July,4

The eDonkey network has never been so efficient !

In fact, since some days, it's several tens of new fully functional edonkey servers that have been put online. In France, despite a very unfavorable legal context, this is not less than six servers that are waiting the eMule client. Of course, many observers are wondering why they can last as long, especially among a hoster which was clearly opposed to this kind of p2p service. But even if these servers are fully accessible and operational, before connecting one of them, be aware that no one knows who controls them or in what way can be exploited the informations which pass through them.

About our activities, our backup eDonkey server is now stopped and you can now connect again our main server, but don't forget to check the TCP port number, which is now changed from 1111 to 7111, because of a too large number of connections which are coming permanently on the old one. This traffic concern mainly thousand of ghost clients that we prefer to avoid. Analyze of this traffic show that these clients does a connection, then keep it active as long as possible, but they do not share any file and they never launch any search. after two or three hours, it's up than 100 000 of these clients which can be connected, thereby increasing the TCP connections table and hence the server load. The connexion requests rate is such that it also degrades the connection process of the other users, by making it very difficult. A good example of the consequences of such pollution is visible when trying to use the eDonkeyServer No2.

besides the fact that this kind of traffic is impacting some other servers (why not all? Why ours?), that makes any serious evaluation of the p2p network much more difficult to achieve by altering artificially the number of connected users. The origin of such connections lead mostly in China, and the change of our tcp port value allow to the eServer software to avoid to deal with these useless requests.As we do not want to penalize our Chinese friends by filtering all of their IP, it's possible that in the future we could change again this tcp port number to another one.

In another area, we would like to bring some clarification to users who use our infrastructure, so as to be totally transparent about our activities. since over one year, we are collaborating on a CNRS project and, even if we never did a mystery of that, we had never spoke clearly about it in our pages. Our last judicial adventure force us to communicate more about that subject, in order to avoid any further loss of time for everyone. Our collaboration on this project is mainly to provide the content of searches performed by users of the eDonkey network. You can find details about the treatment that is made with these data by following this link, but it's important to clarify that all the IP addresses are anonymized with a md5 hash, and that the purpose of this study is not to identify the users. As parents, but particularly as actors of the eDonkey scene, it seems to us very important to actively participate in this kind of project.

To conclude on another serious subject, we deplore the attempts of some of our compatriots who are trying to impose on all French people some absurd and inapplicable laws, if not by their violation of multiple basic principles already enshrined in our laws, if only by their surrealist technical aspects. We speak of course of the LOPSI law and of the absurd and useless HADOPI. The unjust and indiscriminate repression can only lead the music industry in an dead street. Despite all the setbacks of recent years,this one persists in its desire to not do anything to change their business models according to the new digital reality.

Jean roger S.