BearShare has been sabotaged.

[AaronWalkhouse]

(To obtain the most recent BearShare 5.1 installer with upgraded settings, see post #2 below) - Edit by Lord of the Rings or here.

If you have any version at or above 5.2.0.6 your downloads can be arbitrarily stopped or limited by Free Peers at any time. This is what happened early this week when everyone with these new versions suddenly found themselves completely unable to download and then spent several hours at a crippled rate.

Vinnie just had to test his new weapon, possibly to show the RIAA lawyers breathing down his neck that he could do it.

To protect yourself from future episodes of sabotage, I suggest you switch to versions older than 5.2.anything and never upgrade again. If upgrade dialogs are a bother try the expired beta 5.1.0b25 and use the BearStart utility to run it. (edit: BearStart does not run on Windows 8 for everyone) (Instead, an alternative BSLoader can be obtained to work on any Windows version & with custom delay options & no pop-up window like BearStart.)
* BearShare Beta 5.1 runs in forced ultrapeer mode and requires port forwarding for modems/routers. A firewalled ultrapeer is not good for the network or your personal use, so make sure you port forward your modem to allow BS 5.1's incoming port for both TCP & UDP.

Updates:

BearShareV6 and BearShareV7:
Are both fakes. They are not P2P applications at all but are instead a sales platform for a
limited repertoire of DRM-infested music files. Users are tightly limited in what they can
search for and anything they try to share is "fingerprinted" so that all unapproved files wil
be rejected.

BearFlix.
A crippled version of BearShare that limits users to images and short videos only. It still
works on gnutella but the abilities to search and download are too badly crippled for it to
be useful at all

"Cracked" BearShare Pro:
At best, not worth your time because the beta listed above gives you better control and
the download maximums are the same or better. At worst, one of the cracked versions
was improperly packaged with an old freepeers.ini file with the GUID
69D4F5C2D934FBEC6FC6CB06BDD32D29. Having a non-unique GUID breaks push
downloads, causing what amounts to a DDOS against anybody with the defective software
who happen to be firewalled and also against anybody who tries to download any file
hosted by them. All firewalled users with this GUID are being blocked from the network in
the Fullsize Hostiles List and the gnutella templist hosted by Bluetack. If you were
wondering why your cracked Pro was performing so badly even as at kept your bandwidth
maxed out all the time, now you know.

[Lord of the Rings]

To obtain the BearShare 5.1 Beta, clear instructions & fresh connection cache (which you will need) and upgraded settings, see http://www.gnutellaforums.com/host-c...bearshare.html (click on blue link to the left). This version (upgraded by File_Girl) is more updated than the one in the first post above. This version should connect immediately. And should not have any problems with the clock such as the BearStart version can cause.



Any version of BearShare after 5.2 is fake and does not even run on the Gnutella network, but a semi-commercial network with low quality DRM infested files instead.

Originally Posted by Lord of the Rings

A fuller explanation for Bearshare, a sabotaged ShareAza & other programs explained here The Story: Shareaza, iMesh, RIAA, and Recent Events. No wonder I do not feel inspired to buy Sony products any more with the Sony director a part of the RIAA & of iMesh. I think I read a different article which gave the direct link of Sony to such issues. The Sony director being a part of the iMesh story & of RIAA also, maybe one of the off-shoot links.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia as of Nov. 2011

On May 4, 2006, Free Peers agreed to pay $30 million in a settlement with the RIAA and transfer all their BearShare-related assets to MusicLab, LLC. (an iMesh subsidiary).

On August 17, 2006, MusicLab released BearShare v6, a new application unrelated to the original, which does not use the Gnutella protocol at all, but instead operates on the same network as the iMesh client. In August 2006, MusicLab released another version optimized for video download called BearFlix. The first release was version 1.2.1. On October 27, 2008, Bearshare v7 with iPod support was released.

Three variations of the original BearShare gnutella servent were distributed by Free Peers: Free, Lite and Pro. The Free version had higher performance limits than the Lite version but contained some adware. The Lite version was adware-free but had lower performance limits than the Free version. The Pro version had higher limits than both the Free and Lite versions but cost US$24. Version numbers in this series ranged from 1.0 to 5.2.5.9.

A variant of the original BearShare gnutella servent, called BearFlix, is altered to limit sharing, searches and downloads to images and videos which are limited in length and duration. Though its version numbers appear to start from 1.1.2.1 in the user interface it presents itself on the gnutella network as versions 6.1.2.1 and up. It is offered in Basic and Pro (US$19) versions with similar variations in performance limits as the corresponding BearShare versions, Lite and Pro. There is no Free (adware-supported) version in the BearFlix series.

MusicLab's BearShare v6 and later offer paid music downloads in the DRMed WMA format as well as free content in various formats, mostly MP3. It also includes social networking features, somewhat similar to MySpace. The free content is shared by users and is automatically verified by BearShare not to infringe. This verification is done using acoustic fingerprinting. Also, video files more than 50mb in size and 15 minutes in length cannot be shared, guaranteeing feature-length releases cannot be transferred across the network. No other content than music and video files can be shared, which excludes executable files and zip archives amongst others.

A typical example about Vinnie, the developer: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/open-d...bearshare.html. He sold out to the $RIAA money & coded in special controller code within BearShare 5.2.

For some reason the description of the BS forums reminds me of the Handbrake forum. I saw identical activity there. It's a sorry tale to read through all the edited and arrogant reply posts there. I wouldn't be game to post there. lol

.

[doomey]

where can I get an older version of bear share? (please)

[Ahmadabuleil]

thats what happened to me thats th reason i downloaded limewire...but im having connection problems

[Lord of the Rings]

I don't know if this link is any good http://download.bearshare.com/

But personally I'd go for BearShare Lite
http://www.filehippo.com/download_bearshare_lite/

Make sure your firewalls are properly configured! Also your modem/router since most high speed modems have NAT firewalls! Make sure you enable UPnP or else manual port forward from here http://portforward.com/routers.htm

[MidnightAngel]

Well I just tried installing bearshare lite, but it says that it is not a valid win32 application. Is there a way around this or I just cant use it?

[AaronWalkhouse]

The file you downloaded was probably damaged. Try the two programs in the post at the top of this thread.

[MidnightAngel]

thats the one I tried

[AaronWalkhouse]

Are you sure you tried "BSTEST05010b25.exe" and not "BSLITEINSTALL.exe"?
I just tried and it's good. Try downloading it again.

[MidnightAngel]

Well I tried downloading it one more time. First one I tried was from the top post (AaronWalkhouse) and it didnt work, so I tried the next one (in Lord of the Rings post) and it worked great. Im not sure if there is a difference between them tho, but somebody else might be able to tell. It was the "BSLITEINSTALL.exe" one that worked for me. Is there a difference? I hope I just didnt get a dodgy one.....

But thank you for helping me.

Im so happy to have BearShare back, without all the "extras"