WinMX and SoulSeek Interviews

[napho]

Good work from Slyck as per usual.

Despite delay after delay, WinMX continues to be one of the leading P2P networks. Although some claim its cumbersome interface and endless queues are infuriating, WinMX continues to draw a tremedous following. In addition, WinMX's surrounding community remains one of the strongest, rivialing, if not surpassing, the atmosphere created by Napster.

Slyck.com: How are things looking for the release of WinMX 4.0? Last time we spoke, estimates were placed some time around the New Year.

Frontcode: Probably not going to be done by the end of the month as I had hoped, but we're getting there.

Slyck.com: There are several problems with the chat function, such as the Rich Code Text Exploit and Nushi hacks. There is also the problem with administering the channel when the host is not around. What kinds of improvements are planned for the chat function?

Frontcode: The RichText exploit of the riched32 dll has been solved with a work-around within the client. The other issue of non-host channel administration will
also be addressed.

Slyck.com: Will Nushi and other third party clients be allow to connect to the chat network?

Frontcode: Unknown, I'm not familiar with these third-party clients.

Slyck.com: A large portion of the network uses third-party add-ons to control who may download from them based upon if the user is sharing. Will an "anti-leech" function be added to 4.0?

Frontcode: It may, if it is required. There are many improvements to 4.0 that may reduce the need for any "anti-leech" measures, so we are waiting to see how things go during the beta test.

Slyck.com: There is a lot of speculation about what features will be in the next version. Some of which are disliked. Will the installer have a modular option? That is to say, if the user doesn't want to feature, may they
choose not to install it?

Frontcode: The installer will be the same as in previous versions. If we have an option to disable a particular feature, it will be within the client settings and not within the installer.

Slyck.com: Has any thought been put into improving the Whois function? Such as adding more information; megs shared, channels they're in.

Frontcode: Adding too much info to the Whois may cause unforeseen privacy issues that some users may be uncomfortable with. In fact, 4.0 allows a user to control some important aspects of what is visible in their “whois” report to further increase privacy.

Slyck.com: Will there be a public beta test like pervious versions?

Frontcode: Yes, for sure.

Slyck.com: A lot of users seem concerned about anonymity and protecting their identity. Any possibility of discussing security features? Will WinMX users be able to hide their shared directory like in Kazaa Lite or Kazaa Media Desktop?

Frontcode: I cannot reveal any specifics until the beta test, but this is an area we devoted much thought to, and I think the solution we have come up with will be very well received by our users.

Slyck.com: What are your thoughts on the current tide of rulings in favor of P2P; such as the Canadian Copyright board stating downloading off file-sharing networks is legal, and the US court ruling that the RIAA's DMCA subpoenas are invalid?

Frontcode: n/c

Slyck.com: Can we expect any significant resolution to the "queue" situation?

Frontcode: YES! There are a few key factors with the old client that cause this, all of which have been addressed. Getting the queuing problem solved is priority #1 for us.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the community for their continued patience in waiting for the next release. WinMX is hundreds of thousands of lines of very complex C++/C/ASM code, and revising/rewriting this code-base is a very tedious and time-consuming task. I want the next version to be as good as it can be, but this comes at the expense of added development time. Please just hang on, the end result will be worth the delay.

Editor's Note: We would like to thank Kevin Hearn, President of Frontcode Technologies, who took the time out of his busy schedule, even on Christmas Day, to answer our questions. Slyck would also like to thank our forum member 'Dogmeat' who assisted in the development of these questions.
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SoulSeek has quickly become an important force in the P2P world. Although it has not reached great heights like WinMX or FastTrack, this network has one of the strongest and closest knit communities. In addition, its lead programmer, Nir Arbel, maintains close contact with the SoulSeek community; something that is perhaps more important than the network size or availability of files. We would like to thank Nir Arbel for taking the time to participate in this interview.

Slyck.com: Explain SoulSeek’s progress towards decentralization. When will SoulSeek ultimately become a fully decentralized network; and,

What aspects of the network are centralized? Please explain the
current architecture.

Nir Arbel: If anything, we're less decentralized now than we were when we started on the whole thing. The more system functions we tried to move to the decentralized network, the clearer it became how important the reliability of centralization was to most of the things Soulseek did.

