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LimeWire Brings Darknets To All
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Mar 05, 2009 07:57 AM
from the yes-have-some dept.
from the yes-have-some dept.
An anonymous reader writes "LimeWire's new version lets people create private darknets with contacts on any Jabber server (like GMail or LiveJournal). It's different than the recent p2p darknet announcement because it doesn't use onion routing. Sharing with a friend connects directly to that friend. If you're worried about exposing personal information, LW5 doesn't share documents with the p2p network by default."
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Submission: LimeWire Brings Darknets to All by Anonymous Coward
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Great idea... (Score:5, Funny)
Until you start letting 'friends' join your peer network with usernames like Riaa250k into your 'private network'.
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, people still fileshare. I like streaming (youtube) but I still want high quality copies on my local machine which I can have access to even when the network/stream service goes down. And filesharing is useful for rare stuff.
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
And filesharing is useful for rare stuff.
Filesharing on a small darknet may not be useful for rare stuff, unless your friends happen to have it. -1 Downside.
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Filesharing on a small darknet may not be useful for rare stuff, unless your friends happen to have it. -1 Downside.
Luckily, noone targets the rare stuff with lawsuits.
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything I want to listen to and watch can be streamed now. Thanks to Hulu and Netflix and iTunes I can get the latest movies and just about everything else! The costs for these activities are no longer prohibitive.
Lucky for you, Windows using American. I as a Linux using European can use none of the aforementioned services. Arrrhhh. Off to the bay where they don't geo-judge.
Segmenting the internet back into region specific chunks is probably the worst thing that happened since MySpace.
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
Segmenting the internet back into region specific chunks is probably the worst thing that happened since MySpace.
So you'd rather Hulu and Netflix be sued into bankruptcy for streaming content to places in the world they have no right to do so? Yeah, that'd be a much greater idea...
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a similarly affected European, I empathize, but I think it's important not to bite the hand that feeds you here; Hulu is one of the good guys. If they can succeed at showing the cartels at the local level that digital distribution is a good idea, then it will eventually expand to the global level. I wish them none but the best success.
Until that actually happens I will join you in pirating, however.
Parent
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you'd rather Hulu and Netflix be sued into bankruptcy for streaming content
You missed his point... he doesn't care what happens to Hulu or Netflix. They don't exist as far as he's concerned.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Of course, they would not be sued if they bothered to negotiate world wide distribution instead of only negotiating "domestic" distribution Limiting who they can accept money from to a tiny fraction of their possible customers, and instead paying loads of money for technology to make that possible.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm certain that Hulu at least has tried to get international distribution... most likely it is because the organization which holds the rights to that is not interested.... often each country will have a company which has previously negotiated distribution rights for various content. The details of these contracts are likely very convoluted due to some special circumstance.
I can imagine a scenario where a media company gives some other media company distribution rights to general content so that they can g
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And that's why I do not own DVDs: region codes.
Kill hulu with fire; salt the remains (Score:5, Funny)
Segmenting the internet back into region specific chunks is probably the worst thing that happened since MySpace.
So you'd rather Hulu and Netflix be sued into bankruptcy for streaming content to places in the world they have no right to do so? Yeah, that'd be a much greater idea...
Yes!
Well, no, I wish them a violent, painful death. But bankruptcy is an acceptable compromise.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Hulu, iTunes, and Netflix are great if you want to watch the content on your computer, or buy a few different boxes to watch content on your TV. For me, it is way faster to just download the content from usenet and pop it on a USB stick for watching on my DiVX DVD player. Perhaps when that dies I'll look into building a Hulu/Netflix/iTunes streamer - since you sure can't buy one.
Even then, you are at the mercy of the content providers and their whims. Usenet seems to be much more resistant to a point failur
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
The first rule of u*****: never talk about u*****.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I figured that gig was up after they went after the alt.* hierarchies and forced newzbin to go private.
