Napster relied on a single server to store the files every user shared, provided a central file search, and even initiated file transfers between users. Due to this single point of failure, Napster collapsed once the server was shut down by RIAA.

Fortunately, the next generation of less centralized filesharing networks was already on the horizon. On the one hand there were completely decentralized networks like Gnutella. They used query flooding to find other clients, i.e. they just sent their requests from client to client until either enough results were found or the search timed out.

Yet this advantage of a completely server-independent network topology came with the disadvantage of the network not being scalable. Simply put, you can’t search the whole network efficiently.

On the other hand there was eDonkey2000 with its server-based network (first release on September 6th, 2000). Unlike with Napster, everyone could run a server. While the existence of multiple servers meant that the network couldn’t be shut down by closing a single central point, it also had the disadvantage that users could now only search for and share files with users on the same server.

This system had similarities with BitTorrent, at a time where the tracker was the sole mechanism through which to find other peers. However, with BitTorrent (started in the year 2001) this dependence on the tracker was intended because it meant that the tracker can control who is allowed to join the swarm, how many peers each client gets, etc…

The eDonkey2000 Network had a different design goal – a fully decentralized and yet scalable network. In this spirit eDonkey2000 started a new project called ‘Flock’ in May 2002. After beta testing it was renamed ‘Overnet’ and finally merged with the original eDonkey2000 client in August 2004.

In 2002 a new and rapidly growing client entered the ed2k network, a term which refers only to the server-based part of the eDonkey2000 network. An open source client for the ed2k network – our birthday-client eMule – was founded on May 13th, 2002 – 10 years ago today.

In June 2004, ed2k had about 2 million users while eDonkey2000’s Overnet network only had about 800,000 users. So eMule was the leading client in the ed2k network and together with BitTorrent it dominated the following years of filesharing.

Both networks, BitTorrent and eMule, slowly headed towards a more decentralized structure. In order to make files from all servers available to every user, eMule added keyword search via UDP to query all servers and source exchange between clients via TCP to get all available sources for a specific file. BitTorrent adopted the latter in peer exchange.

Early 2004 eMule implemented Kademlia, a decentralized DHT-like key-value store capable of finding sources as well as performing keyword search, thus making ed2k servers completely obsolete. Once again, BitTorrent headed in the same direction, implementing DHT in 2005.

DHT marks a revolutionary step in filesharing. Not just because you can download a file with only its hash (and a few nodes to bootstrap the network), but now a decentralized scalable network becomes available. While decentralized networks like Gnutella were capable of finding information using query flooding in O(n), DHT finds information in O(log2(n)). So if the size of the network doubles, only 1 additional request is needed on average – regardless of the actual size of the network.

The following example illustrates this advantage: Say you have a network with 2 million users and you want to find information about a specific file which unfortunately doesn’t exist in the network (i.e. no user shares this file). Using query flooding every client in the network has to be asked before we can be sure that the file isn’t available. Usually the search just runs into a time-out before, assuming (but not knowing) that the file isn’t available.

Thanks to DHT you only have to ask about 21 nodes (log2(2 mio)) before being sure that the file isn’t available in the entire network. Even better, this was the mathematically worst case scenario. Usually the actual number of required requests is much lower because on your search path you’ll likely reach the node closest to your requested file after only 3-4 requests (empirical evidence on eMule’s current Kademlia).

The next feature we think torrents should adopt is a real DHT-based keyword search. Tribler already made a step in that direction. However, their torrents are being broadcasted to other known clients which results in a search with bad scalability.

We already know that after switching to magnet links only, The Pirate Bay has a total size of about 90 MB. Now think of those 90 MB being stored decentralized. A network with millions of nodes in which each node stores a few hundred Kilobytes means you have thousands of replicas of each torrent entry.

This ensures each entry can be found, even if many nodes leave the network simultaneously. Unfortunately, all previous decentralized search implementations had huge amounts of spam in their search results. This is where we can learn from the torrent community. Sites like The Pirate Bay provide trusted search results.

In a completely decentralized search without any spam they would simply continue to provide this functionality using public-key cryptography to sign torrents. A user relying on his favorite torrent site’s search results would simply add its public key to his torrent client, thus allowing the client to check the signature of each torrent search result and filtering all fakes.

In this completely decentralized future a torrent site such as The Pirate Bay would simply be a laptop with average computing power connecting itself to the internet once every few hours to sign new torrents with its private key. Think about how hard it is just to trace such a “torrent site”. Shutting it down is practically impossible.

