Internet: March 2004 Archives

I've been using Bit Torrent now for the last 30 days. It is a little confusing since there doesn't appear to a site for novices who want an easy to use P2P system. Here's my short guide with what I know so far:

• Azureus. First, you have to select a client. I've tried a bunch so far and Azureus seems like the most user friendly. You can see downloads and get lots of statistics. It is a Java application and has crashed for me a few times though.
• Isohunt. The second thing is that you need a search engine. Unlike other file sharing applications, Bit Torrent separates the search from the download. These search engines go up and down all the time and disappear too, but I've found Isohunt to be pretty reliable for finding .torrent files. These are the magic cookies that tell clients like Azureus where to get the files.
• Xchat. Many of the Torrent files are on Internet Relay Chats. This bizarreness reminds you what the Internet was like circa 1980. Basically, you have to go to a chat room, utter some strange incantation then wait in line until you can do a download from a server somewhere. I haven't actually successfully done this yet, but Isohunt has reasonably complete automation to do this.

Other references include:

• Bittorrent Client Links. A good summary of the top clients.
• Bit Torrent is incredibly basic. Has a separate user interface for every download and doesn't tell you much about what is going on. One interesting behavior you'll see is that many clients using this code preallocate an entire file, so pretty soon your hard disk gets filled with empty files if you have many failed downloads. The advantage of course is that there is less fragmentation.
• ShaD0W clients. HE has two that are popular, the firs is called shadow experiemental and the new one is called bittornadio. Haven't tried these yet.

OK, as usual, the sources of information for shopping have shifted some. Here's the 2Q 2004 guide to getting the best values on the web. h4. For Electronics and Computer Gear This is the easiest category to shop for. There are so many different sources of information. Here's the path I use: # Get a great review. First you need to find reviews to figure out what the best is. These vary, but I usually do a google search for the product name. The highly ranked sites are usually review sites particularly for computer equipment. Top sites I use regularly include "Tom's Hardware":http://tomshardware.com for computer gear and "Photo.net":http://photo.net for photography. # "Pricegrabber.com':http://pricegrabber.com. Particularly for computer and electronic goods, they are good about this. There are some goods that aren't stocked, so beware. Also, I never buy anything from a vendor with less than 4 1/2 stars and I read all the recent reviews as well. # "Newegg.com":http://newegg.com, "Googlegear":http://googlegear.com and "AccuPC":http://accupc.com. If I can't find it on Pricegrabber, I check out these online merchants as they've been reliable in the past for me and they usually have good prices. h4. For Music and DVDs This is more complicated mainly because Pricegrabber doesn't monitor that many merchants. # Pricegrabber. If they have it. This is a good place to check. Gives Amazon's price usually. # Half.com. If the rating is more than 1,000, this is usually a real retailer so is fairly safe. I use half.com and get like new only. # "BN.com":http://bn.com. Barnes & Noble is my last check. They sometimes are better than Amazon and Half.com.

Slyck - File Sharing News and Info. I haven't had a chance to look at the many advances in file sharing and peer-to-peer commercially. Interesting to see an entire site dedicated to it. Most interesting is to see how many users are on various networks cribed from Slyck, the top hit for sites that monitor the state of peer-to-peer networks:

Network	Users
FastTrack	3,038,547
eDonkey	1,229,544
iMesh	1,194,643
Overnet	860,160
MP2P	254,830
Gnutella	242,893
DirectConnect	200,752
Filetopia	4,200

I was surprised to see how Kazaa (a.k.a. FastTrack) isn't as dominent as I thought. All that spyware and other junk must be having an effect.

Interesting developments are that Kazaa has shut down the adware-free versions now, so you have to install all types of junk to be able to look at the FastTrack network.

Here are some new programs I found to try:

• There are only a few adware-free clients left. Trustyfiles is one of them.
• BISS. Bluetack is a ip blocking list manager. The old application I used was peer guardian, this has been superceded by the bluetack blocking list manager. This management application takes block lists from many sources, sorts them and makes them suitable for a wide range of blocking applications. There is also a driver-level utility called protowall which is much more efficient than peer guardian. It takes the list from the blocking list manager and then blocks IP addresses as needed.
• eDonkey and Overnet. This is one of the popular clients for the edonkey network. Overnet is the distributed version of edonkey.