2011, the year that was.

[silicon_toad2000]

What can I say about 2011? It’s been a bit of an extreme year. Obviously the biggest events for the winmx community have been rather negative. The release of src code to parts of the supporting infrastructure of the community and the subsequent beginning of the attacks on the network.

Internally at WinMxWorld, Ghostship has taken a step back to focus on technical issues and left the coordination of WinMxWorld to myself. Those are a big pair of shoes to fill, so I brought my own, they’re a better fit.
I believe Ghostship is the last active founding member of WinMxWorld. He has helped build and drive something great here. I believe I would be expressing the thoughts of many when I say thankyou for all that you’ve put into the WinMX community.

We’ve upgraded the forum software and made some tweaks to the way the site/forum looks. I think the result has been an overall great improvement and couldn’t have been done without Nylly’s efforts. Nylly took my suggestions on how I wanted things to look and made it all look better than I had imagined it would. Thanks Nylly.

In the WinMxWorld help room there has been a lot of work done on some of the bots, especially in light of some of the room spamming which has been happening.  Reef spent a great deal of time on this and came through with a great result which has helped greatly. Thanks Reef.

With the attacks, a lot of room hosts had to run their room offline and the chat room listing function of WinMX ceased to function as it should. As always the community stepped up and Josh has donated of his time and resources with a web based chat room listing and even made it possible for hosts to manually add their offline room to the listing. Great work Josh, I know many in the community are very grateful.

There has been some shuffle around amongst the cache operators. On the whole they have been able to stand firm against the attacks and continue to give freely of their time and resources to support the community. I’m sure the community will join me in thanking these members of the community for all they give up to support the network.

All in all, these attacks have place a lot of pressure on the network and the community. It has been amazing to see the community band together and tough it out. We have lost a portion of the userbase and another sizeable chunk that comes and goes depending on the state of the network. That leaves a core of users who love their WinMX as much as we do here at WinMxWorld and won’t let some technical difficulties push them out of it. Seeing this certainly makes it easy to stick with what we’re doing here, knowing that the community loves their winmx, it’s worth fighting for. I guess on behalf of WinMxWorld to the community, thanks for sticking with it and showing what we’re all about.

Behind the scenes community developers have been working on a solution to the malicious traffic on our network. It seems at this stage that the solution may well come in the form of a new client. To that end I know they have been working hard to complete this as soon as possible to free the community from the annoyances and get the network to operate as intended again.
The call was put out for help from the community and help arrived. The results at the time of this post can be seen below.

[silicon_toad2000]

and

[Will]

The searches were performed while the network was under attack, as you can see only results that are revelant to what you searched for are returned.

[achilles]

Is it possible in the new client to lift the 2gb file cap, and even go beyond 4gbs or will we still be limited by the old protocol?

[Will]

At some it should be possible, but it will only be supported on the new clients.

[cuttingedge]

 

Looks clean! I cant wait to be there! 

[¿Åliçe]

On behalf of ppl who still have some faith...  and manners...   thanks for the efforts.. and good luck in getting this off the ground. 

[Hans-Linux]

CONGRATULATIONS! for the nice new client.

Will the new client work with "Wine" on Linux?

I could not do any better and consider it a waste of my time and effort to start work on a new client. Will finish some work in progress. I will  publish the application and code when done.

I received 32 replies to my survey, Will publish the results tomorrow.

Hans 

[Hans-Linux]

This is the result of my survey based on 33 replies:

1.) If you are downloading or uploading illegal items, would you like the party from whom you are downloading be able to identify you and have the Gestapo ir similar knock at or break down your door at 4:00 AM?
YES/NO
RESULT: 29 YES, 4 NO or DON'T CARE
Most of respondent consider illegal items being items that are prohibited by law in their country, such as porn, politically sensitve items and copyrighted items.

2.) Would you want to enforce sharing?
YES/NO
RESULT: 24 YES, 3 NO, 6 OPTIONAL

3.) Would you want to have your downloads which you share stored encrypted on your hard disk?
YES/NO
RESULT: 14 YES, 12 OPTIONAL, 6 DON'T CARE

4.) How many percent of your upload speed would you be prepared to "Donate" for the good overall performance of the network?
YES/NO
RESULT: 25 YES, 4 NO, 4 LIMITED
Several of the repondndents want to be able to have the "Donated" bandwith automatically adjusted to a percentage of unused bandwith.

5.) Do you want to be able to down and upload BluRay DVDs?
YES/NO
RESULT: YES 32, DON'T CARE 1
Everyone wants to have the unlimited capability up to the limit of their operating/file system.

