Why is BS 6 here ?

[ursula]

Humour me, ok ?

Why, in these GNUTELLAForums, is there any support for so-called BearShare v 6 ?

[AaronWalkhouse]

Most of our "support" for that, uhhh, thing consists of showing it's victims where to get b25.
Besides, the thing actually does have some gnutella in it. ;]

[arne_bab]

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just tell them to leave the sinking ship?

As far as I remember from diskussions in the_gdf, earlier versions of BS already collected many statistics and could be remotely controlled to a certain degree...

And though the stats were very useful for Gnutella development, they are quite dangerous now, that BS has been compromised.

[AaronWalkhouse]

The remote controls are why 5.2 and up are not recommended. There
was also that ridiculously boneheaded decision to replace the harmless and
removable WhenU adware with a locked-in implementation of Zango that
started calling home even before the install was complete. The fact that
Zango/180solutions fell into serious legal troubles at the time was no help.

Soon after they hastily abandoned Zango they were caught crippling download
capabilities to restrict BearShare to just music and short videos, (which was
how they killed iMesh) and when they realized they weren't getting away with
it tried to launch BearFlix, which was just BearShare horribly crippled to find
and download only pictures and video clips. Even now, users of 5.2 and
BearFlix will find they have problems connecting and downloading from
LimeWire. This appears to be a side effect of their attempts to alter
BearShare to their own purposes before they became fully familiar with it's
source code or with the gnutella protocol. Aside from that it looks like they
have stopped trying to kill or cripple it because not enough people are falling
for v6 yet.

Version 6 (which I am calling BearMesh ) appears to be simply a
Frankenstein monster assembled from scraps of BearShare and iMesh and
mostly devoted to renting music under one of the most draconian and hobbled
DRM schemes ever concocted. Their new EULA is a study in user hostility,
with weak attempts at humour failing to hide the fact that they demand you
keep up the monthly rent or the music will stop. Every week I am hearing
distress calls from people who enthusiastically gorged on the easy and fast
downloads of DRM-infected music while struggling to get any DRM-free MP3s
at all, only to find that all the gigabytes of "free" music they were enjoying
stopped working and their support requests went unanswered.


BearShare 5.1, on the other hand, is still the most powerful, stable and
trustworthy gnutella app available.

The beta testing features in 5.1.0b25 raise it's capabilities far above any
other servent that has ever existed and will probably remain at the top of the
heap until the gnutella protocol advances sufficiently to make all current
gnutella servents utterly useless. This will take at least a few years, even
with the incremental changes currently in the works, such as DHT.

All of the above are why b25 has been the one version strongly recommended
by those in the know since that bogus lawsuit. There are still plenty of smart
people who stuck with the ad-supported versions of 5.1 as well, even with the
constant nag to "upgrade" to 5.2. (The beta is also immune to that nag, by
the way )



As for the stats, BearShare has been collecting and displaying these
aggregate figures for years and they are still as harmless as ever. All they do
is give you a clear picture of overall BearShare performance and the size of
the network. These stats are how we detected the remote controlled
download throttle in the first place, and that's probably why the current
MAFIAA-collaborating owners of BearShare have removed the stats page from
their website.



That's pretty much the story since the summer of 2005. Nobody from the
MusicLab front has seen fit to dispute any of it and indeed they appear to
have been avoiding the public and even their own customers since they were
brought to the US by the RIAA to take over from Free Peers.

To sum up. BearShare is definitely not a sinking ship. The new owners have
just fallen off the wrong side of the pier and are still on shore trying to dry out
and figure out what went wrong while the rest of us are still at sea enjoying
the weather. If they start screwing around with BearShare 5.2 again, that's
probably when you'll start seeing mass migrations to LimeWire and the rest.
The Musiclab/iMesh folks have probably realized this (finally!) and will be reluctant
to make any more mistakes even when their MAFIAA masters apply more
pressure to instill their control freak mentality on the software again.

[arne_bab]

Originally Posted by AaronWalkhouse

BearShare 5.1, on the other hand, is still the most powerful, stable and
trustworthy gnutella app available.

The beta testing features in 5.1.0b25 raise it's capabilities far above any
other servent that has ever existed and will probably remain at the top of the
heap until the gnutella protocol advances sufficiently to make all current
gnutella servents utterly useless. This will take at least a few years, even
with the incremental changes currently in the works, such as DHT.

Could you give me some details on these features?

A glance into the linked post didn't reveal infos...