We are currently working on a client which will offer the above mentioned torrent search. It is currently in a closed alpha testing phase and will soon enter public beta tests.

—

About the authors:

David Xanatos is one of the founding members of the Austrian Pirate Party; he lives in Vienna and works as a Physicist at the university by day, and develops file sharing applications by night. He is mostly known for his NeoMule Mod.

Ekliptor is a computer scientist from Munich. He has developed many eMule Mods in the past and is currently researching weaknesses in eMule’s Kademlia and countermeasures at university. Their current project is called “NeoLoader” and able to download files from BitTorrent, eMule and one-click hosters.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Using a mod like this means that no offense of distribution could have been carried out. Indeed, as we pointed out in our earlier report, the stats from her client showed no evidence of uploading, despite an uptime of 924 days.

The lawyers who sent the cease and desist (and a demand for 700 euros) didn’t withdraw the claims after she protested her innocence, so she took advice, went to court and filed suit against the rightsholder.

Unfortunately the judge in the case has no idea about IT issues and wants to have an independent witness examine the software used by anti-piracy tracking company Media Protector. Experts don’t come cheap and this one is set to cost 5,000 euros.

This is believed to be the first time that a neutral expert witness has had the opportunity to examine the software of an anti-piracy company in Germany. So, together with filesharing lawyer Dr. Wachs, Verein gegen den Abmahnwahn e.V and Initiative Abmahnwahn-Dreipage, our friends at news site Gulli have started a donation drive to raise the funds.

Lawyer Dr. Wachs has kindly given the woman 3,000 euros towards the expert but a further 2,000 must be raised via donations. Hopefully this amount can be achieved as engaging the skills of the expert witness will provide a golden opportunity to see exactly how these systems operate and have their shortcoming revealed in court.

Anyone wishing to contribute can do so here (bank details at bottom of article)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Coalition quickly backtracked, suggesting they would accept some type of throttling instead, but that fell largely on deaf ears too. Then new Coalition president Aldo Olcese said that the solution would be to go after the country’s 200 torrent sites instead, but this could also prove problematic. Time and again Spanish courts have ruled that sites that link to infringing content are not illegal, providing profits aren’t made directly from any infringement.

But of course, wealthy operations like SGAE aren’t put off by such rulings and instead go after eDonkey and BitTorrent sites privately, often demanding that they are forced to close via injunction in advance of a full court hearing to assess their legality.

One such case involves the eD2K link site elrincondejesus.com. On May 13th the site received a complaint from none other than every Spanish sharing site’s nemesis, SGAE. Alleging Elrincondejesus “abused” its members copyrights, the site’s owner was summoned to appear in court on June 5th.

At this hearing various things would be discussed, but SGAE hoped to get an early decision to suspend the operations of Elrincondejesus immediately, in advance of the full hearing which would happen at a later date.

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

There would be a month long wait for the court’s decision but today it came.

The judge dismissed SGAE’s request for an immediate shutdown of Elrincondejesus.

“P2P networks, as a mere transmission of data between Internet users, do not violate, in principle, any right protected by Intellectual Property Law,” said Raul N. García Orejudo, a judge in Barcelona. Although some activities are barred, those do not concern P2P he said, noting that there has to be a presumption of innocence.

Speaking with Elmundo.es, attorney Carlos Almeida-Sanchez said: “This is the first time a court clearly states that P2P itself does not violate any rights.”

On possible infringements of the Intellectual Property Act, the court said:

“Adding a work or video recording to Emule, that has previously been converted to a compatible computer file, is not an act of reproduction,” adding that “Copying is not a profitable use, or collective use [such as broadcasting in a store], as these two terms refer to the subsequent use made of the work once downloaded, after the copy.”

Additionally, the Intellectual Property Act describes distribution as needing something tangible, as in distribution via a website for example, which in this case (as it’s P2P) does not exist.

However, the court order recognizes the possibility that public distribution may have occurred but this is difficult to prove, since any sharing could’ve taken place with just one person.

The full trial will take place at a later date.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Back in 2006 the police, who were conducting a search linked to an unrelated fraud case, stumbled across the man’s sizable pirate media collection which included 12,591 MP3 files, 426 movies, 16 full TV-series and dozens of items of pirated software.

During the April hearing the retired IT expert said in his defense that it took him a whole year to accumulate the collection by using eMule on the eD2k network, but it was intended for private, not commercial use. He also told the court that he believed he had been acting within the law.

