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vsp · 01-03-2003, 10:39 AM

I tried out SoulSeek last night, and the connectivity and variety seemed to be on a par with WinMX. The search interface wasn't as good, but adequate, and I found myself looking for a toggle to group all the "active" search entries together, instead of digging through mountains of grayed "away" entries to find them.

I also had one person IM me to ASK if he could download an album from my shared-files collection. Full points for politeness, but if I didn't want people downloading my files, why would I put them in an Outgoing directory in the first place?

Kazaa, Morpheus and Audiogalaxy all have had spyware issues. So far, the others mentioned in this thread seem free of that, though running Ad-Aware frequently is always a good idea.

I tried Gnucleus (a Gnutella front-end), and while I haven't uninstalled it, the hit rate on searches (much less on successful downloads) is a lot lower. For oddballs like the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, I'm finding several magnitudes more on WinMX and SoulSeek than I have in months of searching Gnutella.

EDonkey is useful for specific situations -- i.e. you pretty much have to connect to a server where you know the content can be found. The Digital Archive Project has an EDonkey server, for instance, and it's a wealth of video files of non-commercially-released television programs, but you can't find those files on other Donkey servers.

The newsgroups can be either feast or famine. All services are no better than whoever's using them at a given time, but the newsgroups introduce a time factor that limits their usefulness. On a "live" service, people pop in and out constantly, and sharing files is as simple as designating a directory; on a newsgroup, someone has to make the conscious decision to encode files, post them (under an easily-traceable address) and remain connected throughout the upload. Meanwhile, the user at the other end needs (a) a good news server, (b) a good news client (hail Gravity), and (c) to find and retrieve the articles before they fall off the news spool.

All "live" file-sharing services have security issues. That's inherent any time you connect -- you're essentially yelling "Hello World, this is my hard drive, and any of you can play with the files in this portion of it." The usual precautions and caveats apply.

01-03-2003, 10:39 AM	#9
vsp Syndrome of a Down Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: West Chester Posts: 1,367	I tried out SoulSeek last night, and the connectivity and variety seemed to be on a par with WinMX. The search interface wasn't as good, but adequate, and I found myself looking for a toggle to group all the "active" search entries together, instead of digging through mountains of grayed "away" entries to find them. I also had one person IM me to ASK if he could download an album from my shared-files collection. Full points for politeness, but if I didn't want people downloading my files, why would I put them in an Outgoing directory in the first place? Kazaa, Morpheus and Audiogalaxy all have had spyware issues. So far, the others mentioned in this thread seem free of that, though running Ad-Aware frequently is always a good idea. I tried Gnucleus (a Gnutella front-end), and while I haven't uninstalled it, the hit rate on searches (much less on successful downloads) is a lot lower. For oddballs like the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra, I'm finding several magnitudes more on WinMX and SoulSeek than I have in months of searching Gnutella. EDonkey is useful for specific situations -- i.e. you pretty much have to connect to a server where you know the content can be found. The Digital Archive Project has an EDonkey server, for instance, and it's a wealth of video files of non-commercially-released television programs, but you can't find those files on other Donkey servers. The newsgroups can be either feast or famine. All services are no better than whoever's using them at a given time, but the newsgroups introduce a time factor that limits their usefulness. On a "live" service, people pop in and out constantly, and sharing files is as simple as designating a directory; on a newsgroup, someone has to make the conscious decision to encode files, post them (under an easily-traceable address) and remain connected throughout the upload. Meanwhile, the user at the other end needs (a) a good news server, (b) a good news client (hail Gravity), and (c) to find and retrieve the articles before they fall off the news spool. All "live" file-sharing services have security issues. That's inherent any time you connect -- you're essentially yelling "Hello World, this is my hard drive, and any of you can play with the files in this portion of it." The usual precautions and caveats apply.