I am basing this on Sonagi pulling down images of the recent anti-semitic comic book due to checking out specific copyright laws.

Everything we are talking about laughs in the face of copyright laws with utter glee….

…it is very susceptible to a government shutting it down, as history demonstrates.

RIP suprnova, elitetorrents, et al.

cptbbq, informative write up about the current state of p2p. Two reasons I jumped to torrents several years back was packets-from-many, which p2p didn’t offer at the time, and ratios, which, when enforced, tend to police the grab and goers.

Sonagi, to unspin your head install utorrent & peerguardian. Dead simple to use and well supported. Or if your ISP offers access to newsgroup servers like the undernet use your IRC client.

Gnutellanet is hardest still, and freenet is damn near impossible. And these network have been constantly updated, and revised. They aren’t “old technology”… and, they’ve incorporated the innovations of torrents…

The reason why Torrent downloads faster is that it is more popular (as chiamatt says its “where it is at”). In these systems more people mean more bandwidth.

This doesn’t mean that the network is optimal. Far from it. If just as many people used eMule or Gnutellanet, it would be just as fast, and you would get your historical content the way Madne0 talks about in #15. Being the most popular method at the moment doesn’t mean it is technically the best. People tend to stay with what works, regardless if something better is out there.

In the Donkey or Gnutella networks, the p2p network encompases all files of all users, while with torrents, the p2p environment only exsists around the file being downloaded. Everything else is just a link on a website, thus has serious issues as it is far from optimal, not as easily updatable with new files, requires these new files to specially formated as .tor files, and is vulnerable to legal attack.

…but is resillient against virus attack like the one on eMule (yay, back on topic!

Yes it does, which client did you use? If you use Gnutellanet I suggest you stay away form limewire now, they release substandard version to get you to upgrade to “pro”. And the developer of bearshare is a megalomaniac.

The problem is that they are loath to make the additions to the network they need to make it appropriate for the asian market. For Example they block search queries of 2 (or 3) characters because a search of three characters in engish (like “in”) will return every file with the word “in” and overload the network. But if you search in Korean and you just want songs by Hyori (효리), thats pretty distinct but will still get blocked.

Enough of that though…

chiamatt,

As far as torrents go, modern P2P networks like eMule and Gnutellanet work the same way as torrents but better, in that you get the same function of users downloading already downloded chunks form each other, increasing banwidth for every user downloading, but also it offers an integrated non targetable search network, something Piratbay.org and others like it can’t offer. As Torrent search engines operate through a website, it cannot gaurantee that it lists all torrents availabe (as they are listed independently) and furthermore it is very suseptible to a government shutting it down, as history demonstrates.

I’m not a computer wiz or remotely close to it - and I could be very wrong on how this all works - but with that disclaimer—

All of these are programs (except IRC I think) are programs that flip files into parts in a folder(s) you select for the program.

These files are searchable via file name and such.

So, for example, if I want a movie or song or an archived file of all the music by one band or an ebook or a video game or images or whatever…

I type in a search - it shoots back possible matches (for example, if I look for “The Big Lebowski” movie - there might be several file versions of the same exact movie) -

then I click on the files I want to download —

and the program begins downloading parts of it from different people - a chunk here - a chunk there.

As I download a part - I automatically also share it if someone wants it from me…

Emule and edonkey are older and slower - hence the names.

Torrent allows for faster downloads (don’t know the tech info behind that).

IRC is different. The way it looked to me - imagie the skyscraper Technomart in Seoul - and each room in the whole building is a chat room where people from all over the earth can mix and mingle - going from chat room to chat room.

But, IRC also allows more direct connections to someone else’s computer.

If I understand it — when you search and click a file to download via IRC - you are downloading the whole thing from one server or one other person’s computer….

It can be very fast in transferring the files.

Also, you can go to webpages that provide a seach function for Torrents and when you click on the links, it launches the program and begins to download the file.

I haven’t been using any of these programs for awhile, because while I am student-teaching and paying for grad school (yet again), I’m stuck with dial up….

which sucks out the …………. —-