
EMule 0.60a - ciccionamente
https://forum.emule-project.net/index.php?showtopic=165281
======
fraencko
That brings back nostalgia. I remember vividly being active on various eMule
mod forums back in ~2005. There was a very active scene back then with some
eMule Mods that really pushed things further, MorphXT, Xtreme, StulleMule,
eFmod, Sivka, ionix, NeoMule and ScarAngel come to mind.

So much drama with leecher mods (leecher was negatively connotated in regards
to the ed2k-protocol) that tried to download more than uploading or upload to
clients only that had proven to pay back with higher speeds. But also really
innovative ideas like downloading from clients that used a thin HTTP server
within the client, leveraging your ISPs proxies (Webcache/Peercache feature)
for higher download speeds. Also so many discussions where the network should
be heading with the main Client devs famously mute in regards to those
discussions and drama.

The main benefits of eMule/ed2K, compared to torrenting, were file
discoverability (serverless thanks to Kad search) and longetivity of files. It
was actually relatively hard to find a file that was dead, because people kept
sharing as long as they downloaded, often much longer. Download speeds were
much slower than Torrents, even back then, and that was an advantage because
that kept so many files alive. Great times that basically ended because of
„p2p sheriff“ companies, Torrents and the dawn of One Click Hosters like
Rapidshare that promised privacy and better download speeds.

To this day I am wondering if eMule would still have an active userbase if it
had some sort of mechanism that (via opt-in) allowed clients to download from
trustworthy „friends“ only and pipelined those downloads from the „public“
ed2k network through these friends and their friends' networks. Yeah, may be a
bad idea but to my knowledge never really got explored.

~~~
zepearl
I loved, with eMule and/or Kazaa (don't remember anymore which one), the
feature of being able to get the list of all what the remote host was sharing
=> my idea was that if that person was sharing something that I liked, then
that person might have other interesting stuff which I might have liked =>
from time to time that was the case.

1 or 2 years ago I installed it, connected to the network (nodes? meganodes?
forgot the terminology), and activated somewhere the parameter to be verbose
about the incoming search queries => A LOT of nasty porn stuff being searched
(I therefore quickly shut down and uninstalled everything, brr) => it's a
pity, but thinking about that later maybe they were just automated queries or
similar submitted by police & Co. to search for illegal videos, who knows.

------
grzaks
Please be aware, that the most popular emule server software available many
years ago was backdoored. That's why it was distributed as a binary, without
code.

~~~
0134340
Source? I remember trying it last year for old time's sake and I'd like to
know in what way it could've compromised the OS.

~~~
grzaks
My own reverse engineering. There was a hidden packet in protocol
implementation that opened a shell for you

~~~
fsflover
That would make a great article for HN.

~~~
dang
Indeed it would! grzaks, please email hn@ycombinator.com if you might like to
write about this.

~~~
grzaks
I would first have to find out if I still have that research data

~~~
0134340
Please do. I think it'd be fascinating so bookmarking this thread in hopes of
an article.

------
shrewduser
I haven't used EMule in a long long time, is it still useful? does anyone use
it regularly?

~~~
hannob
Not regularly, but if you're looking for a super obscure documentary that is
not on youtube and you cannot buy anywhere - emule/amule may be the place to
find it if you're willing to wait a few days or even weeks. Did that a few
times.

~~~
aptwebapps
DC++ used to have the most obscure stuff. I remember finding one
site(?server?hub?) that had every single F1 race broadcast (practice,
qualifying, and race) for many years. Basically someone had been recording
every race on VHS tape and eventually digitized them all and uploaded them.
This is just one example of the kind of specializing you could find. I wonder
how much of it is still there.

~~~
StavrosK
One of the reasons why I like IPFS is that it gives you an immutable links to
files like these. If you find the file once, you can get the link and access
it again later (assuming people are still seeding) and be sure you're
accessing the exact same file you think you are.

~~~
aasasd
I mean, magnet links are the same thing—with the exception that they aren't
widely used between users, to my knowledge, i.e. people aren't too familiar
with them and go to search sites instead. (Not to say that the same won't
happen in IPFS if it ever gets popular.)

