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."

Sexist comment

from the article:

"this technology is so easy a grandmother could use it"

As a 48 yo grandmother, and C programmer, I find that offensive.

Re:Sexist comment

You still program in C? Holy crap, you ARE old!

Re:

Hey"!! I've always used a Manual Gearbox But since I'm in the UK that's not unusual :P

Re:Your Silly comments

"...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 dre

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I was over fixing a computer for a 70 year old woman and she has an autocad-like program that connects to her automated sweing machine to stich patterns. I thought that was pretty awesome too lol. But btw, upgrade to C#!

Re:Sexist comment

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!

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I'm about to get myself thoroughly modded -1 Offtopic but this is the coolest craziest thing I've read all day.

I *love* that there is a secret underground network of grandmothers sharing embroidery patterns on the Internet.

Re:Sexist comment

I was 21 when my first son was born, my mom was 42 at the time, and it was her first grandchild.

Like you said, more than enough time to finish college (although I'm still working on the PhD, 4 years later). And, IMO, there's something for having the kids while you are young and still have the energy. Just an observation.

Limewire ...

Well now we know that 36.40% of the polled PCs are infected with a real ecosystem of viruses.

Re:Limewire ...

Time to burn the latest AV tools to a boot CD and start making some house calls. Where do we get this list from?

Gnutella? really?

I'm amazed anyone is still using the Gnutella network. Have there been any improvements to it recently? Last I used it, probably 5 years ago, it was awfully slow. Both in searching and downloading, even edonkey was faster. Plus, it didn't seem useful for much other than individual mp3s. Again, on edonkey you could still find rars of full albums.

Of course, private trackers that focus on a certain niche of content (full albums, classic games, textbooks, etc) with quality control and ratios to ensure seeding are far and away the best. There's not a P2P app anywhere that can compare with what Oink offered. But torrents seem really underrepresented on this list. Limewire is on 36% of PCs surveyed, but only 28% of PCs surveyed had any bittorrent client at all? What gives?

Re:Gnutella? really?

I still use gnutella because I can *generally* find a specific mp3 within a few minutes. That's what it's good for, an impulse downloading of a reasonably popular song.

Re:Gnutella? really?

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.

non-representative sample FTL

FTS: "'Big announcements' are often backed up by a dubiously small data set or not backed up at all."

In this case, the data set is very large, but still of dubious relevance.

The data was collected from the 1.6 million computers by an anti-malware software product I've never heard of, using techniques that would get it itself labeled malware by more reputable anti-malware products. A product that rates only 3 out of 5 stars at Download.com. From a company that rolled over when Gator sued them for calling their spyware "spyware".

Unless there is data to support the assumption that the rubes who blindly install and run PC Pitstop software on their Windows boxes are a representative sampling of the computer user community as a whole, I don't see how this announcement contains any meaningful findings at all.

Easy explanation of Limrewire numbers

PCPitstop.com recorded this information by offereing free malware scans. The very first lines at their web site are "Is your PC acting sluggish? Are strange windows inexplicably popping up on your screen?" If you have Limewire installed you probably fit that category dead on. Of course they're going to use their free services to try and remedy it. People with uTorrent don't necessarily have that problem so no point to going there.. besides they already run anti-malware apps they got via torrents anyway.

Those 1.6million PCs are only those that suffered problems that wanted that free scan. It basically just tells me that 17.8% of all PCs with problems had Limewire installed.

The Best News

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.

Sorted by Network

Sept-07:

40.5% Gnutella
28.5% Bittorent
04.6% Ares
04.0% eDonkey
01.5% FastTrack
00.9% Pando

The first rule of Usenet is,

Dont talk about Usenet...

Re:LimeWire?

I always thought gnutella was crap, but I totally disagree with your labelling of emule. Emule is fantastic for obscure content, and content that is too old to be seeded on any torrent.

Also TFA mentions the emule network as edonkey, ignoring the distributed kad network which is an opensource triumph, that further helps to locate rare content.

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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 cre

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Fourthed. It's like having a library full of all the world's media at your fingertips. Any book. Any song. Any movie. Anything, from anywhen. It's there. A couple of years ago I found old BBC episodes of "The Tripods". Totally camp. Aired in the '

Re:LimeWire?

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:LimeWire?

"Pirate schools"?! Do you go to HAAAAARRRRRRRRvard?

Re:

You are comparing apples and oranges. Limewire isn't a bittorrent client. Limewire can be the most widely used P2P client in use, and Azureus can still be the most widely used by those who are downloading torrents.

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