[thechat] Kazaa

Seb Potter seb at poked.org
Wed Jun 18 19:04:18 CDT 2003


On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:52:36 -0700 (PDT), Terry Fowler 
<quackamoe at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> On the long drive home yesterday the commercial classical music station 
> played Aaron Copeland's "Appalachian Spring" and I decided to see what
> Copeland stuff I could download. When I got home
> I fired up Kazaa and dl'd several Copeland MP3s.
> Then I somehow remembered Brian Eno and snagged
> some of his stuff from the 1984 "Dune" and Ambient
> I and II and a few I'd never heard of. Then I fired up MusicMatch* and 
> started verifying that the song titles matched the songs and that the 
> files were complete.

mmmmmmm.... i love the dune soundtrack

> I realized that I'd forgotten how much I like Copeland so I fired Kazaa 
> back up and searched on Copeland and got "No matches". Huh? An hour 
> earlier I got dozens. I noticed in the status bar at the bottom of Kazaa 
> that there were 39 users online sharing about 10,000 files! This was at 
> 9:45pm PDT last night (17 June 03). What's up with that? At 10:30pm PDT 
> there were over 3 million users online.

Welcome to the wonderful world of unreliable supernodes. when you connect, 
kazaa finds the first supernode it can to connect to, which might only 
itself know of a few hundred other servers, hence low numbers. when it does 
this, you can either click the "jump supernode" option in the file menu (if 
your version of kazaa has this option) or disconnect and reconnect (again 
from the file menu).

> Oh, and I finally listened to some of the Spike
> Jones stuff I'd dl'd a couple of days earlier. The
> Hawaiian War Chant is still DANG funny.

/me goes looksee

> So, now for some details. We got a cable modem a
> couple of months ago, courtesy of the Boeing Co.
> My son installed Kazaa without my knowledge or consent, but we still 
> haven't replaced it with a
> better tool. My PC has an AMD K6-2 500mhz CPU and,
> uh, lemme do the math: 256MB + 128MB = uh, 300 and
> something MB of RAM. Kazaa brings this system to its
> knees. A song I really want "Needs More Resources"
> so I click on the song, as much as a minute and a half goes by and the 
> song gets highlighted. Then I
> right click on the highlighted song and after a similar interval a popup 
> appears with. . . . Oh, never mind about the details.
>
> 1. This thing is an absolute resource hog. Not mention
>
> the spyware I've heard it contains.

Kazaa itself is a big resource hog, but probably worse are the gator 
spyware doohickies that it installs, as well as the sherman networks stuff 
that constantly runs in the background reporting on your activites and 
generally co-opting your cpu and bandwidth... even when kazaa isn't 
running.

> 2. My first dl was Beethoven's 7th symphony, only it
> turned out to be something by Mozart.

Yeah, file poisoning by the recording industry and laziness/ignorance on 
the part of users causes a lot of this. you generally get used to it, and 
learn to add reliable sources to your favourites list.

> 3. Lots of files are not complete.

Ditto, thanks to swarm downloading where files can be downloaded in chunks 
from incomplete soources. It's not uncommon to find a download can never be 
completed because the primary source for it disappeared before others could 
get a full copy.

> I know we've had discussions about which file-sharing
> app is best, but it seems the answer keeps changing,
> so I'm wondering what I can use that isn't the piece
> of invasive bloatware that is Kazaa and where the filenames more 
> reliable. (I saw many instances of "The
> Flower Duet" attributed to Puccini/Madame Butterfly.)
> I know I'm going to get incomplete files, but I hope
> maybe there's a better resource with better chances of
> getting complete files.

Well, Kazaalite is a good one, and has a load of features not found in the 
full version, such as speedup (which re-attempts failed downloads 
constantly and keeps searching for additional sources) and avipreview (so 
you can start watching incomplete downloads).

My advice is to uninstall kazaa, then download adaware 
(http://www.lavasoft.nu) and run a full, deep system scan and uninstall 
everything that it finds (it'll do this automatically with a single click). 
Then head over to http://www.zeropaid.com and grab yourself kazaalite, 
eMule, and overnet... those three should keep you covered for the best 
networks. You might also want to check out bittorrent 
(http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/), which doesn't include a search engine 
or anything like that, but when you find good sources of downloads (google 
works well, searching for ".torrent" and the name of what you're after) 
it'll prove itself invaluable to you.

Oh yeah, give your son a non-administrator account on the machine and don't 
let him install software like that. ;)

> My friend Chuck, the alphageek I've mentioned here
> before,
> told me about teranews.com. It's a newsgroup service
> and
> for a US$4.95 set up fee the service is free for under
> 50MB of bandwidth a day. He adds that there are lots
> of
> MP3s under alt.binaries.mp3s. I'm going to sign up for
> this "one of these days," but with that cable modem
> 50MB
> is just a beginning!

Yeah, lots of mp3s in newsgroups, but downloading in chunks and 
restitiching files is *boring*, as is maxing out a 50MB download limit in 
20 minutes. If it's in a newsgroup, you'll find it with a p2p client from 
another source.

> Terry Who's Feeling Unusually Verbose Today and Didn't
> Even Mention LotR! D'oh!
>
> * I had installed WinAmp and had a neat LotR skin and
> a
> cool Star Trek Nemesis skin and then the Boy
> installed MusicMatch and made it the default. Oh
> well.

I have just this minute finished watching nemesis, and, you know what....

... i kinda liked it. (/me goes down in a sea of flames...)

- seb

-- 
http://poked.org


More information about the thechat mailing list