New Shareaza v2.4.0 - 9 Months After With 900 Changes

October 13, 08 by sharky   1,683  views  

The audacious Shareaza fiasco that saw their domain rudely hijacked and the popular file sharing client replaced with a fake ‘pay’ (aka. "legal") Shareaza v4 is likely still fresh in many of our minds. Fortunately, the original developers did not cease work on the GNU-licensed real Shareaza, as they introduce a much-improved new version v2.4.0.0 this month. After more than 9 months of dedication, the team is proud to announce the first major upgrade to Shareaza since the debacle. This latest Shareaza comes loaded with 900 very impressive cumulative updates & changes, including Vista support, integrated IRC chat, TorrentWizard, new skins, and even a TCP/UDP connection test.

For those unfamiliar, Shareaza is a multi-network peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing client supporting Gnutella2, Gnutella, eDonkey2000 (eMule/eD2k), HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent protocols.

Shareaza For Torrenting?

While BitTorrent is still the "coolest kid on the block" in the P2P circuit, Shareaza is still an excellent multi-protocol P2P app in its own right. While under no circumstances would we advocate its use for private trackers, we found it a very suitable substitute BT client for public torrents. In our tests, DL speeds were very similar to those of µTorrent when simultaneously downloading the exact same torrent to both:

For those who are tight on bandwidth, Shareaza actually uploads (seeds) at a much slower rate than other BT clients, without sacrificing any download speed. While this isn’t necessarily a good thing for BitTorrent as a whole, users who are capped by their ISP may find it appropriate for comsuming less monthly bandwidth.

Scene-Releases On Shareaza?

Decentralized peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella have always been heavily criticized for bogus and fake files riddled amongst the search results. And rightly so. Shareaza comes as no exception; there’s still a decent amount of junk. But there’s also some good versions, too - you just need to know how to search for them properly.

For example, if you search for "Dark Knight" you’ll generate a fair bit of crap in the results. But if you know who (what ‘release group’) put it out, you can narrow down the searching to show more relevant data. We already know that "mVs" was the group who released the latest DVDSCR version of Dark Knight, so by adding mvs to the query, more relevancy will prevail. As with many P2P clients, files with the highest number of hosts will rise to the top of the search - and we were easily able to view a "good" version. We downloaded and tested the top result, and we can verify that it is, indeed, a good working copy identical to its proper BitTorrent kin.

eD2k Links

Aside from adding known good *.torrents to Shareaza, perhaps the best way to ensure good working files is to use appropriate eD2k links. While we’ll admit that in-program Shareaza "eDonkey searching" is often suspect (and even downright dangerous), eD2k links found in reliable indexing sites will most likely provide a verifiable good version, no matter what you seek. A good indexer will have a link for the most recent releases, comparable to a torrent indexer. Here’s a sample of a few that stand out:

Remember, download Shareaza only from their official home at Sourceforge: http://shareaza.sourceforge.net

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6 responses for this post

  1. 01   •   Chris Hanlon Says: 13.10.08 at 10:40 pm

    Cool, but who downloads anything from guntilla anymore lol

  2. 02   •   zig Says: 14.10.08 at 1:37 am

    Well, who downloads anything from Gnutella? Probably those people who downloaded more than 160 millions copies of LimeWire from download.com ;)

    As for bogus files, at a first glance, search results include many bogus results, indeed. But there are easy ways to reduce spam: use additional parameters in your search. The example mentioned above, for instance, is probably a large video file, you can limit the search to results video files bigger than 400 Mbytes, which will instantly remove a great deal of spam. You can also use a spam filter which will block all .wma, .wmv and such DRM infected files along with some spammer IPs. Get the latest filter using this magnet link, then press F7 on Shareaza, click with the right button of your mouse on the window and select import to import this file. Finally, you can also check a result with the built-in Bitzi ticket feature, to see what others think of the file and contribute your own judgment for files you already have. Happy sharing!

    PS: Thanks sharky for keeping your users informed about the so called ShareazaV4 distributed by the former homepage which got hijacked. For those who’d like to learn the whole story, see this post from one of Shareaza developers.

  3. 03   •   Vision Says: 15.10.08 at 6:32 am

    always the latest and hottest information in the sharing world, thanks again sharky …

    Chris Hanlon, a lot of people still using P2P networks, and shareaza is one of the very decent clients to use for those networks, but for torrenting, i don’t think so, it would really be funny to see someone trying to use it on private trackers.
    public trackers ??, i don’t think so either, as it was mentioned shareaza doesn’t use the bandwidth you have like a normal torrent client, and the rate of the upload\download speed can be adjusted without affecting the important perament (upload), shareaza can suck all the resources from any private tracker without seeding back enough data ( **** you all who leechers and kiss my *** )

    i’m sure all P2P users (which i’m NOT one of them by the way) are saying, thanks a lot for the REAL sharezaz team, keep the good work.

  4. 04   •   anonymous Says: 15.10.08 at 3:02 pm

    And I wonder.. why didn’t they change their client’s name? instead keeping the same name that its domain has been hijacked? seriously, this is some dumb behavior, started with losing their domain for whatever reason and ending up with keeping the same name of the program like the fake one…

    Stupid

  5. 05   •   zig Says: 23.10.08 at 7:37 pm

    If the project abandoned its name, this would allow scammers to distribute their product as the one and only Shareaza, easily misleading users who aren’t aware of that. Remember what happened whith iMesh and BearShare ? Interestingly the so-called ShareazaV4 is exactly a clone of these RIAA approved stuff, suffers the same filtering and limitations and connects to the same network. Now just compare on alexa the traffic of iMesh, BearShare (rather stable and high ranking) and of Shareaza[dot]com which was hijacked: it lost 80% in one year.

    That alone is a good reason to keep the name. And hey, Shareaza is the name of the open source project, the community is not giving it up to scammers!

    PS: for the security filters mentioned above, take a look at Shareaza forums, Security and Privacy topic.

  6. 06   •   Raphael Says: 23.10.08 at 11:05 pm

    While all those indexing sites are great(I’m a sharevirus user myself), I often try looking up http://forums.peerweb.org/ for true gnutella releases as they tend to be faster when downloading using shareaza. The content ammount is far from those sites, but the few that exist is very well shared.

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