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BitTorrent's Loss is eDonkey's Gain? 437

Posted by CmdrTaco from the rolling-with-the-punches dept.
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". "
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BitTorrent's Loss is eDonkey's Gain? More

BitTorrent's Loss is eDonkey's Gain?

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  • This is news? (Score:5, Funny)

    by thc69 ( 98798 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:52AM (#13435371) Homepage Journal
    I was under the impression that eDonkey is what everybody uses for file sharing these days, and that BitTorrent was mostly used for software distribution (Free and Open Source, mostly).

    • Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PsychicX ( 866028 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:57AM (#13435414)
      In other news, the MPAA, RIAA, and similar organizations are still stumbling around like friggin morons, trying to kill all file sharing because it is fundamentally evil. God fobrbid they change their business model [arstechnica.com] to avoid becoming obsolete.
      • "In other news, the MPAA, RIAA, and similar organizations are still stumbling around like friggin morons, trying to kill all file sharing because it is fundamentally evil. God fobrbid they change their business model to avoid becoming obsolete."

        In other news, Congress repeals all laws regarding theft. Shopowners are told that shoplifting is now legal, and they should change their obsolete business model.

    • Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mr Guy ( 547690 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:01AM (#13435449) Journal
      At least, that was the impression I came to after I tried to use eDonkey for a while. After a half dozen or so downloads, I finally said screw it and went to Blockbuster.

      I figure, in a way, I'm doing Blockbuster a favor. I typically watch movies only once or twice, so I'm just taking their "No Late Fees" policy to the extreme. They are pretty clear that the return refers to the rental, and doesn't terminate your right to view. So I figure as long as I don't distribute I can maintain a moral ambiguity long enough to justify ripping the movie and returning it, on time, to watch when it's more convenient. That way, unlike with a movie purchase, they have the hard copy to rent to someone else, and it's back in the store the day. As long as I don't distribute, it seems to be exactly the same as established precedent law on time shifting.

      Flawed logic, perhaps, but a nifty bit of justification I'd say.
      • That sure was a lot of fancy words. I'm sold.
      • I figure, in a way, I'm doing Blockbuster a favor. I typically watch movies only once or twice, so I'm just taking their "No Late Fees" policy to the extreme. They are pretty clear that the return refers to the rental, and doesn't terminate your right to view. So I figure as long as I don't distribute I can maintain a moral ambiguity long enough to justify ripping the movie and returning it, on time, to watch when it's more convenient. That way, unlike with a movie purchase, they have the hard copy to rent to someone else, and it's back in the store the day. As long as I don't distribute, it seems to be exactly the same as established precedent law on time shifting.

        Your behaviour is probably Bad© and AntiAmerican©, if not CommieAnarchistLibertarian© for US standards, but it's been ruled as perfectly legal in France, and therefore would probably be in most of Europe.

        • Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:4, Funny)

          by BobTheLawyer ( 692026 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:19AM (#13436216)
          Unless Napoleon won and I didn't notice, no French law is binding elsewhere in Europe.

        • Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:5, Funny)

          by tolkienfan ( 892463 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @01:27PM (#13437638) Journal
          Hear that?

          That's the sound of me packing for France.

          Oh wait - isn't France full of French people?

          Never mind...

      • I think that's what personal use comes down to. Imagine the following scenario in the fantastic world of 2029! People have the ability to record any stimuli that they experience, record it and play it back at a later date. If we have that ability, what right does anyone have to my experiences? I can relive that moment in the movie theatre, listening to that song, etc. Now take that as an analogy to today's content-providing world. Do content distributors have the right to tell me not to reminisce on the movie I saw last week? 'Course not. If I had perfect memory, I could relive it too.
      • "Flawed logic, perhaps, but a nifty bit of justification I'd say."

        Thanks for giving the RIAA/MPAA justification. Take notice, Slashbots. The parent post is a perfect example of why media industries regard their "customers" with such distrust.
        • Thanks for giving the RIAA/MPAA justification.
          Actually, before you level an accusation like that, you'd need to point how how my logic is flawed. Blockbuster makes the same money they would otherwise, thus the MPAA makes the same money they would otherwise, and I watch the movie when it's convenient. I can't see how this is illegal, except for the fact I have to use deCSS to do it. I don't even make a perfect digital copy, which was part of the stipulation of the Sony Beta case. I make a reduced qual
          • Here's how the (copyright) law reads:

            Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

            (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

            Nothing there about a "perfect" duplication. Ripping a DVD would (by my definition, anyway) constitute a reproduction.