6.) Can you live without knowing the Bitrate and Frequency of MP3 and Ogg Audio files before downloading?
YES/NO
RESULT: 19 YES, 14 NO

7.) Can you analyse ASM and/or C/C++ code, write C code and are you ready, willing and able to work for an extended time with me  coding a new WinMX like multi platform (Linux, Windows and maybe Mac) application?
YES/NO
RESULT: 31 NO 1 YES
One party in India offered to quote the cost for coding a new application on receipt of the the final product specification. They have 400 "C" & "C++" coders on their staff.

COMMENTS:
A number of the users who replied to my survey are located in countries where the internet is censored and/or have dictatorial governments who suppress the fredom of speech, information and free exchange and trade thereof.   

Some users want to oprionally and on the fly enable Browsing of their upload directory. Others want a the file hashes and filenames of the files available in the network stored in a distributed and browsable directory system.

Several users want to know if the file they intent to download already exist on their PC. Like GTK-Gnutell, Bit-Torrent, and probably other applications.

NOTE:
This is a double posting. I could not make a link.

I am retired and available code in "C" for 25+ hours per week.

Hans 

[White Stripes]

Will the new client work with "Wine" on Linux?

I could not do any better and consider it a waste of my time and effort to start work on a new client.

actually... your talents may still be of some use.... the plan... at least at one point ... is to open source this client... granted such is far in the future but it'll give you something to tinker with at the least and to port to a wide variety of operating systems at the most..

[cuttingedge]

Once the new client is released, will the old clients stil work on the WPN?

[achilles]

I believe someone said the secondary functionality of the old client will continue to work, but not the primary. I hope at some stage the old client becomes completely incompatible, and a new network is formed. I believe few if any will continue to use the old client once they have learned about the release of the new client.  That is after the bugs have been ironed out.

[MinersLantern]

I am still seeing a few issues with this idea. A new client? Why?
Am I the only person on earth that knows that ANY and ALL peeps who write P2P software are breaking the law? Its been that way for a couple years. How about simply redoing the patch to eliminate the effects from attacks? There is no real reason to create a brand new client. A client just is a GUI to the network. The law (ignorant as it is) will bust people hard and raw for writing a client, so why on earth do so? A simple add-on patch is immune from the 'law'. I know, I know, everyone is getting a woody over a brand new so called winmx...  yall are taking a huge risk with a minor payoff. Fame? or whatever?  Sheesh! WinMX's problem is not its GUI. Sure some small improvements could be made in the GUI, but that kinda stuff is simple. As I just said... a new client is simply a new GUI. An interface to the WPN. Doing that opens the pathway to get shut down and sued off the face of the earth. Or am I the only one to have heard of SPOA? Actually, its been that way for years already, before SOPA. Can't just a patch mod take care or reduce the problem? Seems to me the 'community' is taking an all or nothing approach.

[White Stripes]

p2p software is not illegal (its whats shared that can be)... yes sopa is a problem, but not just for p2p, for the whole internet.... with the attacks going on it is an all or nothing situation..... also.... the 'gui' of winmx is just a look, the program itself is arcane, written for the win9x days, win7 is here... an update is kinda needed...

[silicon_toad2000]

You're the only person on earth with your perspective on things, just as I am the only person on earth with my perspective.

I think if the community developers could simply patch things up they might have taken that approach, or perhaps some members take the long term view, I don't know.

Why? honestly if you have to ask...
No that's not fair. Winmx is more than just some p2p file sharing program. You said yourself it's just a gui for the network (somewhat oversimplified but I'll go with that). Winmx is a community of people connecting to each other. There's a sizeable portion who use winmx to chat to their long time friends. The community helps keep people in touch.
Simply put, the community is worth fighting for.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know this is a view which is shared by many in the community.

[achilles]

Minerslantern, if the problem could have been corrected with a simple patch fix then don't you think it would have already been fixed? It comes down to we need a new client with updated more secure protocols.  Also, it is not illegal to write P2P software. If that was the case then Windows Live Messanger would be illegal. You can share files by Messanger as well. The client is not just a GUI to access the network.  There are a lot of fine mechanics under the hood that makes a network operate like a fine oiled machine. The protocols we currently have cannot be fixed with a simple patch. If we don't produce a new client then WinMx dies completely. It's a certainty. 