In the end the only thing we left decentralized was the distribution of search requests. Those took the heaviest toll on the server, but at the same time search requests, as data, are much more disposable than say private messages, user info requests, or pretty much anything else the server does. In case you haven't guessed by now, no, Soulseek will never become fully decentralized. It would be impossible to manage as a community the same way that's done now.`

Slyck.com: Considering mostly techno, dance, house and electronic music is on the network, do you feel this has prevented the RIAA from taking an interest in SoulSeek?

Nir Arbel: It couldn't have hurt. Considering the majority of stuff trafficked on the system is probably non-RIAA owned, and seeing as the system is pretty small to begin with, it's likely we're not even on the RIAA's radar.

Slyck.com: If certain aspects remain centralized, will you perhaps revisit the idea of allowing individuals to run their own SoulSeek server?

Nir Arbel: Anything's possible, but I really can't think of too many good reasons to let people run their own servers. For one, yes, the way we make money pretty much depends on there just being one server if the privileges we give in return for donations are to mean anything.

Additionally, we like the idea of everyone being connected to everyone. People are still free to create their own communities on SoulSeek by means of chatrooms, shared recommendations and just plain search results. But at the same time you don't suffer the exclusive, elitist attitudes that you might know from networks like Hotline or Direct Connect.

Slyck.com: What estimates would you place on the size of the SoulSeek network (simultaneous user)? What effect, if any, has the RIAA’s campaign had on the size/growth of the network?

Nir Arbel: Right now we have a little over a million registered usernames. At peak hours we get a little over a hundred thousand users logged on simultaneously, but that seems to be down to about eighty thousand right now. Maybe because of the holidays.

Slyck.com: What steps have you or will you take to protect SoulSeek users from the RIAA (if possible)? I understand SoulSeek users can limit whom they share with, however will future versions disable the browsing of shared files like Kazaa Lite?

Nir Arbel: I'm not sure I understand. You can share privately to users on your buddy list, in which case other users won't be able to browse your files. Anyway, if you're thinking about encryption and IP forwarding and all the neat stuff networks like Freenet do, then that's not gonna happen anytime soon, as we're just not up to the task. I get that question a lot from users, and the answer is always more or less: you're on your own. If you don't feel like taking the rather minute risk of sharing files on a largely overlooked P2P network, then either share privately or not at all.

Slyck.com: SoulSeek has been revised with a bit more frequency in the last few months. What improvements/revisions have been made?

Nir Arbel: Almost everything we've done in the last few months was in attempt to let the server handle a larger number of users. This included both server-side modifications like fixing memory leaks, switching the pocket polling interface to the new sys_epoll that's in linux 2.6.x and optimizing wherever we can, as well as changes to the client to make it less aggressive in some respects, like the manner in which wishlists are sent to the server.

Another pretty major update to the system that I'm proud of is to do with the recommendations. It's basically just a system that lets you list anything and everything that makes your life worth living and then links you to users with similar interests and the things that interest them. We used to have a very basic version of this feature in the past, but as the system kept growing we had to give it up because the server couldn't support it anymore. After a few hardware upgrades and software optimizations, we brought it back in a considerably more functional package.

Slyck.com: Let’s look into the future of SoulSeek. What features can we expect? Any chance in multi-source downloading?

Nir Arbel: Nope. To reiterate on something I've said many times before. We like being an old-school network where users not only know who they're downloading from, but also depend on each others' good will. That's how a community works. Any network that does a good job of anonymizing the uploaders through decentralization and multisource transfers can be a great tool, but it's not a community.

New features? The only thing we're concerned with right now is reliability. Make the server stop crashing, make searches return more results and faster, make the client more stable for more people. The network isn't so small that radical new changes can be easily introduced without major disruption. If I am going to start working on new features, it's very likely that they'll be on the side of the community aspect rather than the file-sharing aspect, like the recommendations module.

Slyck.com: A lot of third party developers have infiltrated networks such as FastTrack, DirectConnect and eDonkey2000. A Linux client has been developed for SoulSeek. Is third party infiltration/development a concern to you?

