. But it's a good thing if creators can get paid, yes.
    I don't know what the new paradigm should be, and you didn't suggest one either.
    Not in that message, no, but I have discussed it before. My suggestion is that copying of audio or video recordings be unrestricted, but that the for-profit sale or use of copies be subject to royalites. What I have in mind is something like the exisiting system of music performance royalties presently in place in the US - copying a CD should be recognized as being just as free as an musician performing a song at a party, while selling that copy would be like playing that song in a bar (in which case ASCAP or BMI gets a nickel to forward to the songwriter).

    Of course, there's nothing to say that the artist can't sell CDs and make a profit there - if RedHat can sell a CD that can be freely copied, why not your favorite band? And when the net takes the corporate bastards out of the loop so that the artist, rather than the record company, get most of the money, it's not so bad if sales fall dramatically.

    Add to that concert tickets, merchandizing, and all the other secondary sources of income that artists enjoy today, and I don't think we have to worry about starving artists any more than we do today.

    Some people are trying adverts, but from my perspective, they don't seem to be working. Personally I hate them, and block and filter out all adverts that people try to send my way.
    Me too - banner ads suck. I'm working on an idea I had a few weeks ago for a somewhat less odious approach to sponsorship; I'll submit to /. and Freshmeat when the write-up and sample implementation are ready, hopefully within the next few weeks. (If you're curious, drop me a line and I'll e-mail you a first draft, I could always use feedback.)
  • You make a very good point about people not sharing their stuff, but these problems can be fixed by changing the Gnutella protocol, so lets talk about the possible fixes.

    First, you can just limit how much of your bandwidth Gnutella allows people to use. Second, you can install systems which figure out which sever containing the file has the shortest ping times (they may do this now). Third, you can install a referal system where your system refuses to send a file to anyone within a day/week of sending it to someone (unless there is some local high bandwidth execption from the second category). Machine A would remember that machine B downloaded a file recently and tell machine C who now wants the file to go get the file from machine B. If B dose not have it then his IP address is blacklisted from A and C for a period of time. You could construct a "reputation system" to handle changing IP addresses if you wanted, but that would be more copmplex (and you probable do not want dialup people using Gnutella anyway). Fourth, you can market Gnutella cache servers for ISPS and colalges (note: the 3rd option might force these servers to let the whole internet use them).

    Actually, the 3rd solution might make static IPs a bigger selling point for ISP, which is a very good thing. (If you live in a dynamic IP pool then there may be someone getting all the IPs blacklisted by leeching)

  • not (Score:2)

    by Hollins ( 83264 )
    This project was not stopped on the basis of legal grounds. It was stopped because AOL was afraid Time Warner would throw a hissy-fit when it learned that AOL programmers created a decentralized file sharing system that can potentially be used to pirate media.

    The fact is, I've read nothing that indicates this protocol or its implementation (through gnutella or any other system) is inherently illegal.
  • I was wondering if anyone still has or will be implimenting leech servers. It is extremely nice in a settting where one cannot modify the installed program base. However I don't think that this is something that people like very much.
  • Yes, but do they have throttling implemented yet? So far I've tried getting on and in the span of a minute had 15 people downloading from me. I would like to keep at least *some* of my bandwidth.

    You could try limiting the perceived line speed. Just reduce your line speed to a value of say 1 kb or something like that. Social engineering works suprisingly well.
  • According to the FAQ [nerdherd.net], this program is "a tool for general peer-to-peer file-sharing" that does not need the Wrapster archiver. "It can be used to share spreadsheets, source code, design documents, really any file on your computer," meaning it could provide a distributed system for sharing files, so that mirrors of popular free software projects don't get Slash-DoS'd as easily.
  • 0.56 was out a couple days ago. My timestamp on the installer file from the initital download is 12:34 on March 30, and I don't even know when it actually became available. Actually, I've seen 3 new versions in the last two weeks or so now--development seems to be speeding right along. It is getting a lot more stable quite quickly, though. The one three versions back loved to BSOD on me on a fairly regular basis.

  • Re:servent-to-servent (Score:3)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:29AM (#1155014)
    Well, it could be, but not always.
    When a gnutellaNET search query goes out, it is not transmitted 'peer to peer', ie, directly from you to each of the 2000 other servants. It is routed through gnutellaNET from host to host.

    If gnutellaNET is a peer to peer network, so is the internet.

  • the source... (Score:3)

    by dlc ( 41988 ) <dlc&sevenroot,org> on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:28AM (#1155015) Homepage
    • these versions are being produced by someone with access to the source code

    When will this someone make the code available? If the source is not supposed to be out there, floating around, you would think that it benefit from being distributed. Stick it on a few anonymous servers, have a bunch of people archive it on their harddrives, and then eventually, distribute it on via gnutella.