            Aside from that, my point isn't to debate the merits of the Blockbuster/MPAA/RIAA business models. It's that actions like what you described gi

            • You have two problems in your point.

              First, you are assuming that all copyright laws are the same as US laws.

              Second, you are not considering the fair use rights. The problem with the status of the law today is that prior court decisions have not been reconciled with the DMCA.

              The DMCA specifically prohibits the actual act of circumvention of a copy protection for most purposes. Copying the work is no longer the violation, the circumvention of the copy protection is.

              I just wish this issue would get to

            • Subject to 107 through 122 (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Mr Guy ( 547690 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:25AM (#13436296) Journal
              107 is the four factor test. Again, I'm not a legal genious, so I'll refer generously to Stanford [stanford.edu] and the EFF [eff.org] for help in this matter.

              1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
              Personal use is clearly non-commercial.
              2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
              In this case, the work is creative which is a point for their side.
              3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
              In my case, it's a whole copy of the work, another point for their side, however it's a reduced quality copy which is a point for my side.
              4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
              With Blockbuster's particular business model, I've already demonstrated it's actually MORE profitable for them to have me rent a movie rip it in 20 minutes and return it. As for future sales loss, that's not relevant to this argument because of a crucial factor - I delete them after I've watched them. The Supreme Court (Universal City Studios v. Sony Corp., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)) ruled that a time shifted copy does not deprive them of revenue, and that was for a broadcast, not even a paid rental as in my case. I firmly believe that the courts would uphold my arguement that I rented the media that it's on but bought a license to watch the movie. In fact, Blockbuster's terms and conditions does not stipulate how many times you may watch a movie that you've rented, it merely stipulates how long you can keep the media. I've time-shifted the right to watch the movie until after the media is returned, but that doesn't negate my right to watch it, and the Supreme Court upheld my right to time shift it.

      • Re:Every movie recently released is secretly porn (Score:4, Interesting)

        by siegesama ( 450116 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:54AM (#13435956) Homepage

        That's almost the same thing I do with used CDs!

        1. Head on over to the local used CD place near campus, spend $100 on recommendations and stuff that looks interesting.
        2. Return home and rip and tag and organize everything nicely onto the dedicated storage machine.
        3. When I'm running low on cash, take my accumulated CD stack to said store and sell back
        4. Eventually repeat at 1

        The local brick and mortar gets a cut, and I get an ever-expanding library of music that's correctly tagged, in a format I prefer, and at a good bitrate.

        My experiences with downloading ripped media is that it's usually poor-quality. About the only thing useful is fan-subbed anime, and they're not on things like eDonkey

        Once I get some money stored up for a new RAID in the TB-range, I'll probably start following the same process with DVDs (unless it's something I end up really liking, in which case I prefer the nice case and cover and quality of the version bought from Amazon, like Firefly for example)

      • so I'm just taking their "No Late Fees" policy to the extreme

        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. R
    • Indeed, I was using Emule/ed2k network to download long before the Bittorrent / The Piratebay et. al. anwhere available, Personally I find more things on the Ed2k networks...
      As an example, there is NO WAY you can find a movie called "Rojo Amanecer" (mexican movie abou the October 2nd massacre in Tlatelolco) on any torrent, but it is available on Emule.

      I also used sometime Winmx, that was when I was looking for the digital version of back iusses of the GAme developers Magazine which I could not find on emule [gdmag.com]

      • Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:55AM (#13436646)
        I've tried giving eMule a whirl, but unfortunately after spending an enormous amount of time trying to both get it working, and once working, actually download files, I've come to the conclusion that it is best relegated to only rare files that can't be found on better services such as BitTorrent.

        My main complaints:

        1) Setup and use is much too confusing. While BitTorrent has streamlined the process by integrating such things as the "server" (tracker) into the torrent file, eMule tries to manage a list of servers, and doesn't seem to do a very good job of it.

