I used aMule again ten years later. This is what it looked like to me

I used aMule again

The advancement of technology makes one stop using programs that were once inevitable. WinZip (In the days of Windows) to put together the pieces of a file downloaded in a cyber cafe and saved in multiple diskettes, k3b to create the installation media of some distro and, of course, aMule

With the popularization a few years ago of platforms such as Amazon, Spotify and Netflix, the piracy of books, music, movies and series, drastically decreased or mutated. Instead of unauthorized sharing of movie or series content obtained from the cinema or cable TV, they were recorded from the platform. Also sharing passwords or access via VPN from countries where Netflix did not operate, became the order of the day.

Streaming exhaustion

However, a careful reading of social networks seems to reveal a trend that is not massive at the moment, but it is growing. The abandonment of video streaming platforms and the return to download applications.

There are many reasons for this. First, the oversupply of platforms. In addition to international ones such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney +, Star +, HBO +, Paramount + and Pluto TV, there are others with a less geographic scope or aimed at specific content.

However, if we are to believe Pareto's Law, We only see 20% of the content 80% of the time we spend on the platforms. It has been shown that the interest that decreases when you see more than 5 chapters in a row in a series. And, for rights reasons, the series and films that interest us end up disappearing after a few months.

The fragmentation of different platforms makes them desperate for new content. Content that is not always characterized by its quality. I can cite as an example two cases that I know of due to geographical proximity. The kingdom (Netflix) and Maradona the series (Amazon) In the first case the criticism he pointed that the political prejudices of the scriptwriters outweighed the narrative interest. In a second, the manipulation of reality without it being justified on television grounds.

Internationally, the Fear Street trilogy, an adaptation of the work of the harmless RL Stine, generated a lot of excitement. It did not go unnoticed that the bad guy was the white boy who became a police officer, the good guy the Afro-descendant lesbian girl, and the main victims the couple who became a drug dealer because of Wild Capitalism.

I used aMule again. I remembered why I had stopped

Reading about this disenchantment with the platforms, I meet several new aMule users. Although I believed that the project was discontinued, apparently it continued to be active, releasing the first version from 2016 this year.I don't remember when was the last time I bothered to install it. Even in the pre Netflix era, BitTorrent had more up-to-date content and downloaded faster.

In the Ubuntu repositories (And I suppose that in Debian Testing) there is the latest version so the installation was not a problem. Fedora has it in the Fusion RPM repositories and it can also be installed from the ArchLInux repositories.

What is aMule?

It is a client for the ED2K and Kademlia file sharing networks

ED2K is a file exchange protocol (P2P) (Point-to-Point) in which a server acts as an intermediary to connect clients. In other words, the first thing the program does is connect to a server. The default installation includes a list of servers and can be found others on the Internet.

Once successfully connected to a server, we can use the search tool, either locally (the connected server) or globally (all servers), any file and we will get the results that match the search as a response.

When we start the download, aMule asks the server for information about where the files are hosted. The server responds with the IP addresses of the clients that have told the server that they have the specific file.

Customers don't need to have the entire file to start sharing it. There is a shift system and, when the requesting client reaches the top position, the remote client sends him the part of the file that is available to him. It is common for a single file to populate from different sources.

If both users have HighID (an identifier that is assigned depending on the connection configuration) the transfer will be made directly from client to client, but if one of the clients has LowID, the connection will be established through the server, since LowID cannot accept incoming connections. Consequently, two clients with LowIDs cannot connect to each other.

The Kademlia protocol eliminates the intermediary server since each of the clients assumes parts of their functions.

The truth is, I don't think it's worth installing. The user interface lags behind, the configuration is a bit cumbersome (By default it saves the downloaded files in a hidden folder and you may have to configure the Internet connection manually. BitTorrent offering continues to be more comprehensive and downloads faster. Even with programs like Popcorn-Time you don't even have to wait for the download to finish. Browsers like Brave even already have a client built in for this protocol.


12 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Juan said

    Is this a serious article?

    Or the tantrum of a spoiled child?

    1.    Diego German Gonzalez said

      I'm going to accuse you with my mom.

  2.   Lithos523 said

    The truth is that I cannot disagree more.
    While it is true that Amule needs some configuration and is slower than torrent, its catalog is vastly larger than this and especially with things that have been around for some time, it has no rival.
    As for the configuration, opening a couple of ports on a router can be somewhat cumbersome, true, but tell me that it is a problem that the default download folder is hidden, it is yamar lout who installs it, not to continue choose where to download.
    In addition, it is based on sharing, unlike torrent, which is more for pure download.

