Author Topic: 3rd party winmx replacement? (Read 25323 times)

Lagerlout666 · « **Reply #20 on:** July 22, 2009, 08:44:31 am »

W.P.C.C is a nice client, but as far as im aware its closed source? You would be better trying to use KM's source albeit only as reference for doing your own.

GhostShip · « **Reply #21 on:** July 22, 2009, 09:09:21 am »

The WinMX protocols have been known for a long time and information on how to use them is available to coders as well as some helpful guides I have written, most of this information is available in the "Core" section of the forum that is made up of members who can show they understand the need to be responsible with sharing it and to date with about 30 members of that group all have been, this is purely to prevent a repeat of the idiocy seen in former years with exploits being all most folks where interested in learning about.

I dont know how many more times I have to say this I have the transfers/protocol info if you can code folks.
Can I warn anyone against reverse engineering the original client, one reason is that its illegal and two it may taint the work folks like myself do that is done by spending months watching network traffic and analysing it, I ask you not to do something thats wrong and unecessary if you need info contact me and if I dont have the particular info you need I will obtain it via legal means.

birdman · « **Reply #22 on:** July 22, 2009, 09:21:51 am »

Maybe Emulator could add the transfers etc to his wpcc and then maybe that could become a replacment for winmx it seems half way there already ? please note i do not know about coding

GhostShip · « **Reply #23 on:** July 22, 2009, 09:30:10 am »

I,m sure thats a possibility but as has already been mentioned WPCC is closed src and thus the community gains little if anything in terms of looking to the future and being able to work on improvements as a community.

birdman · « **Reply #24 on:** July 22, 2009, 10:15:57 am »

Personaly open source does not bother me, ive used winmx for years with that not being open source and the patch and have not batted an eyelid as i would think most wouldnt. I think the need for a new client is greater that if if its open or closed source, just my opinion

Pri · « **Reply #25 on:** July 22, 2009, 11:17:18 am »

Quote from: birdman on July 22, 2009, 10:15:57 am

Personaly open source does not bother me, ive used winmx for years with that not being open source and the patch and have not batted an eyelid as i would think most wouldnt. I think the need for a new client is greater that if if its open or closed source, just my opinion

I do agree with this. I would like portions of it to be Open Source so that if the original writer goes MIA (which is common) others can pick up the work from where they left off like KM has done with WCS and WCB. On the other hand I just want a new client out there as soon as possible that can do everything we want even if it is closed I think most of us would be happy enough if it supported plugins which WPCC already does.

Forested665 · « **Reply #26 on:** July 22, 2009, 03:01:34 pm »

GhostShip you have always said that the primary portion of your client will remain closed source. So if you go away it doesnt really help us any more then wpcc would.

whohas · « **Reply #27 on:** July 22, 2009, 03:32:58 pm »

My fear of having a program developed under closed source is not only the fact it could be abandoned and never seen again, but also that the community may have very little influence over the direction of its development.
On the other hand, I don't know much about programming, but I always assumed the reason some popular p2p clients are NOT open source is because of the potential security issues that could arise if this code falls into the wrong hands.

It seems many people are still keen to have a new client but there doesn't seem to be any organised keen driving force pushing the people behind such peoject.

Here are some things that I think might be required for a "team" to undertake such a project:
1.) market research - regular interaction with the community, gathering data and organising it in a managable way that can be used by the dev team. This could also possibly incorporate design elements, such as how the UI will be made and how it can be improved based on what the market wants, etc...
2.) resource manager - providing tools for the job, such as tech stuff like setting up a website/forum/ftp, live chat for public (or developer meetings), etc...
3.) programmers - people to write the code to do the job demanded by the community (info from market research)
4.) testers - test the product, compile detailed bug reports for he programmer/s to work on.

Maybe I am talking crap or maybe theres some sense to this, who knows, these are just some random thoughts of mine.

GhostShip · « **Reply #28 on:** July 22, 2009, 05:43:52 pm »

Hi Whohas

Much of what needs to be done in terms of updating is kind of redundant in my mind if we are unable to replicate what we have already and the hold up with that is lack of experienced coders and some trepidation on behalf of the existing ones, it is not a small project by any means and I factored this in when asking folks to work on a secondary client first that offers little or no facility for network damaging exploits and thus can be open-sourced, a primary client that can deal with existing network clients may be another kettle of fish and a special group may need to be formed to keep things safe and secure until an enhanced network protocol is constructed and utilised that will have no impact on the network as a whole, as I wrote previously there is no point running before we can walk.

Quote

It seems many people are still keen to have a new client but there doesn't seem to be any organised keen driving force pushing the people behind such peoject.