Nir Arbel: It depends. If the client knows how to upload as well as download, and respects download privileges, I don't mind people using it. I think Nicotine does both of those, but I heard that MLDonkey, which has a SoulSeek support module, doesn't even have file upload functionality on the SoulSeek network. That's just not ok.

Slyck.com: Tell us more about SoulSeek Isle; is development still active? What is/was the goal of this project and what relevance will it have when SoulSeek becomes decentralized.

Nir Arbel: Yeah, there's not much to say. We thought we couldn't keep supporting the growing number of users on the Soulseek server, so we started an initiative to branch out to additional servers, the first of which was supposed to be the isle. After putting a lot of work into the server software, we discovered we had a lot more breathing room than we thought. So the Isle is down for now. We still use it when we need to test particularly risky modifications to the system though.

Slyck.com: What is your opinion of the RIAA’s current campaign against file-sharing? Do you see file-sharing prevailing in the end?

Nir Arbel: I'm not sure there's a point to forming an opinion about it. Day rolls into night and a huge corporation that never factored values of human decency into its profit model will do everything in its power to keep making more money, without any regard to perspective and common sense.

And so other than giving people who have perspective and common sense something to make fun of, I don't believe their efforts will make a difference in the long run, as far as our file-sharing habits are concerned.

[Dawn]

2005

yay

[Undermind]

I cry myself to sleep every night, because soulseek hardly ever works like it's supposed to on my system, it is constantly crashing, oh well.

[JackSpratts]

if it makes you feel any better it hasn't worked on anybody else's either. it's been down for days.

- js.

[Wolfie]

Originally posted by JackSpratts
if it makes you feel any better it hasn't worked on anybody else's either. it's been down for days.

I don't know if this will solve your problem, but I heard someone mentioned installing the most recent version fixxed a similar problem they were having with soulseek recently.

[JackSpratts]

Originally posted by Wolfie
I don't know if this will solve your problem, but I heard someone mentioned installing the most recent version fixxed a similar problem they were having with soulseek recently.

sure did - thanks wolfie! V. 152 connected. still, others aren't so lucky. the network isn't working for everyone, regardless of version installed.

- js.

[Wolfie]

No problem, JackSpratts. Glad it worked out for you.

Hopefully these problems will be solved with next version.

Cheers

[multi]

if theres a build of nicotine for win32
it might me worth a try...that seems to work pretty well on linux

[Undermind]

Originally posted by JackSpratts
if it makes you feel any better it hasn't worked on anybody else's either. it's been down for days.

- js.

haha, but seriously, SS is pretty close to being banned from my machine, I think my firewall doesn't like it or something, but besides that it is a resource hog. The crashes always happen when it does searches. who knows, I've searched the web, but find no real help. I installed the latest version as soon as it was released, but still nothing. I'm thinking it's mostly my setup, oh well, thanks anyway

[napho]

Originally posted by Undermind
haha, but seriously, SS is pretty close to being banned from my machine, I think my firewall doesn't like it or something, but besides that it is a resource hog. The crashes always happen when it does searches. who knows, I've searched the web, but find no real help. I installed the latest version as soon as it was released, but still nothing. I'm thinking it's mostly my setup, oh well, thanks anyway

Maybe you could give Soulseek a higher resource priority although that's a longshot. Also you could try MLDonkey. I can connect to the SoulSeek server although something is blocking it from working. You might have better luck.

[assorted]

Soulseek is a resource hog

Soulseek crashes

Soulseek's server is down sometimes.

Soulseek does not have multi-source downloading.

Soulseek often has some form of bug going on that makes you have to check the dudes blog to see whats going on.

Yet it's the only p2p I use for music, and I've tried a bunch for a long time now.

This goes to show that a good community makes the client, far more then the quality of the client itself. The music selection for me is simply unparalleled on Soulseek, and I'm not some electronic freak. Soulseeks' community is excellent for anything outside of the top 40 charts.

I imagine this is the future of p2p music, not waste or kazaa. Clients that connect you to, say 10,000-70,000 others who have tastes you share, not 50-300 others (like waste or direct connect) and not a million others (like kazaa) who you can't really connect to and are all sharing the latest 50 cent and the paris hilton video only.

Just my opinion, of course.