It has come to my attention that although LimeWire is taking advantage of READING the search results that BearShare sends out to determine if the server is busy, they are not SETTING these flags in the extended area.

This prevents people from detecting if a LimeWire servent is busy or not, and therefore puts more load on BearShare users.

It was apparently an intentional oversight, designed to improve the reliability and quality of downloads using LimeWire, at the expense of the BearShare servent.

For those of you who do not know, the above post was submitted by Vincent Falco, the developer of the popular Gnutella client, Bearshare. He is a frequent collaborator with the LimeWire team and valued colleague.

This thread gets into some quite technical details of the Gnutella protocol, so I will explain a bit.

When a Gnutella client returns a search result to another Gnutella client, it has the option to include metadata (data about data) in that search to supply more information.

Overall, there are four major fields supplied in the metadata that supply more information about the client returning the search result.


1) whether or not that client has upload slots available.

2) whether or not that client is firewalled.

3) whether or not that client has ever completed an upload to another client.

4) whether the connection speed supplied in the search result has been measured by the client or whether it was supplied by the user.


Vinnie began this practice of including metadata some number of months ago, and LimeWire chose not to include any of this extra information until LimeWire 1.4.

In LimeWire 1.4, we included the first two pieces of information because they are clearly beneficial. We did not include the other two because we did not see them as particularly useful. We responded with "maybe" in these fields as a result, which is distinguishable from "yes" and "no" and is defined in the protocol.

We did not do this out of any malicious intent in terms of giving LimeWire an advantage over Bearshare. Getting into this type of competition, we believe, is not in our interest or anyone else's. We do, however, regret not discussing this issue with the developers at Free Peers, as such a discussion would have cleared up any confusion and would have avoided any hard feelings.

We apologize for any confusion that this may have caused and hope that these issues can be worked out more fruitfully for all in the future.

This is really funny. Like Vinnie can talk about a client not playing nice. It's hilarious that after he unilaterally embraces and extends the Gnutella protocol, he can then complain that other clients don't follow suit. What next, is he going to complain that the other clients don't include spyware too?

This is especially funny because in my experience, past versions of BearShare strongly preferred to connect only to its own kind (although happily downloading from anyone). Vinnie insists he took this out many versions ago, but in testing I could still see it happening. Once BS connects to a few of its own kind, other clients will have a *very* hard time. Whether this is intentional or just do to some socket handling problem I don't know. Perhaps it's even fixed by now - I gave up on BearShare when it started forcing OnFlow on you. Still, as Vinnie refused to accept that it could be happening in the first place, I somehow doubt it.

Reall this is almost as funny as when Vinnie was talking about how some "poorly written" client was flooding the network only to later discover it was his own program screwing up the search TTL!

Actually, installation of Onflow,Savenow, etc. is optional in the latest version. You are given the option to install or not to. You are not forced to.

Heh you got a chuckle out of me...

Now you're going off base. There was one version released which had a preference only for outgoing, Auto connections to other BearShare servents. Incoming connections were never refused or dropped. This was certainly a mistake and thats why it was removed.

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Vinnie insists he took this out many versions ago, but in testing I could still see it happening. Once BS connects to a few of its own kind, other clients will have a *very* hard time. Whether this is intentional or just do to some socket handling problem I don't know.

Now you're trolling - this was removed and it never came back in any way shape or form.

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Still, as Vinnie refused to accept that it could be happening in the first place, I somehow doubt it.

No, and if you look in the revision history you can see not only when I added it, but also when I removed it.

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Reall this is almost as funny as when Vinnie was talking about how some "poorly written" client was flooding the network only to later discover it was his own program screwing up the search TTL!

Now THATS funny! Hey we live and learn.

Sounds like he is an ******* to me.

Dont apologize, Vinnie should be the one apologizing he just as you well know likes to talk a lot of ****.

I think as we are mostly all limewire users, we can all band together and say to vinnie "we don't care!" If he wants sympathy for bearshare, maybe he should post on the bearshare board....

Feel free to dispell the myth if it's at all false, but popular opinion has it that BearShare is spyware. For that reason, I boycotted even *trying* the BearShare client (because spyware is always inevitably cancerware in that it's near impossle to remove without causing damage to your computer) and instead came across LimeWire (IMO the best client for file-sharing/Gnuttla Network interfacing).

If BearShare is spyware (which I'll assume true until told or proven otherwise) then it being squeezed out of the Gnutella Network is no loss. Next to porn, email spam, and the Radiohead.com, spyware is the lowest form of filth there is. I don't want to get all 'Big Brother' on everyone, but it's just plain deceptive and intrusive. And since most users out there apparently don't know that BearShare is spyware, maybe if LimeWire can help attribute to BearShare's slump in popular then they're doing one hell of a favour to the poor sods who have no idea that their main internet connection may be monitored courtesy of BearShare.

Hummer

We all know in vinnies world everything about gnutella revolves around bearshare, right?

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