I do try my best to get folks interested but time is always going to be short when your making your own efforts and heading into the uncharted territory of programming, also I have set up a section for developers and have a wide spread of the community programmers able to access it, it has folks from this site, mxpie, mxcontrol, and even the rebellion amongst many of the well known other community names so I have tried to be inclusive in selecting members who I believe will recieve benefit and in turn give benefit to the community effort as a whole, however it seems thats not enough at this time and we need more skilled coders to interact and help complete a part of something that all of us can own, the effort is based on delivering something for all not just users of this site and I hope those sitting on the fence take notice of this important aspect of the "core" section" structuring.

I truly have no idea where we can go in gathering new hands to help with the job who share our ideals of a community based codebase and wish to aid or lead future developement, and that rather than anything else is the roadblock we face.

Pri · « **Reply #29 on:** August 09, 2009, 07:14:21 am »

Quote from: GhostShip on July 22, 2009, 09:09:21 am

Can I warn anyone against reverse engineering the original client, one reason is that its illegal and two it may taint the work folks like myself do that is done by spending months watching network traffic and analysing it, I ask you not to do something thats wrong and unecessary if you need info contact me and if I dont have the particular info you need I will obtain it via legal means.

Sorry to revive this thread but I was just reading through it and spotted this nugget. Where on earth did you get the idea that it is illegal to reverse engineer anything?

It is perfectly legal in the United States and many other countries all over the world to reverse engineer anything including things that are patented and protected by trade secrets.

The Supreme Court of America has confronted the issue of reverse engineering several times, upholding it under the principle that it is an important method of the dissemination of ideas and that it encourages innovation in the marketplace.

So I just wanted to clear that up that reverse engineering is perfectly legal and a lawful activity. Companies will always try to make it difficult because they do not want their competitors to learn their secrets but that does not affect the legality which is and always has been that it is perfectly legal

Bluehaze · « **Reply #30 on:** August 09, 2009, 01:35:51 pm »

Greetings Pri,

Please check the WinMX License Agreement under the Help tab. I am sure this is one of the things Ghostship is looking at. If you install and/or use WinMX, you are agreeing not to, among other things, reverse engineer the program. You might be thinking of instances like many years ago when Compaq reverse engineered IBM's pc standard and "cloned" the pc. It was a boon for consumers, bringing in competition and lowering prices.

Thanks for your interest in the possibility of a new application to access the WPN!

Pri · « **Reply #31 on:** August 09, 2009, 01:52:05 pm »

Quote from: Bluehaze on August 09, 2009, 01:35:51 pm

Greetings Pri,

Please check the WinMX License Agreement under the Help tab. I am sure this is one of the things Ghostship is looking at. If you install and/or use WinMX, you are agreeing not to, among other things, reverse engineer the program. You might be thinking of instances like many years ago when Compaq reverse engineered IBM's pc standard and "cloned" the pc. It was a boon for consumers, bringing in competition and lowering prices.

Thanks for your interest in the possibility of a new application to access the WPN!

It doesn't mater what the WinMX Agreement says. The Law superseeds it.

And this doesn't only apply to Computers. It applies to everything.

Pri · « **Reply #32 on:** August 09, 2009, 02:04:54 pm »

Also I just wanted to add that the reason the law is like this is for 2 main reasons.

1. By being able to reverse engineer something you can improve on it and it creates competition and rivalry which is important in a free market to spur innovation and curb anti-competitive behaviour.

2. So that Patent Holders and Copyright holders can examine rival products for infringement of their intellectual property.

The law has always been like this and it is a common misconception that reverse engineering == Illegal Practice. Some products and services come with things like an EULA (End User License Agreement) which stipulate the ways in which a user/operator of such Product or Service can interact with said Product/Service. These EULA's or License Agreements may stipulate no reverse engineering but these do not hold up in a court of law at all they are completely meaningless and are not legally binding.

To put it another way if an Agreement told you it was ok to go kill someone that doesn't magically change the law making it ok for you to go and kill someone. The same thing applies to the legality of Reverse Engineering. But even beyond that the EULA and License Agreements included with Software (And other goods/services) are completely meaningless and cannot be enforced by any measure beyond a civil case. (Basically one person suing another person just like I could sue you for anything I wanted).

Some people get confused about the DMCA which stipulates the reverse engineering of copyright protection is illegal. But that is a separate issue governing only the removal of copyright protection for unauthorised distribution. It does not cover removal of copyright protection for fair use (Like stripping the encryption from a DVD to play it under Linux) this is a legal grey area but one no one wants to enter due to the litigation costs involved.

Anyway I hope this clears it up?