Re: (Score:2)
People still fileshare? Everything I want to listen to and watch can be streamed now. Thanks to Hulu and Netflix and iTunes I can get the latest movies and just about everything else! The costs for these activities are no longer prohibitive.
Yes, everyone is living in the United States.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People still fileshare? Everything I want to listen to and watch can be streamed now.
Yeah, nothing like low-quality, [BUFFERING] media that can suddenly "become unavailable" with no warning! That's the best!
Re:Great idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
So how's last year's season of movies and independent music artists who are not crap, working out for you? Can't find them on the streaming websites? Enjoying your guns n roses, aerosmith, metallica etc? I'm not saying those are great artists but just easy examples.
The only way to get the stuff at the real cost of distribution is to instead get it at completely scam-worthy prices online (10$ for a digital CD? 4$ for a movie?) simply because you didn't record it yourself and/or get it off filesharing networks for free, which is what it's truly worth: 0$. Honestly why should you pay later for something that you could have recorded yourself for free?
whoops.
Guess you can't do that, because they're all taken down or removed due to licensing issues, or label you a pirate for daring to fileshare.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...you are guessing that iTunes is Windows-only? Just to be clear, we're talking about the iTunes from Apple, not some other iTunes? ;)
Netflix is not Windows-only either, btw. I don't know about Hulu.
Being US-only is a concern though.
Re: (Score:2)
Hulu works on Linux ... sort of ... if your standards of "works" are pretty lenient. Perhaps if I tweaked enough stuff, it would be watchable. ... But even on Windows, its overall quality might generously be described as "really awful".
It's apparently going to be a few years before the Internet + telco can deliver me a picture that is as watchable as a noisy and degraded NTSC broadcast signal. My esteemed spouse and I did watch a couple of glitchy episodes of "WKRP in Cincinnati", and enjoyed them. But i
Re: (Score:2)
...you are guessing that iTunes is Windows-only? Just to be clear, we're talking about the iTunes from Apple, not some other iTunes? ;)
Netflix is not Windows-only either, btw. I don't know about Hulu.
Being US-only is a concern though.
Hulu is definitely not Windows-only. It's more available than Netflix's "Watch Now" as far as tech goes (I think it's just a Flash player), but I believe they restrict access to only some countries (like the US).
It's a decent site, and I was shocked when they pimped it during the SuperBowl. Free and legal streaming of a lot of TV and a some movies.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Hulu and Netflix, AFAIK, are US-only, and I believe there are still countries where iTunes is unavailable. I would also guess (not using any of them) that they are all Windows-only.
iTunes is clearly not Windows only. Hulu just streams things via flash so it's accessible via any OS with a flash player (which is basically all of them). The Netflix service can be accessed on OS X and Windows via Silverlight and on Linux with Moonlight. So no, none of them are Windows only.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Those services are not international (Score:5, Insightful)
iTunes doesn't work with Linux, as jopsen says Hulu is US only (and the BBC iPlayer is UK only), and Moonlight is never going to gain any traction under Linux. Even Flash has only just arrived for 64-bit computers recently. The only reliable cross-platform and international way to watch movies is to download them via file-sharing.
Phillip.
Parent
Silverlight 2 vs. Moonlight 1 (Score:4, Insightful)
Moonlight is never going to gain any traction under Linux.
And let me guess, somehow this will not be the fault of Linux, and the blame will be squarely leveled at Microsoft.
It'll be the fault of Microsoft if Microsoft continues to make questionably necessary additions to the Silverlight spec to make the Moonlight developers fall behind, and then continues to push Silverlight app developers to "take advantage" of those additions.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Most of Hulu's content runs under Mac OS X 10.5, but there are a few videos that do not work.