  3.   Nonamed said

    It works great for me, for security I use it only with the kad network, it is not necessary to use servers.

  4.   Pablo said

    But what do you say, where did they get you from, uncle? I tell you, the emule or amule, of course it is worth installing it, it is not dead at all, in fact the emule has already had a community version for some time and they continue to release new versions as in the old days, bycy and it goes like a shot, nothing is complicated to configure, it is a moment and it is also only the first time, today it is not necessary, neither to open ports, nor to obtain high id, due to the fiber connections we have, the emule or the amule, they go like a bullet, even with vpn, I use it with vpn and with low id always and it goes like a shot. Currently in Linux the emule under wine is better than the amule itself, although they have just released a version. In emule or amule, it continues to function as the order of the day, its extraordinary search engine or there are also web pages with ed2k links, another thing is that you do not know them, but you find all kinds of content, old, super old and super current. I use emule under wine and I find everything and if I can't find it, then maybe torrent shot, but occasionally, because with emule you have more than enough for everything. That piracy has dropped due to streaming is a pure fallacy, because it is what they want people to believe, but it turns out that no, with streaming there is more piracy than ever, because everything that appears on any platform streaming, the next day it is already available to download by torrent or by mule and if it is a movie premiere, you have to wait at least a month to download it, another thing is that you have no idea where and how to download , but EVERYTHING is available for download, just as it has always been, nothing has changed, just because you don't know how, it doesn't mean it's like that. Learn a little before saying such nonsense.

  5.   daniel said

    I do not think the same, of course it is worth installing aMule, but only if you are someone who likes movies and it is not just to see the latest of the latest (which also works for that). Try to download non-new movies on bittorrent and then tell me.

  6.   arangoiti said

    Although, as you say, the Torrent offer is more complete, the AMULE network continues to be the best to find rare or unusual things, it has no competition. If the problem is the download time, make no mistake, nothing will happen to see or hear what you were looking for a few hours or days later. Big Amule.

  7.   Pedro086 said

    Germán, listen to us and try Amule again. You will see that the supply of files is immense. Yes, the GUI is crappy, it hangs sometimes, you have to open the ports, it is slower than Torrent, etc, etc ... ... but it has almost 3 million files.

    It works? Yes
    Are there 3 million files?… Yes
    Do they have things that you can't find in Torrents? Yes!!!!!

    It is done.

    Of course, you are the owner of your opinion and free not to use it.

  8.   rv said

    It seems to me that there are already comments about it, but I add myself: aMule is a great program and the associated network allows to share material that in other networks simply * does not exist *. You have to dig deeper with such long-standing software before making tiling judgments against it ...
    Then, the right-wing / reactionary opinions of a political nature are the property of each one, but they should be removed if some technical seriousness (or at least some relevance) is intended. It has nothing to do with aMule, ed2k or kademlia, that the author of the note is a fan of white policemen or detests black lesbians, etc ...
    regards

  9.   Tony Martin said

    Torrent downloads in Spain go at light speed, but they are in the hands of a few websites that are persecuted, no, the following, and you also have to enter the websites with the suit of infectious patients, because they have everything. The amule works slow but it has everything, I have it mounted on a raspberry and it works like a movie.

  10.   jony127 said

    I agree with the comments, I think this article is very unfortunate. Why write an article about amule and then say at the end "I do not recommend it"?

    Amule and torrent are different applications that provide you with different things and there is the good thing, having alternatives. For example, I want to download individual songs in mp3, using the amule search engine I find them and download them in the blink of an eye, by torrent it is almost impossible.

    Amule is a useful application and valid today, for some downloads it may be better to use torrent but not for others.

  11.   wibol said

    I have been using eDonkey/eMule/aMule forever, but lately I was already having too many problems with aMule on Linux. Closures were very frequent at the end of a download, so I started looking for alternatives outside the eDonkey network, but I think that none is up to the task for the reasons that several users have already commented.

    I recently rediscovered mlDonkey, which always seemed very difficult to get up and running, but this time I've spent the time and I'm delighted with it. It easily reaches the speed of my contracted bandwidth, when no other client had been able to stably exceed 12000kB/s, it reaches 38000kB/s.

    To make my job easier for a future reinstallation, I created a Docker image that only requires choosing a download directory to start enjoying this magnificent p2p client. In the Linux Mint forum you can find a tutorial on installing mlDonkey in Docker that I published not long ago.

    https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=367937

    I hope that it will be of help to those of us who are still using this wonderful network and that my link will not be considered spam, in which case I apologize.