GhostShip · « **Reply #33 on:** August 09, 2009, 07:56:47 pm »

I havent seen you point to any statues that make the law clear Pri but regardless, the issue is simply one of decency for me, I dont think we should steal someones hard work for ourselves and then pat ourselves on the back saying how celver we are, we have all read the WinMX licence and have taken note it includes a few terms of usage regarding reverse engineering, whilst you claim this does not tie your hands it sure does mine. Both legally and morally

What is funny about all this is that there is nothing secret to learn from chopping the app up anyway that is not already in our hands.

Pri · « **Reply #34 on:** August 10, 2009, 03:09:01 am »

Well you have already done reverse engineering Ghostship so you can get off your high horse. Simply by reading the information going in and out of WinMX to figure out its network protocol is considered Clean Room Reverse Engineering.

Maybe you should dump all that work? No I didn't think so. And you can google the law anywhere.

Link 1: http://www.webmilhouse.com/files/reverse_eng_paper_final.pdf
Link 2: http://www.chillingeffects.org/question.cgi?QuestionID=195
Link 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Legality

Quote from 1st Link

Quote

In the United States, there has been much talk of the legality of reverse engineering
software since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). However,
case precedence has ruled in favor of reverse engineering more often than not, for both hardware
and software. Even in such strange areas as boat-hull engineering (Samuelson & Scotchmer,
2001), courts have ruled in favor of reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability and
improvement of a competitor’s products.
In most reverse-engineering projects, copyright infringement becomes an issue when a
programmer decompiles software and makes a copy of the original in the process. However,
courts have ruled that in the process of reverse engineering, specifically for interoperability, the
copy of the software is ruled under the “fair use” doctrine (Samuelson & Scotchmer, 2001).

Just look at ReactOS it is a complete Windows NT Replacement that runs Windows Applications and even Drivers the entire OS is made by reverse engineering Windows. There is a difference between decompiliation and using source code straight from the program and reverse engineering by reading the data sent and received by code written in to the program to mimmic those procedures in a newly written piece of code.

MXM, Leech Hammer, the Community Patch were all done by Reverse Engineering parts of the WinMX Client. As were FXServ, WCS, RCMS, WebChat - Pretty much every single thing that interacts with WinMX either directly by injecting in to it whilst it's running in memory or transferring data with it via it's Chat and/or WPN protocol was made through some degree of reverse engineering. Simply by using the program.

Pri · « **Reply #35 on:** August 10, 2009, 03:14:53 am »

Also I don't want to be a pain in the ass but I'm a big open source advocate and well versed in the law in these areas and I just want to make it clear that Reverse Engineering is perfectly legal and even welcomed by law makers as an intended part of everyday business.

GhostShip · « **Reply #36 on:** August 10, 2009, 09:18:16 pm »

I think we are becoming confused here as to the term "reverse engineering" so I,ll state my interpretation of the definition and that may clear up where I,m drawing the line, by "reverse engineering" I mean actual binary decompilation or actual translation of parts of the binary file into other machine based languages based only on the contents of the application file.

Other activities that do not seek to pry open the file itself are not covered by the law where I am, and I,m relying on existing legal precedence for protection against any claims.

Btw I,m also a great supporter of open src and for this reason will be using open src and releasing open src when I have crafted something together for us to use, I urge other client creators to do the same if possible as by diversification we can I hope move forward with new ideas and concepts without stealing the users basic experience or detracting from their security.

whohas · « **Reply #37 on:** October 02, 2010, 03:46:54 pm »

just checking in this request as I do once a year or so, is there still no other app which connects via the WPNP peer caches? I have a friend who is a programmer who might help with this project if it has not already been done, but would need some more info before we do anything first.
So, any news on this?

whohas · « **Reply #38 on:** October 02, 2010, 03:48:15 pm »

oh and PS, i spoke with them about this reverse engineering thing, they said that its not illegal (in EU where they live) to reverse engineer the code of an application as long as you dont publish this code to the public, but you can use this code to program a new app and make this app public.

GhostShip · « **Reply #39 on:** October 02, 2010, 07:35:10 pm »

Programmers are always welcome Whohas,

In reference to your last post, we have no need to reverse engineer anything as far as WinMx goes as its been possible to generate the whole protocol via alternative methods and that's basically all anyone needs to know to build a clone, to aid this we have a private development section of the site where all the community programmers can discuss and develop their talents.

We are currently working on such a scheme here ("we" being Willmav and myself) and good progress is taking place, obviously there's been a lot of planning and many months of coding going into this and still there is much more to be done ,however once a few of the key milestones are completed to our satisfaction we will release more details and some screenshots, obviously there's little point in showing where we are at the moment as that would simply mean unwanted pressure to complete and other distractions, rest assured a lot of effort is going into this project but there is always room for more help, this is after all a community project, Winmxworld may be the driving force behind it but like the community patch all will gain from the work.

I hope that addresses your key points and its always nice to see folks interested in the future, such folks are likely destined to help create it after all.