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”:http://trustyfiles.com is one of them.
* “BISS”:http://www.bluetack.co.uk/index.php. 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 The old application I used was peer guardian, this has been superceded by the bluetack blocking list manager.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”:http://www.edonkey2000.com/. This is one of the popular clients for the edonkey network. Overnet is the distributed version of edonkey.