Specifications

33 AOL 9.0 Optimized
34 HP Pavilion zd7000
34 Toshiba Satellite P25-S507
36 Canon PowerShot G5
HANDS-ON TESTING OF NEW PRODUCTS
ILLUSTRATION BY CHIP WASS
36 Macromedia Contribute 2
38 Gateway Profile 4X
38 Pioneer DVR-A06
40 Palm Tungsten/T2
PC MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 www.pcmag.com
30
File sharing continues to be hot
news, with the Recording Indus-
try Association of America (
RIAA)
looking to make examples of indi-
viduals—not just companies—who illegally dis-
tribute copyrighted material. The threat of law-
suits is not turning users off from file sharing,
however. In fact, it may be driving users to seek out
anonymous services.
n We don’t advocate down-
loading copyrighted material without permission. That said, the ability to hide your IP address
in a peer-to-peer (
P2P) setting is an interesting, potentially revolutionary technology, and it merits discussion.
n To determine just how much anonymity is possible while file sharing, we looked at Blubster, Filetopia, and
Morpheus. All have serious limitations but are likely to boost what some would agree is a welcome trend.
THE MAGAZINE
WORLD’S LARGEST
COMPUTER-TESTING
FACILITY
Blubster 2.5
A paradox of sorts, Blubster 2.5
promises to protect your privacy
and anonymity but then
loads annoying adware
on your machine—
not to mention the
suspicious search
bar your browser
acquires. If you
can live with that,
you can connect
with over 200,000
users sharing about 47
million audio files. You can’t
share other file types, but a lot of
the audio offerings are of high
quality, including high-bit-rate
MP3s and Ogg Vorbis files
(which, at certain bit rates, sound
better than MP3s).
Blubster is fast
and provides reasonable
anonymity. But we
hate the adware
that comes with the
free version.
BY KONSTANTINOS KARAGIANNIS
File Sharing Without the Tracks
Blubster’s MP2P (Manolito
peer-to-peer) network uses
UDP
(User Datagram Protocol) in-
stead of
TCP. Few firewalls are
preconfigured to allow access to
the high
UDP ports MP2P re-
quires, though, and people con-
cerned with anonymity often
have firewalls. Blubster won’t
work unless you can open the
appropriate ports.
The seeming unreliability of
UDP (packet receipt isn’t ac-
knowledged) and the absence of
servers are what help make
transactions on the
MP2P net-
work difficult to trace. Rather
than servers, gateways—Web
pages with changing peer lists—
facilitate connections to ma-
chines with hidden
IP
addresses.
In our attempts to scan test ma-