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eMule
by Jocelyn Doire
Quite often
when you listen to the radio you tell yourself "Oh,
I would like to get that song", and it's quite easy
to go to any of the multitude of stores and get it for
maybe $15.
But there is nothing more convenient to get a song or
other digital material than to start a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
program, type the title and/or the artist, wait a bit to
get it downloaded and then be able to enjoy it as often
as you want for free. No wonder that this type of
activity is now one of the most popular uses of the
internet.
It goes without saying that this free download has not
pleased the audio and video industry, and they have been
fighting very hard to stop it, resulting in hundreds of
downloaders having to pay thousands of dollars in the US.
In Canada, the industry has lost a few legal cases in the
last few years, and as result Canadians are less likely
to get sued over exchanged copyrighted material, but
there is no guarantees, the legal status is evolving
every day.
There is also the issue of paying people that have worked
hard to create all that material, and to mitigate that,
they are now collecting fees on every CD sold in Canada,
among other things. Unfortunately there is no simple
solution. For example, the same fee that can help big
groups can hurt small ones, as my musician friend told
me, because they are too small to claim that money, but
have to pay more for CDs when they record their music.
Ok, enough preliminary discussion, lets talk about a P2P
program that I find very well done called eMule which is
available at http://www.emule-project.net. There are a lot of P2P programs,
such as Kazaa, Shareasa, Morpheus, Grokster, but some of
the advantages of eMule are that it's an open source
program under the GPL license, and does not have any
spyware or other malware.
eMule starts by showing a list of servers that you can
connect to. Contrary to older sharing software, eMule
does not have one central server that can easily be shut
down, instead it uses a multitude of servers distributed
all over the world, none of which being the master, this
makes the network extremely robust and almost immune to
any attack, because even if many servers are terminated,
the others will simply carry the load. In fact, as soon
as you connect, you also become a server, and anybody in
the world can get files from your shared directory.
Once
connected (click on the "connect" button at the
top), probably the first thing you will want to do is a
search for a song or an artist. Simply type the name as
best as you can (you can boolean operators), and the
program will list all the files that contain the searched
words. You can limit the search to only audio or video
for example, or to a specific P2P network, or again to a
maximum size. Once you have found what you were looking
for, simply double click on the file's name to start the
download.
The next
step is to relax and watch the file(s) transfer. The top
window will show what's being downloaded (see below for
more info on the progress bar), and the bottom one lists
what's being uploaded. If you right click on any
downloaded file, you get the option to pause, stop,
cancel, get more details, and more. A right click on any
uploaded file will give the option to get more details on
the uploader and the transfer, or to even send a message
to that person.
The time it
takes to download a file will depend on many factors,
including the number of servers you connect to, the
connection speed, the size of the file, and also a credit
system that rewards those that contribute the most to the
network. Most of the time the download speed will be much
less than the maximum speed of your connection.
One of the strong features of eMule is the amount of
statistics you can get for about any aspect possible,
starting with the progress bar that is the most complex
and informative I've ever seen. For example, it will show
what's missing, what you got, how available is the data,
what's downloading and more, all of this in a single
progress bar.
A lot of the
features of eMule can be changed from the look of the
user interface to the details of the connections and the
securities. The help is also quite extensive and fairly
easy to understand.
eMule is a
beautiful program, starting with the very cool logo of a
mule, with the choice of the colors, the extensive amount
of info available and the ease of use. I really think
that this program is a great model to anyone who writes
user interfaces. Not only is the program nice, but it
also works very well, it's fast and as far as I can tell,
has no bugs.
For more information on peer-to-peer network and how they
came to exist, there is an interesting article on the How
Stuff Works' web site at http://computer.howstuffworks.com/napster.htm
Bottom Line:
eMule (Freeware)
http://www.emule-project.net
Originally published: January, 2005
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