Xunlei

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Thunder
Developer(s) Thunder Networking Technologies (a.k.a. Xunlei Networking Technologies)
Stable release 5.9.3.951 / 2009-07-01; 8 days ago
Operating system Microsoft Windows
Available in Simplified Chinese , Traditional Chinese , English
Type Peer-to-peer file sharing
License Adware, Spyware
Website http://www.xunlei.com/

Xunlei (Chinese: 迅雷; pinyin: Xùnléi; literally "swift thunder") is a popular Chinese download manager and file sharing client that supports BitTorrent, eMule, Kad, and FTP. It is mainly used in the Mainland China & Malaysia. The software is only available in Chinese and other languages can be added in. The client is developed by Thunder Networking Technologies, a Shenzhen startup formerly known as Sandai Technologies (三代科技). Xunlei comes pre-installed on most PCs in China including Qinghua Tongfang (清华同方). The software is known to be bundled with adware.

They also offer download accelerating services and it able to bypass internet bandwidth throttling by tricking service provider as it is not using P2P.

Contents

[edit] Operation Mechanism

Thunder is one of the most popular softwares chosen by end-users in China subject to its superior speed. Compared with other downloaders, its download speed could be several times faster. Such advantage is obtained via its proprietary P2SP technology in a multi-billion indexed binary-file search engine and an algorithmic hybridization breakthrough of various standard file transfer protocols, consisting of http, ftp, mms, rtsp, bt, emule, and etc.

Thunder is also a products family with its members including the most popular Thunder 5 and Thunder Mini, Web Thunder. As a freeware, Thunder has advertisement in its products generally in the form of Banner. Recently, it starts to offer VIP programs,providing value-adding services such as offline downloading. Adware Thunder can’t be simply seen as a P2P client. It uses P2P technology to speed up but essentially not a file sharing client. Thunder has no support to share a private file. Its support of BT was added in 2006 and EMule later. No search, downloading, or publishing was supported. In a word, Thunder is a tool and can be used only to download files in web sites. P2SP stands for peer to server and peer. P2SP is the source of Thunder’s surprising speed. It’s also the underlying generalized engine for data transfer of all products in Thunder corporation. Basically P2SP works as follows: Step1 a user initiates a data transfer task, such as a downloading given a URL. Step2 Backend servers translate this URL into a unique identifier which identifies the corresponding file. It also works for multiple files for other than URLs like torrent file. Step3 Backend servers search for sources hosting the same identifier and return them to downloading clients. The sources may be server or another client. Step4 Clients using the sources for multiple-source data transfer.

P2SP’s strength lies in its capability to traverse multiple protocols including traditional client-server based protocols like HTTP/FTP/MMS/RTSP and P2P systems including BT/EMule. Thunder also develops its own proprietary system and makes much optimization.

Thunder declares its strength also lies in its ability to spider all the Internet files which caused many accusations by downloading websites.

Thunder may have built a world class data transfer network. As capability of this network grows with its size, which is the nature of P2P, Thunder’s dominant is not only technique itself.

[edit] Google Investment

Google investment aroused much questioning. It’s believed that Google Investment stemmed from pragmatism of competing Baidu. In fact, bundling Google Toolbar in Thunder contributes much to rising of Google’s search market share in China. As Thunder now bundles Baidu Toolbar, it’s unknown what happened and unknown to what extent this might affect Google China’s search market share.

[edit] Controversial issues and Challenges

1)Debates and discussions：

“File Sharing” Thunder is not a P2P tool in its essence as it does not support active file sharing. While copyright advocates view Thunder as a P2P tool and a facilitation to violate copyrights, P2P advocates criticizes Thunder is a P2P vampire with much greater downloading than uploading. Many pure P2P tools blocked Thunder. As Thunder is becoming more active in uploading, this blocking becomes weaker.

“irect Linking” Direct linking, generally called leech, is many site owners’ concern. In 2006, Huajun, the leading software downloading site in China, initiated the blocking of Thunder with many other downloading sites. The key issue is whether Thunder is leeching and hurting sites to get its own benefits. The conflict is comprised finally. As more and more downloading tools embrace P2SP and bandwidth gets cheaper, the problem seems to fade.

“Privacy” Thunder shares files default without no additional notification after installation. Thunder argues that such action does benefits to users and users can disable this sharing manually, this still worries some users as sharing policy in Thunder is unknown. Monitoring shows Thunder shares only the files downloaded through it. File moving, renaming can automatically disable sharing.

2）Challenges：

“Copyright” Content providers owning copyrights often find users download through Thunder. They argue that Thunder should be responsible as Thunder helps, actively or inactively, violate their copyright. On the other hand, Thunder views itself as only a tool and has no right to control how users use it.

As copyrights protection gets stricter, Thunder tries to find the way out. In 2007, Thunder declares its new service called “Claim Copyrights” which enables copyrights owners to protect their contents in Thunder. Later, Kankan claims to host only authorized contents. While these new actions make progress, the final solution seems still far.

“Competition” Thunder’s popularity arouses much competition. The biggest competitors are Tencent whose flagship product QQ is used by nearly every Chinese user and Flashget whose product was No 1 in China. As more and more tools are developing their own P2SP, Thunder’s technical advantage is facing greater challenges. However, Thunder’s dominance seems stronger than ever. As P2SP network is not easily copied and has the nature of self-growing, Thunder’s power is still firm.

[edit] See also

[edit] Products reference

Thunder download manager, generally called Thunder, is the flagship product of Thunder Corporation. With its core technology of P2SP data transfer engine, Thunder expands its advantage from downloading to multiple fields. Now, Xunlei Kankan, an independent video-on-demand product providing DVD quality videos swept over China. Gougou search engine providing multimedia search is the fourth biggest search engine in China and dominats video search. Other supplementary products range from local Media Player to Software Assistant. The following snippet is from Baidu’s Top List of Software Search in 2009-7-8

Xunlei Kankan: Xunlei Kankan is generally called Kankan. Kankan provides video-on-demand service with a web user interface. The differences between Kankan and other VOD products such as video sharing like Youtube are as follows: First, Kankan make use of its so-called P2SP technology and provide high definition DVD-quality videos at a very low cost. This naturally requires client installation. Sencond, Kankan claims to have copyrights and cooperates with many content providers and service providers in China. Kankan is a product strong both in user experience, traffic and business model. With its increasing popularity and increasing fame, Kankan may be another phenomenon independent of and beyond Thunder.

Gougou Search Engine Gougou is a search engine focusing on multimedia search. As a fourth search engine in China, Gougou is No 1 in video search market. Gougou provides direct searching of files which causes accusations of copyright violation. Gougou makes great efforts such as screening certain keywords, the most powerful and daring action no search engine adopted before.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunlei"
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