Unfortunately for the man, the legal system wasn’t sympathetic. A court in Vannes has just handed him a 2 month suspended jail sentence coupled with 33,000 euro (apprx $46,200) in damages.

Lawyers for 19 plaintiffs including the National Federation of Film Distributors, Sony, Paramount, Sacem and SCPP demanded between 1 and 2 euros compensation for each illicit MP3 and between 7 and 12.50 euros for each movie. It is believed that SCPP will collect the largest share of around 17,000 euros.

In a statement the man’s lawyer said: “There is stuff like this on all kids’ computers right now,” while pointing out that many of the files had been downloaded by the defendant’s children.

In January 2007, a court in Nantes also sentenced a file-sharer to two months suspended prison sentence for being caught in possession of 400 downloaded movies.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The report is based on data supplied by BigChampagne and PC Pitstop. BigChampagne is a company that tracks online media, it also provides provides Billboard online music charts. PC Pitstop gathers data by “inspecting” the computers of users that try their free online virus / spyware scanners. The data used in this report are collected from Windows registry and table entries of 1.5 million PC’s through these online diagnostic tests performed by PC Pitstop.

The results. The percentages in the table indicate the install base of the P2P applications:

In the report we further read that the once almighty “Kazaa family” is now only installed on 1.3% PCs. Newcomers like FrostWire and Pando are included in the report for the fist time with a 0.2% and 0.3% install rate respectively.

As said before, the usability of these figures are doubtful. Here are a few concerns. First of all, install rates do not equal usage. The fact that someone installed a P2P client does not mean that they actually use it. So the report can’t say much about the popularity of a filesharing network or application. They do not make these claims, but the way the data is presented is a bit misleading, to say the least.

For example, uTorrent is by far the most used BitTorrent client. Over 50% of the peers in an average BitTorrent swarm use uTorrent. It could be that uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are installed on almost an equal number of PCs, but that the BitTorrent mainline client is hardly ever used. For instance, novices may start with the mainline client, but move on to better BitTorrent clients later on.

Another remarkable point is the uTorrent data collection for this report. uTorrent doesn’t install itself, and even the installer doesn’t use the Windows registry. So how did they come up with these statistics on uTorrent then?

It is also funny to see mIRC in the top 10 of most installed filesharing application because it is so much more than this. Most people I know use mIRC for other purposes than sharing files.

The concerns raised here show that “power” is not always in numbers. They might have collected data from millions of users, but is this really valuable if you have no idea if they actually use the application? A survey among 10.000 users where you actually ask if, and how often they use these applications is probably more useful.

And on a final note, people who want to read the report, but don’t want to pay $195 might want to try Google’s backdoor. Doubtful statistics, doubtful security.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The new version has the option of only connecting to clients that support this feature but it has the option of connecting to all clients as well.

Protocol obfuscation has been the most requested feature by eMule users for several months. It has been reported that Brasil Telecom has been aggressively throttling traffic generated by eMule. This has made eMule practically unusable for thousands of Brazilian’s and although NeoMule, an eMule mod, added protocol obfuscation several months ago it only partially alleviated the problem.

NeoMule users represent a very small percentage of the ed2k network and although their protocol obfuscation feature works well, it only works if the users it connects to are also using NeoMule.

Recently, more and more ISP’s have began throttling P2P protocols. Numerous ISP’s have targeted the BitTorrent protocol and in response Azureus, BitComet and uTorrent have implemented protocol encryption.

Overall, their protocol encryption feature has been effective but Allot Communications claims that they have developed technology that allows ISP’s to specifically target and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic.

It’s clear that eMule’s protocol obfuscation feature will be well received by the eMule community but it remains to be seen how long it will take for ISP’s to figure out a way to throttle eMule’s traffic once again.

p2pnet

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Domingo criticized “panic” generated by the Police with this operation and stated:

only a Judge can sentence what is illicit or not, not the Police, neither the General Society of Authors and Editors (SGAE) nor a minister”

The police report claims that 350.000.000 illegal files are shared per year in Spain.

The president of the AI accused the Police to facilitate information that is practically impossible to confirm, and invited to the police show some proof.

The following sites were named in the police report:

naiadadonkey.com, indicedonkey.com, ps2rip.net, emule24horas.com, emule24horas.net, emule24horas.org, mp3-descargas.com, exeemspain.com, portalvcd.com, pctorrent.com, pctorrent.net, pctorrent.org, pctracker.com, pctrecord.com, tododatos.com, spanishare.com, comunidadspanishare.com

link (Spanish)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.