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • Unfortunately, there are still WAY too many problems with Gnutella.

    • Searches still hit every machine on the network. A significant portion of my bandwidth goes to dealing with all the fools looking for Star Wars, The Matrix, Sex, Porn, P0rn, .mpg, .avi, and Debbie does Dallas! This situation will only get worse as more and more folks use this software. This can only be solved by some kind of centralized search server (ala Nappy), or a distributed set of search servers (Fast Machines on Fast connections "Volunteer" to ast as a search server.)
    • Some kind of Bandwidth throttling is Necessary. Having 14 folks downloading from my poor little PC at the wrong end of a 33.6 connection is silly. Unfortunately, Setting my speed to 28K on Gnutella doesn't do much. You would think these folks would abort the transfer when the transfer rate goes to 0.1 K/s, but no......
    • Gnutella needs some better regular expressions, and some way of limiting responces by filesize, connection rate, etc.
    • Some kind of chat mechanism is needed. I saw too many folks using the "search history" as a chat mechanism. (Talk about Chat lag.)
    • A better Time-Out mechanism is still needed. If I don't start downloading in 5 seconds, the transfer rate is going to be too slow to bother with. (This should be, of course, user definable.)


    CSG_SurferDude

  • Re:Scalability? (Score:3)

    by GhostCoder ( 108387 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @07:55AM (#1155017)
    It's not very scalable. I don't know what the limitis, I haven't looked at it that hard, but I know that the network will most likely collapse under itself if currently implemented in its current state.

    Example:
    With 2500 hosts person A connects up to the network, that person sends an INIT broadcast message to the host he's immediately connected to, person B. Person B sends it out to everyone else he's connected to, etc. Then the replies start coming back, single-cast, to person A from 2500 other nodes (or possibly less, due to TTL). Searches happen the same way, except this time with more data.

    A couple of problems I see: 1) with more hosts, the number of ping messages sent and the number of ping replies sent will grow (linearly, I think). 2) With an average TTL of 7 it is possible that one node may not be able to reach a segment of the network (any other node that's 8 or more hops away).

    The protocol needs to be modified so that there are other ways of getting host information. Maybe a master browser or two. Someone can decide, or be elected a master browser. That client collects a number of hosts, and should a new host connect they can choose to ping the entire network, or talk to the master browser.

    Another thing is that it really isn't necessary, as far as I can tell, to ping the entire network to see who's there, other than to possibly get additional hosts to connect to. That could be gotten in much better way. Gnutella has a list of other hosts, why can't it send those to each new person that's connected, rather than them creating a small flurry of activity on the network?

    There are other issues that I've run across while developing my gnutella irc bot (gnurd - "/msg gnurd !help" on efnet). I think the developers will work out something, intelligent routing, etc. But in my opinion large changes to the protocol would have to be made to scale up past 10k people or so.

  • Collapsing under it's own weight (Score:4)

    by unicorn ( 8060 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:47AM (#1155018)
    Maybe it's just me, but the GnutellaNet sure seems to be collapsing under it's own weight, and user's greed. I have been running it, but am quickly starting to realize that there isn't much point to it, anymore. It's been over a week since I've had anything successfully download. And over the weekend, at least half a dozen people grabbed a huge mpg off my system, how many copies of it are now available for grabbing - 1. Nice to see that once people leech the stuff, they have no intention of sharing it back out, thus reducing the potential load on my machine.

    And last but not least, what's the point anyhow. I know that the pages about the program, claim that it's a tool for filesharing. But be realistic. There are a million easier ways to share files, that are far more reliable. If I have a file to share with a bud, I'll email it to him. Not tell him to log into Gnutella, and grab it. Or I'll toss it onto something like FilesAnywhere. The only reason that I can think of, that people love stuff like this, is it's so much more anonymous than even an FTP site. After all, someone has to be a designated contact for a domain name. On Gnutella, et al, nobody has to identify themselves at all.

  • Protocol specs URL correction (Score:4)

    by dlc ( 41988 ) <dlc&sevenroot,org> on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:32AM (#1155019) Homepage

    ...Actually, the protocol specs are at http://capnbry.dyndns.org/gnutella /protocol.html [dyndns.org]

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • I wonder...? (Score:5)

    by emerson ( 419 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @09:25AM (#1155020)
    I wonder how the FSF feels about the GNU name being to promote a piece of software whose authors allege they won't give out its source code until the 1.0 release is done, which now looks exceedingly unlikely ever to happen?

    I wonder why Slashdot keeps talking about this software as if it were open source and GNU-happy, when it's not, and may never be?

    I wonder if this community is really as strict about its beliefs as it would like to believe, or if it has degraded, as I've long been suspecting, into a what-can-I-get-for-free-as-in-beer crew, just a tiny step above warez d00ds in the ecological chain?


    --

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