The popular BitTorrent file-swapping community, an underground programmer from its ranks has stepped forward to announce new software designed to withstand future onslaughts from Hollywood.
Exeem, with the domain name exeem.com is registered to a Swarm Systems, which has a listed address for that company in the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts & Nevis, at the local office of IFG Trust Services, a company that helps set up and administer offshore companies, stated a technology based website, ZDNet Australia.
Peer to Peer is a website where persons can download music, movies and other softwares which is most of the time illegal.
Just weeks after legal attacks crippled the BitTorrent, the software has already been distributed in a closed beta, or early test format, by the creators of the SuprNova.org Web site, which was until late last month the most popular hub for the BitTorrent file-swapping community.
Last week, the head of that now-defunct site, a man known as "Sloncek," officially announced the Exeem project in an interview on the NovaStream Webcasting network. He said that it would be a modified version of the popular BitTorrent technology, but transformed into a decentralised, searchable network similar to Kazaa or eDonkey.
The system seems to work pretty well," said Simon Bauman, who operates the Mitosis.com Web site and has tried the software for several weeks. "It seems faster than other peer-to-peer programs right now, but with only 5,000 people, it's hard to really gauge it."
Official confirmation of the Exeem program, released at a time when BitTorrent Web sites are under aggressive legal attack from Hollywood, raises the potential of mass migration for the millions of people around the world who have grown accustomed to using the technology to download movies, TV shows, music and software.
The Exeem technology could find itself in some of the same difficulties faced by other file-swapping networks.
Much of BitTorrent's popularity has come both because of the speed of downloads and the assurance that files were real instead of the decoys or damaged content often found on other file-swapping networks. Indeed, a recent academic study attributed much of BitTorrent's strength to the influence of moderators at the SuprNova Web site, who hand-checked files to ensure they were genuine.
"One of the big advantages of BitTorrent/SuprNova is the high level of integrity of both the content and the meta-data (information such as movie name or file size)," Johan Pouwelse, a Delft University of Technology researcher, wrote in a recent paper.
"A decentralised scheme such as in Kazaa has no availability problems but lacks integrity, since Kazaa is plagued with many fake files."
Exeem includes tools to write comments or rate files, which Sloncek said would help eliminate fake files. However, Kazaa has included similar tools, and some researchers have found that up to 70 percent of the popular songs are actually fakes.
The software is being launched without any participation from Bram Cohen, the original BitTorrent creator. He dismisses the project as simply the latest in a long line of Kazaa clones that has little to do with his own software, even if it uses some of his technology.
"Exeem has nothing to do with BitTorrent," said Cohen, who is continuing to improve his own technology in hopes of seeing it adopted by big online businesses. "It's just yet another warez (a slang term for pirated content) tool."
In his interview, Sloncek said Exeem would be free, but ad-supported. A public version will likely be available "very soon," he said.