        2) It doesn't "just work". Getting your client to connect to the kademlia network is a nightmare, and after the client launches, IF you have previously been on the network, you CAN expect it to connect. Eventually. Azureus, on the other hand, connects to it's Kademlia network in under a minute, and it works every time. Azureus can also use UPnP to autoconfigure your router for BitTorrent use.

        3) Downloads are slow. I thought I had left behind queues back in the days of fserves and Kazaa. There is nothing like having a file sit at 0% for several days because all the clients that have the file report that their queues are full. BitTorrent's method of isolating client instances into seperate swarms has eliminated this problem. Some clients, such as Azureus, have support for multiple swarms in one client instance, but ensure that each swarm is being properly handled, unlike eMule and it's queues (and queue limits).

        4) It is hard to search. If I do a search one minute on eMule, and then try a minute later, I get quite different search results, and most of the results have very few peers. With BitTorrent, I frequent the few search sites that I use, and get consistant, fast search results. Usually what I want to download has quite a few peers.

        5) eMule "swarms" have tons of useless peers. People who are leeching, or have full queues, or long queues, or are seeding too many files. In a BitTorrent swarm, EVERYBODY is uploading, because if they don't, nobody is going to upload to them, and they aren't going to get very far. BitTorrent users also tend to be dealing with less files at once (Such as only one or two), so they can "concentrate" on those files. An eMule client could be seeding hundreds or thousands of files.

        I will give eMule one thing, it DOES have a lot of rare stuff. It's very hard to download, as I spent a week downloading a 90MB file, but it was sufficiently rare that it was worth it. I will continue to use eMule for when I just can't find what I'm looking for elsewhere, but for more popular files, BitTorrent is a heck of a lot faster.

        The only real advantage of eMule, as I see it, other than having rare files, is that it is a tad more decentralized. Yes, it still has central servers which isn't, but a client can rely entirely on the Kademlia network (considering he can get the bloody thing bootstrapped with no servers). BitTorrent doesn't quite work like this yet. Trackers are now optional due to Azureus's own Kademlia network, and many torrents don't include a tracker at all (Of course this makes them azureus-only since no other BT client has a kademlia implementation that is compatible, or as good). BitTorrent still, no matter what else, requires a source of Torrent files, and that is usually going to be a web site.

        I suppose that technically there is no reason that torrent files couldn't be served up via Azureus's kademlia network... I'm not sure I want that to happen though, as the centralized source that is websites like TorrentSpy and PirateBay just work faster and more reliably than decentralized search solutions. Still, in a pinch...

        • Re:This is news? (Score:3, Informative)

          by irw ( 204684 )
          eMule does not pander to the "I want it NOW!" attitude.

          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?

          ...eMule tries to manage a list of servers, and doesn't seem to do a very go

    • Actually, since ED2k clients usually include browser integration for ed2k links, I've seen a lot of win32 projects using ED2k for distribution instead of BT. My problem is the clients - I use Shareaza, which sucks up all my high-speed-lite bandwidth and beats my 2ghz processor into a bloody pulp when I use it, even if I'm only getting 1k/s of download. The alternative would be to use that Java-based client - but running a JVM all the time would eat half my ram.

    • Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xtracto ( 837672 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:04AM (#13435482) Journal
      Indeed, I was using Emule/ed2k network to download long before the Bittorrent / The Piratebay et. al. anwhere available, Personally I find more things on the Ed2k networks...
      As an example, there is NO WAY you can find a movie called "Rojo Amanecer" (mexican movie abou the October 2nd massacre in Tlatelolco [wikipedia.org]) on any torrent, but it is available on Emule.

      I also used sometime Winmx, that was when I was looking for the digital version of back iusses of the GAme developers Magazine [gdmag.com] which I could not find on emule (less on bittorrent of course) and I think some japanesse or chinesse had it on WinMX because it was there. These days, I could find only the CD 2 of those archives.

       

  • don't spoil it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:53AM (#13435377)
    shhhhhh

  • Pffft eDonkey (Score:5, Funny)

    by roman_mir ( 125474 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:53AM (#13435378) Homepage Journal
    I moved from bittorrent to IRC. Now that's progress!

