Peer-to-peer filesharing

Kazaa is one of the 1st peer-to-peer clients. Therefore it is very well developed and offers a lot of additional services as for example skype integration.

Since the beginning Kazaa was accused to install spyware or malware on the user's computer. For more information check the wikipedia entry.

The latest release of Kazaa can be downloaded here.

With this release effectively some 3rd party software is installed. It is claimed that this sw is only used to advertise selected contents to the Kazaa user. The following components are installed (acc to the Kazaa EULA paragraph 9.4):

- Cydoor from Cydoor Technologies Ltd
- Topsearch by Altnet
- Bullguard P2P by Bullguard Technologies
- Instafinder and RX toolbar by Vista Interactive

Diet Kazaa is an add-on to Kazaa which allows to disable the unwanted contents of Kazaa

A description can be found here. It is remarkable that the EULA of Kazaa (paragraph 9.4.6) are explicitely prohibiting the disabling of the 3rd party sw. This is possibly why the program can no longer be downloaded from the DietK website. Similarly the Kazaa Lite which was a Kazaa version with the 3rd pty sw disabled is no longer maintained.

Shareaza is an open source software for filesharing. It comes without any 3rd party advertisement software and allows to access the Gnutella, eDonkey, Bit-Torrent and Gnutella2 P2P networks.

In the latest revision it features so called collections, groups of files that can be downloaded together.

You can find the latest version on the Shareaza homepage.

Limewire is an open source project as well. It is based on Java, therefore it is available for several platforms.

Limewire is not employing any malware or spyware. The basic version is free, featuring advanced gimmicks like iTunes integration (only for Windows and Mac users). Limewire gives access to Gnutella and bitTorrent networks.

The Limewire Pro version has to be purchased and promises faster downloads as well as 6 months to 1 year tech support.

Get your Limewire here.

Bit torrent is an alternative to the Gnutella network and the handy function is that several files can be clustered within a so called torrent.

With your client you 1st get the torrent file (usually from a search engine) and with this torrent file your client then identifies the files to be downloaded.

In the meantime other P2P clients offer file clustering as well (see Shareaza), but pure bit torrent clients are available for Linuxes and Unixes as well.

Get your client from the original Bit Torrent homepage

For more information on P2P go to Wikipedia. Please don't forget that sharing copyrighted content is prohibited.

Check out as well my other lens on how to get music from the internet.