LimeWire Lives Again

Slayer Silver Wolf writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "'On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company's servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off. Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.' And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA."

Re:Spotify Not Available to Me

[mikael_j]

Because you don't live in the very small section of the world where Spotify is allowed [wikipedia.org]? Also, LimeWire is GPL where as Spotify is proprietary (what are they storing about you?).

Us europeans will stop pretending Spotify is available everywhere when all the americans realize that those of us over here can't download TV shows through the iTunes store and that Hulu blocks access as well (well, there are always US iTunes accounts and proxies but it's a serious PITA).

Re:Why

[zach_the_lizard]

My cousin uses limewire. How do I know? I was called in to remove the layers of viruses, Trojans, and rootkits from the machine. As soon as I saw that Limewire was on the machine, I knew this was a lost cause.

Re:Why

[MBGMorden]

True, but some trackers will not allow you to seed more than a certain number of torrents before it stops accepting connections from you. I've had this happen several times before when all my torrents went dead for a few days until I noticed that the tracker was sending back a "Too many torrents" error message. Pruning the list of active torrents a bit returned it to normal.

Also, I'm not sure how true this is for other people, but for me, most files in torrents have an abhorrent naming convention, and just going into my giant default "Bittorrent Downloads" directory doesn't work well. Most stuff I'm going to rename and move to a more organized directory structure within a few days of download.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Bittorrent more than anything, but for older or less popular files, I often find them on the ED2k network via aMule. Downloads are like molasses, but sometimes that's ok depending on what you're trying to find.

Re:Limewire???

[tehcyder]

Well (a) you have to pay for the full spotify service, the free version is limited in the amount of time you can listen and has ads, and (b) there are other things than music that people download (movies, programs...)

And its been replaced by???

[br00tus]

Limewire is written in Java, meaning it is portable. Limewire can download via a Bittorrent mesh of pieces, and it can also download via a Gnutella mesh of pieces, with Gnutella often able to use Tigertree hashes. So you have the best of both worlds.

I don't see what has come out that surpasses Limewire. Bittorrent is dependent on a web page for searching for files and for finding peers. DHT and Peer Exchange help in this somewhat. Bittorrent is also dependent on web pages in searching for files. Tribler, Cubit and Torrent Exchange are attempts to solve this, but nothing has come out that deals with this, while it has been OK from day one with Gnutella. Gnutella is fundamentally peer-to-peer and extensible. If something better has replaced Limewire I haven't heard of it.

Re:file sharing is the hydra of greek legend

[Anonymous Coward]

musicians make music because they love music. they do it for that reward alone. any money beyond that fact is just icing on the cake. no one goes into music saying "i have to generate a positive net cash flow in the third quarter." no one writes songs like that, well, no songs you want to listen to anyways...

I seem to remember an interview someplace with the members of Kiss where they said they did it to make money and bag babes.
Oh wait you are talking about musicians and making music. So sorry... nevermind.