    • Re:Pffft eDonkey (Score:3, Insightful)

      by masklinn ( 823351 )

      Hah, I moved from Bittorent to newsgroups, THAT is what I call progress !

      • Re:Pffft eDonkey (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Doctor O ( 549663 )
        Actually, there are lots of people who believe that this [usenext.com] is a "brand new way of downloading". Of course, those are of the kind who came on the net when DSL was available and who have their machines on 24/7 just to download movies and music they'll never get to watch and listen to in their lifetimes.

        I've given up on downloading years ago. I just don't care enough to wait days for downloads to complete and find out how to a) uncompress the shitty, obscure compression format du jour and b) how to convert the s

  • Funny... (Score:3, Informative)

    by darkitecture ( 627408 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:53AM (#13435383)
    Funny... it was because of increased legal activity that I moved from eDonkey to BitTorrent.

    ...and started using PeerGuardian.

    • Re:Funny... (Score:2, Informative)

      by imogthe ( 742394 )
      I tried methlabs' http://methlabs.org/projects/peerguardian-linuxosx / [methlabs.org] but it almost brought my box to a grinding halt while loading some 18.000 rules into iptables. After that the box was virtually useless as the load average was around 20.0!
      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.

      • Re:Funny... (Score:4, Informative)

        by darkitecture ( 627408 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:08AM (#13435512)

        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%.

      • Re:Funny... (Score:3, Informative)

        by TheRealJFM ( 671978 )
        Yep, as the coder of the original PGLinux (a bash/perl script that imported the rules into iptables I can offically say that it sucked, and although it ran ok on my machine it still sucked. it just sucked slightly less than the previous "Linux PeerGuardians which just ran a long list of bash commands, while this version used iptables-restore to import a list of rules, which is IN THEORY (if iptables wasn't somewhat poorly planned for this purpose) much faster.

        However that was *over a year* ago - we picked u

    • PeerGuardian; false sence of security (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:07AM (#13435505)
      Often thought of as a means of evading the anti-piracy wings of corporations and groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, PeerGuardian offers little actual protection against the threat of prosecution. Users of Bittorrent often tout the application as a means of protection, but it offers little more than a false sense of security. Whilst anti-piracy organisations and groups will not be able to connect to peers or seeds using PeerGuardian, these peers and seeds are still broadcasting their IP addresses for anyone, including anti-piracy groups, to see.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian [wikipedia.org]

  • Funny... (Score:3, Funny)

    by cecille ( 583022 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:53AM (#13435384)
    I moved from eDonkey / eMule to bit torrent...Is it back in style again?

  • You'd have thought (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ixne ( 599904 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:55AM (#13435395)

    ... that the movie industry moguls had played Whack-a-Mole at the amusement parks before and learned something. Guess not.
  • How long is it going to be before the *AA realises that suing everybody they can see isn't working? Cat and mouse game indeed.

  • Legit or not? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Speare ( 84249 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:58AM (#13435419) Homepage Journal
    If the previous uses of [insert your old P2P tech here] were valid according to the laws of the country in question, then the movie industry should be smacked out of court and life moves on.

    If the previous uses of that technology were not valid according to the laws of the country in question, then the people who are sourcing the illicit data should be smacked around in court and life moves on.

    If you don't like those terms, stay the fuck away from data that you don't have a legal right to transfer, and produce more original data which will have the transfer rights (public domain, creative commons, gpl, whatever) you prefer.

    This has NOTHING to do with the trend to replace [insert your old P2P tech here] with [insert your new P2P tech here].

    • Re:Legit or not? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by orzetto ( 545509 )

      Are you saying that because Jack the Ripper used a scalpel, my surgeon has to operate me with a spoon? That since crackers use Linux, we should forbid it (yay, forbid computers altogether!)? That since speeders use cars, we all have to walk only? That since Lucrezia Borgia poisoned people, we should ban chemistry?

      Get the difference: there can be uses and abuses of the same thing.

      • No, I'm saying precisely the opposite, and quite clearly, I thought. Maybe you can't read.

