Xunlei

Xunlei

Xunlei 7
Developer(s) Thunder Networking Technologies (a.k.a. Xunlei Networking Technologies)
Stable release

Microsoft Windows:
7.9.42.5050 (2 December 2015 (2015-12-02)) [±][1]

OS X:
2.6.7 (17 March 2015 (2015-03-17)) [±][1]

iOS:
5.7 (September 6, 2015 (2015-09-06)) [±][1]

Android:
5.11 (28 November 2015 (2015-11-28)) [±][1]
Development status Active
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android,iOS
Size 22.3 MB[1]
Available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English with a language pack
Type Peer-to-peer file sharing
License Closed source adware
Alexa rank Increase 1,026 (November 2014)[2]
Website xunlei.com

Xunlei (Chinese: 迅雷; pinyin: Xùn Léi; literally: "thunderbolt") is a download manager and Peer-to-peer software developed by Thunder Networking Technologies (Chinese: 迅雷网络技术有限公司, formerly Sandai Technologies), supporting HTTP, FTP, eDonkey, and BitTorrent protocols. As of 2010, it was the most commonly used BitTorrent client in the world.[3] On 24 June 2014, it went public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, raising just shy of $88 million.[4]

Products

The Xunlei download manager, generally called Xunlei, is the flagship product of Xunlei Corporation, which also supports Xunlei Kankan, a video-on-demand website, and other desktop software. Xunlei is the most popular download software in China.

Xunlei

Through Xunlei, users can access a large portion of the files available on the Internet. Features in Xunlei includes a built-in browser, changeable skins, cloud storage, "offline" downloading, hi-speed downloading (only available for members), email service and more.

Xunlei is accompanied by a family of products including Xunlei 5, Mac Xunlei, Xunlei Mini, and Web Xunlei. As adware, Xunlei products feature banner advertisements, which can be disabled if logged in as a user (in the latest version).

Xunlei Kankan

Xunlei Kankan, also known as Kankan, is a video-on-demand service with a web interface as well as a client application. Xunlei Kankan is also available on mobile platforms including Android and iOS (including iPhone and Kankan HD for iPad).

Others

Along with Xunlei 7 and Kankan, the company also produces software such as a gaming client, a graphics editor, game "accelerator", software manager, and a web photo viewer.

Concerns and criticisms

File sharing

Xunlei is different from P2P tools in that it does not support active file sharing. While copyright advocates view Xunlei as a P2P tool that facilitates copyright violation, P2P advocates criticize Xunlei as a leech with much more downloading than uploading. Also it is often observed that Xunlei prioritizes file sharing with Xunlei users rather than other client users. Many pure P2P tools have blocked Xunlei, although this trend weakened after Xunlei began balancing the number of downloads and uploads.

Xunlei sets up its own storage servers to backup the files which are not active or shared any longer. This feature is named as High-Speed Channel and allows Xunlei users retrieve data faster than others. But only paying users have access to these servers and download files.

Direct linking

Direct linking, or leeching, concerns many site owners, who may feel that the practice benefits Xunlei at their sites' expense. In 2006, Huajun, the leading download site in China, started blocking Xunlei along with many other downloading sites.

User agent imitation

Since many websites recognized and blocked Xunlei via user agent (UA) string, Xunlei began to use common browsers' UA as camouflage. The default UA is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) or Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6. However, if Xunlei determines it is blocked from a website, it will automatically change UA to imitate other browsers, such as: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)

Privacy

Xunlei shares files by default without additional notifications after installation. While Xunlei argues that this behavior is a common convention and that users can disable it, some users are still worried, since Xunlei's sharing policy is unclear. Investigations have revealed that Xunlei only shares files downloaded through Xunlei. Moving or renaming files may automatically disable sharing.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Check Update [Check for updates], 粤 Guangdong
  2. ↑ "xunlei.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
  3. ↑ Van Der Sar, Ernesto. "Thunder Blasts uTorrent's Market Share Away". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on 15 September 2011. Retrieved 15 September 2011.
  4. ↑ "Xunlei IPO on Nasdaq raises $88m". Retrieved 24 June 2014.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, December 16, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.