Re: (Score:2)
All of Hulus content runs in flash... but they link to content on other sites that uses WMV - which should work on Mac at least if you download the QT plugin (used to be called Flip4Mac)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
reading the neauseatingly gushing article, I couldn't quite figure out how this works - does it require limewire servers or exspose you to lime wire ? what is this jabber client ? /. can offer a clean, simple explanation
my impression is that the software basically lets you share a folder, or the equivalent of a folder between a set of computers; the problem, for making this useful, is that only downloaded files appear - what if I just want to share some word docs ?
surely someone on
Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought we had gotten past this whole INVITE PLZ PLZ PLZ PLZ business years ago.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Let me guess, you don't have a facebook account?
Re: (Score:2)
Neither do I. I think he is referring to the days of IRC. Those were the days...
I don't really care about any of the social networking sites. The furthest I've gone is Jabber (with my own Jabber server) and it works great. Don't know why I need anything else. I've had my finger wetted with MSN Messenger but didn't really like it (ads and spam) and closed it after a good year.
Darknet != Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Being anonymous is not the same as being free.
To that end, using a darknet is actually reducing how free you are because you're not standing up to the authority or laws you're circumventing. Freedom is being able to do what you want to do without having to hide it.
Re:Darknet != Freedom (Score:5, Informative)
And how is the ability to exercise a freedom which you weren't given, but should have been, is bad for you? Of couse that if an essential freedom is missing, anonymity won't give it back to you, but it will still give you the ability to exercise it.
Of course, after reading the first half of TFA, I don't see what anonymity you're talking about. It's about sharing files only with people you want. It's a cool feature, which I would find usefull, but it seems useless if you want anonymity.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Freedom is being able to do what you want to do without having to hide it.
Hiding is what precedes [wikipedia.org] freedom [wikipedia.org].
Otherwise premature [wikipedia.org] openness can get you shot down [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Like ripping off the movie industry of their product. Yeah that's our freedom right there.
This is more of a way to bypass the laws that would normally include file sharing of regular files,
in the generalization of p2p torrent laws enforced by the ISPs, but fall into the category, you are using torrents so this file must be a bad pirated one.
65 yo Grandmother (Score:2)
huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:huh? (Score:4, Funny)
I have to admit. I got a mental image of a guy looking at an onion and then throwing it away. Magic.
Parent
Sounds like a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder... (Score:2)
When I worked in a computer shop I'd get a lot of computers coming in infected with so much spyware/adware that they were struggling just to remain "idle". In just about every case I could trace the infection back to something downloaded off of limewire.
I wonder if this is just going to make that spread faster, since these darknets will compose of your friends and you'll think "Well this file must be clean, it's on my friends computer, I trust him!" Meanwhile the friend downloaded the file ("Britney spears
Terribly dangerous in a way (Score:3, Funny)
This is of course adapted thinking from the way our authorities work atm.
How do we trust limewire? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Somewhat unimpressed .. (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically it allows encrypted file transfers between people who are communicating on a chat / IM network? Is it me or is that not exactly a huge innovation [wikipedia.org]?
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, that's my thought every time someone brings up a 'secure' network that relies on only talking to your friends on it. There are already -tons- of ways to get that file from someone you know. The problem that P2P solves is getting a particular file from a stranger.
Re:Somewhat unimpressed .. (Score:5, Funny)
Is it me or is that not exactly a huge innovation?
Haven't you read other news in IT lately?
MSN msgr, Yahoo chat, ICQ, Google talk et al. all reinvented IRC each in their own mutually incompatible way. Then they added file transfer that wasn't FTP.
Web 2.0 is a reinvention of the mainframe with thin clients on dumb terminals. JavaScript is becoming a reinvention of python, except with curlies. JSON is a reinvention of XML, which is a reinvention of s-expressions.
Next up, someone's going to reinvent the business process of reinventing the wheel in slightly different and incompatible ways ("for added value", of course) and patent the method. Hey, that'd be a good use of business method patents.
Can you tell I'm bitter? ;)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Didja know LimeWire is open source, GPL'd?
See http://limewire.org/ [limewire.org] .