        The technology is irrelevant. It's all the same for BitTorrent or eDonkey or whatever. Switching technologies has nothing to do with the core issue: current laws protect movie industry content in many countries. If you're copying movies that you aren't authorized by law or contract to copy, prepare to be squashed no matter what tech you are using. If the movie industry is suing to try to stop legitimate copyin

  • Where did you live... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LaserTank2005 ( 890708 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:58AM (#13435422)
    ...the last 4 years? That sounds if nobody ever heard of the ed2k network - now known as eMule / Kademlia...

    • Re:Where did you live... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:50AM (#13435912) Journal
      That sounds if nobody ever heard of the ed2k network - now known as eMule / Kademlia.

      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.

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by BlackCobra43 ( 596714 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:59AM (#13435429)
    Confused, the MPAA and RIAA have begun massively suing farms all across America.
  • This just shows that no matter what the people in legal suits do, they can't kill the sharing ... they cannot kill the internet RAWRR!! :-p

    Seriously, for any network they "shut down" 10 new will popup. The reason for that is that its hard to prove that they're used only for illegal file sharing, many like, BitTorrents and other havea very legitimate use.

    But, that's what makes the world go round these days and lawyers are all the more happy because that's more money in their pockets.

  • quality over quantity (Score:5, Informative)

    by Janitha ( 817744 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:59AM (#13435435) Homepage
    One might say that bit torrent is losing ground, but in what sense? The number of GB moving back and forth? the number of times you use it everyday for same purpose? Files found on bit torrent tend to be of higher quality and larger size compared to those found in eDonkey network? eDonkey network has files from 1K to several gigs. And torrent files also usually tend to be more legit than those found in eDonkey (as in falsely named, not always but sometimes and corrupt). So it could be that people are using torrents to download a movie using one step, compared to in eDonkey them having to download several copies at a time or simply redownloading since the first copy that was downloaded was not the right one. And admit it, the process for downloading a movie in both these networks are simple, but eDonkey is defintly easier (I don't think so, but many others do) so wouldn't the majority simply choose the easier one?
    • eDonkey tends to have more persistent files. With a tracker you usually end up with a Window of but so long before either the tracker expires or all the seders remove it in favor of other files.

      With the ed2k network, you find many more people who simply share out certain directories, so that those files are available whenever they're online, and for a very long period.

      As such, I find the eMule is a MUCH better place to look for less popular things.

      The drawback is that ed2k is usually a much slower way to g

  • eDonkey (Score:5, Informative)

    by Eminence ( 225397 ) <akbrandt@gmail.TEAcom minus caffeine> on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @09:59AM (#13435436) Homepage
    What I don't get is why the post doesn't provide link to some information about eDonkey network [wikipedia.org] and some [emule-project.net] clients [nongnu.org] to use [shareaza.com]. I know it can be found on the Net within seconds, but why not make the article more useful.

  • Being #1 is good? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:01AM (#13435446) Homepage
    I would hardly call being the #1 filesharing network a "gain", with the ??AA's being all lawsuity.

  • They're moving on? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by __aanmdr9234 ( 911276 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:01AM (#13435447)
    Let me get this straight - these people are moving ON to edonkey/emule? Most people who do filesharing started off on eDonkey and then switched to Bittorrent for the speeds it offered.

  • This isn't the end (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChrisF79 ( 829953 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:01AM (#13435453) Homepage
    Let's face the facts. As soon as the RIAA or whatever organization starts scaring people away from one technology, everyone migrates to the next. To see a story touted as news about people switching from torrents to eDonkey seems like common sense really. In six months or so, I think we'll be reading a post on here about how people are switching from eDonkey to whatever comes next. It's a cycle with the organizing bodies constantly playing catch-up.
  • let me guess, they have a new commercial tool that focusses on eDonkey rather than bittorrent?
  • If they keep *telling* the various special interest groups what we're using to rape their respective industries, no fucking wonder there are new rounds of lawsuits every time large groups of people jump from one sinking ship to another...

    Bastard media, be on our side for once.
    • If they keep *telling* the various special interest groups what we're using to rape their respective industries, no fucking wonder there are new rounds of lawsuits every time large groups of people jump from one sinking ship to another...

      Bastard media, be on our side for once.

      You do realise that it's the media industry you're raping, right?
  • What the article fails to mention is that in South Korea, only old people are using BT now.
  • Bet the Folks at RIAA and MPAA thought it was fun to play whack a mole when they were kids!

