Maybe I shouldn't say this but I'm going to anyway.....
 

Gagme... go phuck yourself.

So sad, but true humand behaviour. It is called GREED.

Don't you people get it? We all need to make money.

Vinnie does not want to give you the choice to not have his creation Bearshare (which must have taken a lot of time to develop) not phone home, with whatever information he thinks he, his present or his future sponsors want.

Yes, Bearshare is a bloody good Gnutella net client. A lot of people like it, a lot more like to use it more often, but are scared.

But nobody would want to pay any or much money for it, would you??? I wouldn't.

So stop bugging him. Bodhi, he cannot answer your (very well written) question, about the choice of update.
He doesn't want it, but cannot publicly say it. It would be so easy to do.
Normal business tactics, keep them talking and discussing but also keep your customers using your goods.

JD

PS: Is it maybe possible to have a firewall block Bearshare sending these packets to this 'certain address'??? (ATGuard is flexible enough to possibly do this).

firewall would need inspection
 

you asked if it is possible to block this using a firewall? sure, everything is possible ;) any "desktop-firewall" will not be enough though, as these packets are send to all other bearshare clients you connect to (i suppose), thus blocking all of them would deny communication at all. but you should be able to do this with a firewall looking into _each_ package (i think this is called stateful inspection then). this would require:
a)
you to know the common structure of these packets to set up according rules, and
b)
processor time - each packet needs to be inspected.

so if you are willing and able to set up something like that ... well, go ahead :)

So one silly programmer assumes that he has total control over "his" network and thinks that since he made his client now use TTL 1 that all the clients will be updated in a day or something.
too bad jr. programmers don't think before they make these stupid decisions
I would think a more mature programmer would know that something like this would be bad for the whole network, unless you were thinking you owned the whole network and it was all yours cause you were the dictator personality
I say if a client sends even one non standard packet, then instantly block that IP for 24 hrs. Then within a day or two everyone would dump the crap and go get something not in the greed factor. Hows that for a control packet? That should control the dictator types!
"I have to be one up on the competition" WHY??? COULD IT BE GREED?
The other thing would be to make a simple program that blasts out zillions of copies of this packet with ttl 7 to every client so that gnutella stops and everyone blames the stupid packets and the lame author.

Reading this posting makes me again thinking about writing an open source gnutella proxy in my free time. In the very beginning I hought about firewall solutions and maybe anti-kidporn, but now about filtering out unwanted meta stuff.
I still wanna wait and see how gnutella protocoll gets improved. I hope all sides sit together and launch a new Gnutella RFC.

Sorry I don't agree with the behavior " I'll take a open network protocoll and add some hidden/encypted metadata but no one else should profit or reverse engeneer it, because now it's all mine and this is my bussiness concept". Too aggresive for my taste.

True
 

Yeah you're right - instead of developing a good servent and implementing functionality, maybe we should have just filed for a few "busines process" patents like Gnotella / Petapeer and then wait for someone to accidentally infringe it so we could file a law suit.

Yeah, you are right what you are doing, it is a very nice servant.
It is the way how you do which I don't agree with.

OR maybe it's really my personal problem. I'm a freelance programmer and maybe I should stop spending free time for bearshare, no further improvement suggestions or helping in forums (e.g. german Bearshare forum)... instead put my focus into a open source gnutella servant and further protocol development. If there is a preffered way I can help Bearshare, let me know. I hope you find a good business concept!