Spotlightingnews

EDonkey Shutdown Brings Joy to Hollywood

EDonkey's copyrighted material sharing days are over, after Switzerland and Belgium silenced Razorback2 p2p server.

The Motion Picture Association: "Swiss authorities arrested the site's operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home. At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site's servers located at an Internet hosting centre in Zaventem near Brussels."

Razorback 2 was eDonkey's largest server, generally accessed through eMule, serving not only as meeting ground for over 1 million users, but also as one of Hollywoods revenue blackhole.

edonkey and eDonkey2000 history:

The eDonkey network (also called eDonkey2000 network or ed2k) is a file sharing network used primarily to exchange music, films and software. Like most file sharing networks, it is decentralized; files are not stored on a central server but are exchanged directly between users based on the peer to peer principle.

The eDonkey client programs connect to the network to share files. eDonkey servers act as communication hubs for the clients and allow users to locate files within the network. Clients and servers are available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux and other UNIX variants. Anyone can add a server to the network. Because of constant changes to the server network, clients update their server lists regularly.

The official eDonkey2000 client includes a plugin that allows BitTorrent files to be downloaded. Once a torrent download begins the search facility within eDonkey can find the same file within the eDonkey/Overnet network and synchronise its download. This effectively allows a torrent to be used as another source for the download, vastly increasing speed as well as virtually eliminating problems with fakes.

Torrents are very "clean" in terms of falsely labelled files and their use as file size verifiers in addition to eDonkey2000's own user-based fake warning system has vastly improved the network's functionality, especially in comparison to other notoriously fake ridden networks such as Kazaa.

By effectively combining the range of the existing Overnet and eDonkey networks with the lightning-fast file distribution of the BitTorrent system, eDonkey2000 is following a growing trend amongst peer-to-peer programmes of integrating downloads from multiple networks. This has the advantage of maximising the number of files available while limiting vulnerability to problems on a single network.