    See It's Karma! First you have fun whacking the game, Now you're fighting for your lives attempting to whack any file sharing out there!

    Ooh, It's Napster! WHACK! OOOH it's KAZAA! WHACK! OOOH IT'S BITTORRENT ! WHACK! OOOH IT'S EDONKEY! WHACK!

  • eDonkey can't stop MPAA/RIAA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LexNaturalis ( 895838 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:09AM (#13435520)
    It doesn't matter if people move from Kazaa to BitTorrent to eDonkey, as the article mentions, because the internet traffic still ends up in the same place. At some point, the traffic has to go from your computer to another computer via an ISP or other such service (obviously assuming it's not a LAN). The MPAA/RIAA has taken to issuing subpoena's to ISPs, so even if eDonkey is "decentralized" the users can still get caught. I don't see what the point is, really. I mean, seriously... if the BBC is posting about it, do you think the over-priced greedy hawk lawyers of the RIAA/MPAA are going to ignore it?

  • Why is this news? (Score:2, Informative)

    by NubKnacker ( 787274 )
    Don't junkies move from one spot to another to buy their drugs after the cops bust a spot? File sharers are doing the same...

  • Different purposes... (Score:5, Informative)

    by EvilNight ( 11001 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:16AM (#13435580)
    Use bittorrent for popular, fast downloads. Once the torrent gets old, nobody is seeding anymore, and it dies off. That's when you fire up your preferred eDonkey client and go browsing. Things tend to persist a hell of a lot longer out there. That bullshit about the files being polluted and corrupted is a myth, as well. Since you can preview them instantly as they are downloaded, it's easy to spot the crap files if you manage to find any.

    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.
  • ...everything [uni-kl.de] hasn't gone to eDonkey yet!
  • And the RIAA&friends will never get it back in. Sue eDonkey, and there will be a next nextwork which will be used more.
    Anyway: To much work to sue everybody anyway, but it keeps them busy, in view, and gets their budget will get bigger to do their work (ie: Sueing)
  • According to CacheLogic, 60% of the traffic on the internet by the end of 2004 was made up of peer-to-peer activity, though it does not have a breakdown of how much of this is copyrighted material.
    My guess, all of it, except of what is known to be public domain.
    Copyright isn't evil. OSS is copyrighted, just like all those "quality" movies from Hollywood.
    Why do they always confuse "copyright" with .. uhm .. something else.
  • ...in terms of speed and file availability, as well as ease of use (built-in client searching which seems to work really well) it's very nice.

    However, the bigger servers (Razorback et al) don't always work very well with NAT - behind an ADSL router you can't change the setup of, you may as well not bother. In those cases, Bittorrent works faster because it usually ends up with more valid, reachable seeds/peers.

    Don't know if there's good technical reasons for the edonkey servers not allowing people like me o

  • shhhhh!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by vettemph ( 540399 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:24AM (#13435650)
    Why does slashdot keep letting the cat out of the bag? The first rule of P2P is don't talk about P2P.

  • My trouble with eDonkey clones (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:25AM (#13435652)
    What I find troubling with the Linux eDonkey clones (aMule, xMule) is that they:

    1: Do not offer as many features as their Windows counterparts,

    2: Not as stable on Linux as they are on Windows,

    3: Are plain ugly and

    4: Are damn slow on Linux.

    The only software I find a pleasure to look at and also exists for the Windows platform is OpenOffice.org and the GIMP. There are more open source softwares out there but I haven't found them.

  • Ummm, hate to break it to you guys but eDonkey is not new. The venerable "Donk" has been around in some fashion for about half a decade. Who thought this was news?

  • One Word.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DigitalJeremy ( 907237 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:30AM (#13435697)
    FTP.

    The ORIGINAL file sharing protocol. P2P's come and go - FTP will remain mighty!!

  • I was addicted to pirated movies (Score:5, Funny)

    by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:31AM (#13435703)
    I downloaded so many of them, that virtually spent all my time burning them to CDs and DVDs.

    Eventually I realized that I had no time left to actually watch any of it, so I deleted all my collection.

    Now I have more time, but no movies to watch.

