One thing that's been completely ignored is that firewalled/router users are screwed by design on Kazaa. As more and more broadband users get routers to have multiple computers connected to the internet at once, fewer and fewer of those will be able to use Kazaa (or KL++) to their full extent.
If you are one of the firewalled/router users, you desperately need to get KaNAT, use port-forwarding at the router level, and unfirewall Kazaa. Otherwise, the only people you can download and upload to are non-firewalled users which don't have a router -- which in other words means mostly 56k users!
Leeching is incredibly bad now on Kazaa. Out of the last 20 or so people who've downloaded from me, only about 3 were visibly sharing files (although some of the 20 were no doubt using KL++'s privacy patch.)
The lack of partial file sharing makes Kazaa very poor for sharing big files.
The lack of file integrity checking means even a 1-byte error in sending of a 600+ MB movie means that particular copy (probably) cannot be used as another source for that movie. And as files get copied many times, the levels of corruption increase.
Kazaa's network was doomed from the start. It took the Gnutella network ideas -- made it proprietary -- and stagnated. While even the Gnutella network has p2p programs on it now that support partial file sharing, hash checking, automated sharing of additional source lists for downloads (called alt locs), and UltraPeers/supernodes that now rival the size of the supernodes on the fasttrack network.
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