~~~
StavrosK
Do magnet links work across torrents? Do two different torrents of the same
file have the same magnet URI?

~~~
rakoo
The infohash (which identifies the torrent, and thus the magnet link) is a
hash of the following structure:

[http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html#info-
dictionary](http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0003.html#info-dictionary)

There are some things, beyond the content of the file, that will change the
hash:

\- Path of the file (nature_documentary.avi vs root/nature_documentary.avi)

\- Name of the file (nature_documentary.avi vs nature_doc.avi)

\- The pieces length

~~~
aasasd
Ah, if it's the entire dictionary and not filtered by the clients to just
those fields, then presumably additional data may be shoved in—specifically
the trackers to contact.

~~~
rakoo
No, look at the content of the dictionary: trackers are not part of the "info"
dict, so you can add all the trackers you want, it won't change the identity
of the torrent. Identity is defined by the infohash.

Trackers are added in the magnet link by adding parameters to the URI: see
[http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0009.html](http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0009.html)

------
waihtis
Well this is a blast from the past for sure.

I haven't been looking at torrents for ages, mostly because local LEO
partnered together with extortion lawyers made it uncomfortable over where I
live. Literally extortion in this case, as the legal firms in this business
sent blackmail letters to people who's IP addresses had been seen as part of a
torrenting activity to either pay a ridiculous settlement fee or go to court.

~~~
Pelic4n
Rent a seedbox in eastern europe (somewhere like Belarus or Romania) and
torrent your stuff from there. There's no way they can cost-efficiently get
you that way.

~~~
waihtis
Tbh I dont really need illegal torrents nowadays, but thats an interesting
concept for sure.

~~~
mehdix
It is not necessarily about illegal torrents. There are some niche files such
old movies that you wouldn't find anywhere to let you watch it where you live.
I used to torrent some, just to keep it alive and prevent such works from
disappearing from the Internet. However, I'd still prefer to torrent from a
location that reduces the chance of receiving such letters from opportunity
seekers to suck some cash out of me.

~~~
DangerousPie
The law firms aren't going after everyone who is torrenting, they are going
after people downloading copyrighted material. You're not going to get a
letter if you're downloading a torrent of the latest Ubuntu image.

~~~
aasasd
Not guaranteed, actually, due to the carpet-bombing strategy of targeting the
‘culprits’. Can't remember if Linux specifically was involved, but there
certainly were some misfires.

(Ironically, when I tried downloading fresh Ubuntu with desktop Transmission,
it froze for a rather long while, presumably due to the near-two-thousand
peers.)

~~~
smabie
It's not going to connect to most of them. The protocol doesn't scale linearly
with the number of peers, so most clients won't connect to more than like 50
at a time. And will download from even less.

With an infinite number of peers, 0% of the traffic would be actual file
chunks. 100% would be bookkeeping.

I guess that's a long winded way or saying that the issue probably wasn't with
the number of peers.

------
cpach
Wow. I’m almost shocked to see a recent update for eMule of all applications.
Throwback thursday for sure! I think I may have used eMule at some point in my
youth, like in ~2003 or so.

------
Santosh83
On a related note, it is remarkable how a program that does several things and
deals with more than one network protocol and presents a complex, information-
rich, configurable interface can still clock in at about 3 megabytes. I can't
help thinking an Electron version of this would be about 250Mb and have 1/4th
functionality and consume 1 Gb of memory just idling.

~~~
duiker101
While I completely I agree, I believe the appeal of electron comes from being
easily cross platform with a single and consistent UI and most of the code
being shared between platforms. I don't know of many stable frameworks that
can achieve that while being able to easily create decent looking UIs. The
only other one I saw was JavaFx. But even then, you will still need separate
codebases for web and native.

~~~
high_5
Ain't it ironic? From all the excellent desktop oriented frameworks we have,
developers and users seem to prefer cross-platform compatibility that web
techologies enable. Consistent UX seems to be winning over all the
technological superiority, performance, or personal preferences that
developers have. And I don't like the CPU hogging Electron apps too.

~~~
luckylion
Do users _really_ care about cross platform (as in Windows, OS X, Linux, not
Desktop/mobile) consistency?

