Views of a Patzer!

If you are still using Kazaa, Morpheus or one of those old, obsolete software, I have news for you....wake up, things have changed!! eDonkey n/w was the coolest one, till sometime back, not anymore. It still is the best source for complete CDs, though. eMule, an open source client for edonkey network, is still one of the most downloaded programs off sourceforge. The main advantage of eDonkey network is, it provides quality CD dumps, while Kazaa & Gnutella (most of the time) provide you only the rips. Rips include only the bare minimum that is needed for running the software, while a CD image, obviously, allows you to make an exact copy of the original CD :) Mind that, many of the things available in these networks are illegal. But, because of its P2P nature, it is pretty difficult to shut down these networks, unlike Napster which was inherently non-p2p and so was easy to shut down. The original Gnutella network doesn't have good content, but gnutella2 seems to be good.

The latest *hot* thing is BitTorrent. Torrent network doesn't have that much data, when compared to some of the other networks. That doesn't mean a thing, as it is still pretty much a newbie to the p2p arena. At the current rate, Torrent is going to be a biiiig one soon. If you are in to category III films (CAT III is the certificate for those Chinese films that contain gore, high volume of sex blah blah blah. I think you get the point, click here if you don't!), the best Torrent source for these kinda movies is CrazyMazey. This has a forums + its own tracker. So, the download speeds are amazing and you get all those "Cannot-see-without-puking-atleast-once" films from here :) [WARNING: This is not for the squeamish. If you are new to these and are curious to know more about these, read this review of one of the Cat III classics, "The Untold story"]. Some other Torrent sources are LokiTorrent & Youceff

[Update (22/12/04) - Due to the legal actions being taken, many torrent trackers are shutting down. I have removed all the links to these sites, but you know how to get there, dont ya?! ;)]

# posted by Kannan Ramanathan @ 9:18 AM