  • The real problem with BT (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rAiNsT0rm ( 877553 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:31AM (#13435711) Homepage
    IMO is the whole tracker/seed deal. This part should have been made transparent to the point that users didn;t have to see or understand it. I personally never saw it as being that good of a system in the first place. It is not elegant nor does it lend itself to people using the software as it is intended.

    The whole BT thing is a good idea for software releases and large files people are looking to download from a single site, say I go to a distro site and have a choice of FTP/HTTP/BT but to use it for P2P is just useless in my eyes.

    The whole Zen "the interface is no interface" thing was a little unsettling too as I had no idea that my downloads were being slowed by my firewall back when BT first came out until I used a version that showed that there was a problem.

    I still think there is a place for BT and software like it, but not for P2P filesharing. As much as I hate to admit it, I like having n00bs and clueless users on my system so I can access stuff easier and faster. BT was more for the tech savvy and they tend to be smart enough/greedy to never seed a download unless they happened to walk away from a download that completed.

    I still pine for the days when Kazaa lite was not full of viruses/spyware/fake files and instead was a great easy quick system to get exactly what you wanted ASAP.
    • This isn't a mistake in bittorent design, bittorrent is not a filesharing program and was never meant to be a filesharing program. As you say, it's good as an FTP replacement, but the mass exodus to bittorrent for music/movies/warez trading was sheer idiocy. Claims of faster downloads (despite being blatantly false for anyone who actually tests it) are the only reason I can find for it, but even then it makes little sense. Everyone knows FTP is the fastest protocol for transferring files, but the days of pe

  • eDonkey? Yeah right (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pope ( 17780 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:46AM (#13435868)
    There's still not a 100% working OSX version of a client, and any number of BitTorrent ones, so I'll stick to what works for my system.

    All the DAP stuff I really wanted I got through torrents anyway.

  • The only way (Score:5, Insightful)

    by el_womble ( 779715 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @10:59AM (#13436007) Homepage
    to stop illegal downloading is to uninvent the wheel. Make ANY device that can digitize analog data illegal unless they are properly licensed by a *IAA authorized service provider. No home movies. No home recording, unless it is to analog media. In a sense make digitzers like stills. Anyone can make Whisky, its easy, unless the equipment to do so is illegal.

    I have little sympathy for the *IAA. Do you think they gave us CD/DVDs because they gave us better quality, or because they increased profit? The fact that they were too miopic to realise that the same technologies that were dropping their bottom line could enable consumers to replace them is karmic.

    The creators of optical media suing bittorrent et al, is like the great ship builders suing boeing and airbus. It shouldn't be allowed to happen. Artists need to stop looking for recording contracts and start looking for marketting contracts. You can still make money in popular arts, its just you can't expect to make money by selling digital facsimilies of that art.

  • my P2P round-up (Score:5, Informative)

    by dahlek ( 861921 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:05AM (#13436062) Homepage
    aMule is a nice linux client. The donkey is nice in that it has probably the biggest selection, but it's also S L O W.

    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:my P2P round-up (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Antiocheian ( 859870 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @02:03PM (#13437995) Journal
      Much to the hapiness of regular, responsible emule users, people like you will never have a satisfactory experience of the ed2k-kad network.

      You are a leecher.

      You entire posting, informative as it is, it is a cookbook for leechers. You don't like bittorrent because you have to seed. Too bad for you. You don't like emule because it's slow. Has it ever occured to you that its slow because people like you refuse to share and you get little credits? You like Gnutella because it allows you leech freely. And you like messing up the usenet by abusing any part of the word "privilege" that it used it be.

      I am glad you don't use ed2k. Just be aware that it works perfectly for those who contribute and those who share.

  • edonkey/emule is SLOOOOOOOOW (Score:5, Informative)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @11:13AM (#13436155) Journal
    If you are used to FAST bittorrent edonkey/emule is going to dissapoint you. For the most popular files it can take DAYS sometimes WEEKS to get a large file in the 100s of megabytes.

    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.
    • I shared out a folder I had with OLD device drivers and out of date software...files that nobody should want.

      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.

  • Notoriety = Bigger Target (Score:3, Informative)

    by venomkid ( 624425 ) on Tuesday August 30, 2005 @12:12PM (#13436820)
    It's a shell game at this point. eDonkey will be in BitTorrent's shoes soon enough.

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