I believe a lot of the appeal of electron is that e.g. Linux users gets a
version _at all_ , which they wouldn't for plenty of products if it would have
to be custom built. Most users don't constantly switch the OS platform,
consistency across OSes is of little importance to them.

~~~
notagoodidea
Most users don't have to switch between platforms but those who are obligated
to do like I was, consistency cross-platform is removing a level of friction.
Most of the time $work provides me Windows and I run my personal laptops on
Linux (mostly Fedora) for the last 10 years. Some of my colleagues were
running OS X. It was messy to switch context all the time to explain, learn or
replicate stuffs when you are not in a IT/SE environment or even tech-savvy
places. One lab we had people on Windows/OS X/various Linux distributions for
office desktops and calculation servers on Linux distributions. When software
are not consistent across platforms, it results on a lot of friction and lost
time in meaningless conversations about "How to do X/Y".

The only time I am ok with inconsistent cross-platform is between
desktop/mobile because the UX and means of interaction are fundamentally
different.

Electron is a middle ground (that if I can avoid it is better) but sometimes
ease to use prevail on ressource-hungry applications. The other alternatives
(imgui, vulkan, etc.) seems complicated at best and I am not familiar in of
with GTK/Qt port on Windows/OS X to know if they are a pain in the ass to
develop with.

~~~
luckylion
That's a good point, developers/sysadmins/IT and adjacent jobs in general may
be a sizable exception.

Most "normal" users are usually running very homogeneous systems (the average
office worker doesn't get to choose whether they want a Mac Book, a Windows PC
or a Linux workstation), where the difference would only be between work &
private computer use - but I think, most people (again, developers and maybe
designers excluded) have little overlap in the tools they use at work and at
home.

Electron is the native-ish sequel to the everything-is-a-web-app movement, I
suppose. That has similar motivations (also makes everything no-install, super
portable), and for plenty of tasks it's good enough, as computers these days
are massively over-powered for lots of general tasks.

------
paulintrognon
Funny how a software that old, widespread and "battle tested" hasn't had a
version 1.0 yet

~~~
aasasd
Eighteen years, same age as what Wine was in ‘alpha’ while being used by
everybody including as a backbone to commercial apps.

------
mindfulhack
Way to go, old friend!

P2P technology is important to resist censorship. It does not have an opinion
about what content goes through the technology. Like Tor.

The important thing is that it's decentralised, which makes it truly "of the
people, by the people, for the people".

Those saying 'Why use P2P apps if you have nothing illegal to share' are the
same ones saying, 'Why need privacy if you have nothing to hide'. They're
wrong, they're privileged, they're selfish, and in many cases they're lying
hypocrites (and therefore dangerous and abusive people).

Long live P2P. The more protocols in active development the better.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
> P2P technology is important to resist censorship

It's important to retain culture too, people who legally own movies, music,
etc can't be trusted to actually archive or distribute them properly.

Look how many artistically important movies are not really available anymore
and the only old dvd copies floating around are either badly cropped, badly
graded, cut or have poor subtitling/sound. The only people who can be trusted
to look after these artworks are people doing it out of passion rather than
profits.

In 10 years the teenagers growing up today are going to have a cultural
blackhole as a lot of the more unusual music they enjoyed no longer exists
anywhere online because it was all on spotify, YouTube or soundcloud and they
might have gone out of business, not retained it or the creators themselves
lost it or moved on.

~~~
isolli
Music can also be lost to fire, as it was in 2008 [0] (with Universal studios
originally downplaying the loss until a 2019 New York Times article revealed
its full extent).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire)

~~~
arka2147483647
The point is that if everything is in a single giant "library", and it burns
down, then everything is losf forever.

But if there are copies here and there, there is much more chance that at
least some will survive the centuries.

Eg, single point of failure vs redundancy

~~~
whywhywhywhy
>The point is that if everything is in a single giant "library", and it burns
down, then everything is losf forever.