Best wishes,
Arne

[AaronWalkhouse]

For starters, you can switch it to ultrapeer mode at any time instead of
waiting for it to do so automatically. That gets you 26 peer connections to
other high-outdegree ultrapeers and 45 leaf nodes too. Not only do your
searches become extra powerful, they also go into passive mode after a
couple of minutes and accumulate relevant hits from all the traffic passing
through.

BearShare's download limits, already stronger than LimeWire Pro's, were
greatly expanded to 50 streams per file to weed out weaknesses in the
networking and download modules. You almost never reach 50, but you
definitely never end up with a slower download just because the software
settled on the first 17-20 sources to respond.

The automatic upgrade functions no longer do anything because b25 was the
last in it's line. That means no background downloads and uploads of the
installer and no nag. No other version of BearShare are immune like this.

[arne_bab]

Nothing there, that you can't do in Phex (or in gtk-gnutella, by the way)...

That's just a matter of User Interface, not of the network.

Only LimeWire restricts there iirc - I assume, because they want to keep the network-handling as automatic (optimal?) as possible.

Phex is at a default of 6 download streams per file, but can be set to up to 99 (and up to 99 overall streams).
Force to be Ultrapeer was already possible in 2.0 in late 2004, so I see no spectacular new developments.

I thought they might have added some things I overlooked...

What other new things do they have?
(communication in the_gdf was a bit sparse...)

[AaronWalkhouse]

The thing is, BearShare's network performance is so well optimized that it
actually can hit those limits. Numbers in a GUI are meaningless without the
performance to back them up. Overall streams can be set to 999, by the
way, though few machines can even manage as many as 500 without bogging
down. Mine just barely makes 500 when I push it but what's the point in
dividing a broadband connection so thinly? Maybe it's for those lucky folks
with fiber. ;]

LimeWire has to put limits on because Java is never going to be as efficient as
fully native code, especially that churned out by M$ compilers for M$
operating systems.

As for feature comparisons, I have no idea what Phex has. I do believe that
GTK has fallen well behind in the past few years because the development
teams for LimeWire and BearShare were huge by comparison. You can pretty
much assume that LimeWire and BearShare added the same core features
during that time, such as high outdegree, OOB hit returns, push proxy, full
alt-loc capabilities [including FWalt] and UDP hole punching for firewalls the
user cannot control or remove. LimeWire has just added the ability to use my
Fullsize Hostiles List in 4.13, though that's not new to BearShare.

Point-to-point chat and browsing hosts is compatible between BearShare and
LimeWire but I don't consider those to be new features.

I suppose you could always grab a copy of BearShare 5.1.0b25 and give it a
test drive. Along with trying out the visible features, you will get the
changelog (history.txt) in the program folder. All of the new features are
mentioned in there. To go back further in the history you can always look for
5.0.x versions and read their history.txt file.


By the way, can Phex load up an IP block list with over 300,000 rules? Take a
look at LimeWire's better-ipfilters-branch and the new PATRICIA Trie. I doubt
it's an exact fit but you might find it useful. Here's the Jira entry for it, from
which you can find those parts of the beta source:
https://www.limewire.org/jira/browse/CORE-52

[arne_bab]

Dynamic Querying?

And I can't grab a copy of BS, because I'm on a ppc-linux box here
And even on my amd Box, Windows will not get a single bit (I'm a bit fix set on this ).

I don't really know how big the Phex hostiles-list is, but 300.000 sounds about right.

Phex generally does 20 sources per file in real world useage, and most often it simply doesn't do more because the bandwidth limits I defined are reached (150kB/s, we are two people behind one DSL-Box).

If I want to, I can get about 90 UP connections in real useage (when I'm an Ultrapeer myself) plus leaves, so this performance isn't an edge for BS.

But that doesn't necessarily mean, that bearshare doesn't have any edge over Phex on the technical side.

My main reason for avoiding Bearshare is not its performance (I am sure that it is great), but that it isn't free software.

And the main reason for avoiding LimeWire is that they are cooperating far less with other Gnutella developers than before, so their software may be free, but their development style isn't open anymore.

And Bearshare doesn't provide that much of an edge over Phex, that I'd tell anyone to keep BS. It won't evolve anymore, while others do, and that means that a BS user doesn't further the development of Gnutella, while a Phex user does (like a LimeWire user, btw., but I already stated my reasons not to use LW).

That's why I support Phex, after all, plus that I like its style.

[AaronWalkhouse]

BearShare was always free. Even the ad-supported version would let you
remove the adware. BearShare Pro was optional and provided only marginal
benefits for it's token price.

What's the format on the Phex hostiles-list? Maybe I can put out a Phex
version of my list too, if the conversion is simple enough.