1.6 Million PCs Track Popular P2P Clients

Hodejo1 writes "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all. Big Champagne, PC Pitstop and Digital Music News joined forces to analyze 1,661,688 PCs to track 152 unique P2P clients quarterly from September 2006 to September 2007. The result is a definitive list of the most popular P2P software in use. Topping the list by a healthy margin is LimeWire. 'In September of 2007 LimeWire was found on 17.8% of all the PCs polled that month. With regards to market share — counting only those users with at least one P2P application on their systems — LimeWire held a 36.4% share, meaning one out of three P2P users has LimeWire on their system. These numbers are up slightly from September 2006 when LimeWire held a market share of 34.1%'. Meanwhile, uTorrent has made huge gains during this period soaring into second place and posing a genuine challenge to LimeWire."

LimeWire?

[towelie-ban]

As a recent college grad (read: pirate), I'm amazed by the percentage of people still using crap like LimeWire and eMule. I would've guessed most people have evolved to uTorrent at this point. But, when you need to download a copy of "Achy Breaky Heart", I guess LimeWire is, sadly, your best option.

Re:LimeWire?

[cdrudge]

But, when you need to download a copy of "Achy Breaky Heart", I guess LimeWire is, sadly, your best option.

...if you can't use Google [google.com].

Re:Sexist comment

[SeeSp0tRun]

A little harsh there chief...

With an even age distribution, being 24 years old and deciding to have kids is beyond further education, as well as having an occupation for more than 2 years.

Not saying this factual, but some grandmothers can be young enough to figure out p2p nowadays.

Re:Gnutella? really?

[explosivejared]

I am a high schooler still, and as such am in contact with many high schoolers. Most of the kids that file share simply don't want to bother understanding the simple concepts of a client versus a tracker. The fact that you can't just open a torrent client window and automatically start downloading is a real turn off. It's sort of crazy that kids will go out of their way to find new cgi proxies daily to circumvent filters at school, but don't have the will to do a web search for a torrent and use a client to download them.

There is no real difference in simplicity between limewire and torrent, but there is a major one in perception. Kids see these boxes with "ports" that they have to configure and test, and they just lose all interest interpreting that there is some deep knowledge of computers required. They completely disregard the fact that limewire is less safe and that the community surrounding torrent is much more cooperative and helpful. It's really weird. I can't explain it other than kids are only interested in "cool" stuff that requires no effort, or what they perceive to be no effort.

If you can't parse it already, I'll just go ahead and say that, yes I do have trouble relating to my peers sometimes.

Re:eMule

[zegota]

I've never been able to find solutions manuals, reliably, anywhere other than on eMule.

The Best News

[Nom du Keyboard]

The best news is to find out that your own P2P app isn't even listed. That might put you below the litigation radar threshold.

Re:seconded

[MrNaz]

Thirded.

Furthermore, I can't see any useful comparison between bittorrent and sharing apps like LimeWire and eMule. Torrents are for specific content targets, sharing bandwidth between peers for what people *are getting now*, while traditional P2P apps create what could be described as a communal library of what people *already have*.

The two P2P models are totally incomparable, and other than the fact that they both evoke "It gets used to pirate our hard forged artwork!" cries, they have nothing in common.

Re:Sexist comment

[rueger]

Did she mention that there are a whole army of grandmothers out there trading copyrighted sewing machine embroidery patterns by e-mail? Disney has in fact busted a few of them from time to time.

My ex-mother-in law collected 500+ 3 1/2" floppies full of designs before we bought her a CD burner. No-one has enough grandhildren to use that many designs!

Re:Your Silly comments

[Talkischeap]

"...don't use IE to look at porn or download illigal stuff/cracks/ etc, and youll genrally be fine."

Yeah, tell that to my wife's 83 year old mother who is constantly getting her laptop infected, and she'll kick you ass all over town.

By the way, what dream world do you live in where you actually believe the foolish statement you made?

And I really think your silly question should have been, "Why am I under the impression that Firefox users think that "their" browser is the best".

I've used Firefox since it's original name (been so long, can't recall), and I've never touted it as the best browser, but it certainly has many useful extensions that the others lack.

Re:Maybe the story is an advertisement.

[blueg3]

LimeWire is certainly the most-often-seen P2P client in police investigations.

Re:What about?

[aywwts4]

I'm saying the foundation of the poisoning would be that the clients would be purposefully trying to successfully identify themselves as azureus or utorrent. If they identified themselves as 'Crappy Selfish Client .23b' Its already a completely fixed problem. Clients even have filters in them to try and find when a client is trying to fake their identity. But there has to be a way to fake is successfully, without that then yes, there would be no harm done.