What.cd suddenly comes to mind...

~~~
selectodude
That was so tragic.

------
donatj
I played with aMule, similar project, about 6 months ago. Used to use it like
10 years ago.

Almost all the server nodes were themselves just SPAM, their names advertising
prescription drugs for cheap, as well as dating sites. I found myself very
disappointed with the state of the ecosystem.

------
orliesaurus
Oh my, those were the days... This amd DC++ while everyone else was using
Kazaa and Limewire

~~~
digikazi
Ha... for some reason I thought Limewire was awful and barely used it. I was
however a very big fan of WinMX for many, many years. Happy days! I remember
building a massive music collection with it - and sometimes waiting days for a
track to download (although usually it was more like hours).

~~~
severine
And sometimes by the time the track or album finished downloading, you knew
some of the lyrics by heart!

Ah, the memories...

------
creamynebula
EEEhhhh, I used Emule around 2003-2008, mostly for downloading music and
books, but since then I've been getting everything I need from either torrent
or http ddl. What kind of things do you people seek in emule nowadays?

------
zantana
What's the likelihood of getting hassled by your ISP for running this? I
always assume that the main target is torrent traffic these days and all the
rest is mostly being ignored, due to the volume of torrent enforcement, but
would be interested if anyone had any experience otherwise.

Asking for a friend.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Your ISP doesn’t give a crap what you download, they just care about the GB
downloaded and a specially uploaded. Users are harassed when the ISP gets a
legal notice from a copyright holder that has “proof” of infringement by your
IP.

------
BuildTheRobots
Wow, what a blast from the past! You won't remember me (certainly not under
this name), but I briefly hosted the download for the installer in 2003 which
was just hidden in a subfolder of my works website. Fun times, thrilled it's
still going :)

------
einpoklum
It's good that development is on-going, but it's a bit saddening that the
official client is closed-source and single-platform (if I am not mistaken!
Haven't seen an indication to the contrary on the site).

I think the platform would fare better, and would decline less, if the
software were developed more openly.

Note that there is a FOSS client for Linux (and maybe other operating
systems): aMule.

[https://github.com/amule-project/amule/](https://github.com/amule-
project/amule/)

And while it seems some development (last commit was 8 days ago), it has not
seen a proper release for 4 years.

~~~
netol
eMule is GPL, any closed source fork is likely illegal, even if it's the
official client.

Apparently, the source code of this release can be found at
[https://github.com/irwir/eMule/tree/v0.60a](https://github.com/irwir/eMule/tree/v0.60a)

aMule was created as a cross-platform port of eMule as far as I can recall.

~~~
einpoklum
Umm, the link you gave is for something released in 2016; and not worked on
since.

------
jakearmitage
What a blast from the past. The project, the forum software, the community
around it. What a delicious injection of nostalgia.

Thank you!

------
brettermeier
Where would you find stuff to download?

Anyone has good sites / servers?

~~~
aaron695
I use eMule because it had a rare doco I found on this site.

[https://docuwiki.net/](https://docuwiki.net/) (Obviously check it's Creative
Commons etc before DLing anything)

But you can just search in app. But I can't work out if it's worth adding
servers or they are all linked? Or where to get servers from. Or what it all
means. I guess I should read a manual.

(Some search material can be illegal (Not from copyright law). Anyone used to
these networks I guess knows this, but if new be careful, you will probably
autoshare if you accidentally get it)

------
skee0083
Will these changes come to aMule for Linux as well?

------
filmgirlcw
Holy shit this takes me back!!

------
_pmf_
Me, I was a mldonkey man.

~~~
robert_foss
Masochism you say, I'm impressed.

------
maxpro
Wow, I was sure all donkeys and mules died a decade ago. Or were full of
malware. How is this still usable today? I mean you can find literally
everything online for download or stream, without pirating over p2p.

~~~
rglullis
Just as a very silly example: try to find Pantera's glam rock albums and you
see how much the mainstream channels feed you only what they want you to see
and consume.

~~~
alanfranz
I can find all Pantera's albums on Spotify, at least those citied in
Wikipedia.

But, I agree that sometimes there's content which is hard to find on digital
stores or streaming services.

~~~
rglullis
Maybe they added now or it can be a regional issue, but they didn't have it in
Germany at least until 2018 when I looked for them because I wanted to show a
co-worker.