[MinersLantern]

A patch can and does intercept the entire communications protocol. When one loads a rewritten dll into a program (any program including winmx) any desired changes can be made to take place at the network level. Is it 'legal' to write an app that does p2p? Sure... maybe...  BT is often used as a method to distribute perfectly legal things like the latest flavor of Linux. Still, BT index sites are being shut down like crazy. 'Legal' p2p involves the author examining each and every file, to be sure its 'legal' to be on the network. Also things like M$ messenger can be used for file shares. But, messenger is not a p2p program. Hell, I could share each and every hard drive on my pc with the rest of the planet via netbios... thats 'legal' too. Im just saying that writing an app specifically to share files is illlegal. If you dont beliieve it, go right ahead and find out the hard way. It is also a plain fact that a patch could be done without any mods to winmx itself to eliminate the flooding. Load WS32.dll into winmx. BOOM! Now the entire stack is under complete controll of the person who writes a (correct) patch as far as winmx, the application, is concerned. If a flooder is detected, they can be removed. If multiple connections from one specific and automatically detected group of similar ips are detected, they can be removed too. UDP traffic could be measured, if its excessive block it. Life would suck for the flooders if winmx being patched could do that. And yeah... If you have a patch that has full control of the windows stack itself, that can be done. Example the caches. They sit aroud sending fake ips all over the wpn, trying to connect to silly things, like random ip on ports 25, 53, etc, etc. Simple crap to block. Ports that should be obvious to block. But no... the caches still are sending that garbage globally to winmx primaries. The caches are simply a list of ips and ports. It should not be horribly difficult to purge them of obviously false data. Another mode is when the attacker (aka KM) decides to make the caches send ips leading to military sites. It should be obvious that the military doesnt exist to trade files. Delete them, and remove any of their ips from the wpn. Stuff like that should be do-able via the current patch imo. NVM trying to reinvent the wheel.

[MinersLantern]

It isnt even a major thing with the caches, although that could be improved. Grab yourselves a copy of Netlimiter. Its payware, but from whatever source. You can view traffic on any application and to any ip that is tryingits attempts. Crack open winmx as primary. You will see a 'slot' that sits there changing ips constantly. Flood traffic happens on that slot. Under normal conditions, it will change ips very slowly. When the WPN is in attack mode it switches very quickly from one ip to another. One ip range ive had p[roblems for years with is one that starts with 252.18.xxx.xxx. That thing will connect, just long enough to knock you offline. I have firewalled it, but that doesnt block its attempts. Winmx trys it anyway. The firewall prevents the connection, but the attempt at the connection a few hundred times per minute still eats up ports who sit and wait for a response that isnt going to happen. A patch could remove such attempts from happening in the first place. Remove the attack ip from the internal cache of ips in winmx, and it isnt going to sit there locking up you windows stack. Firewalls are nice, but they just block traffic. They do not block attempts at connections when winmx is polluted and trys to connect anyway. That shit consumes the real traffic. When you run out of ports in windows, you have to sit and wait for them to expire and the resources to be released. As I have said several times... a patch CAN automagically detect such a situation and remove that ip along with any other 'strange' ips from trying in the first place. Right now my netlimiter is showing false trys from ips from 116.xxx.xxx.xxx to 118.xxx.xxx.xxx. The system is not trying other ips. WHY? Because the entire thing is busy dealing with the above ips that do nothing. A patch can and should discover (it aint rocket science) that the same few ips are constantly trying to connect to the system. Then it should remove them, altogether. Not block them, remove them.

[MinersLantern]

But dont mind me, im just a crazy guy that lives in the desert. lol
And im still waiting for (some kind of) patch.
Forget the new features. Winmx is dying more and more by the day. It doesnt require a new client. Would automatic detection and removal of fake attempts (ips) be called a change to the WPN? I dont think so. If it were to be considered a change to the WPN who cares? Is the WPN a gift sent from Jesus or what? There is nothing holy about a protocol. There is nothing holy about a GUI either. A patch to WS2_32.dll as loaded by winmx can preserve both IF people would stop thinking too much. Just do what is needed to delete the effects of the attacks. Worry about the wonderful new GUI later.

[hollow87]

@ MinersLantern

WinMX.exe already loads WS2_32.dll

WS2_32.dll is a known dll on windows vista and 7 there for it will always load from the system32 directory

But the current patch does use import hooking as described in this article to hook functions imported from WS2_32.dll
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/DLL/DLL_Injection_tutorial.aspx

Yes filtering IP addresses at the cache level would help people connect faster, but not by much with the current attacks as not able to get a connection to an IP not running a WinMX primary is not causing the primaries to return the wrong search results.

And in your logic coding a p2p for file sharing is illegal but BT is legal which is a program used for file sharing....flawed logic?

Your logic should be it is illegal for coding a p2p for ILLEGAL file sharing.