LimeWire Resurrected By Secret Dev Team * TorrentFreak (original) (raw)
Last month, the Gnutella-based file-sharing client LimeWire was effectively outlawed after a U.S. federal judge granted a request from the RIAA to shut the software down. Now, not even a month later, LimeWire is back as good as new. Not only has a secret dev team reanimated the hugely popular client, but they have also made a few significant changes which make it better and more streamlined than before.
While religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam lean heavily on spectacular resurrections from many hundreds of years ago, the mere mortal scriptwriters of the modern entertainment industry like to use the concept in their stories too.
In this decade, Noah Bennet from Heroes wasn’t alone in returning to life after being shot since Nathan Petrelli also cheated the inevitability of the bullet with his own miraculous recovery. Going a little further back, anyone old enough to remember the 80s will recall that Bobby Ewing of Dallas evaded a permanent underground future by the fortuitous inclusion of a last-minute dream sequence.
Some characters that refuse to stay dead aren’t always friendly though. How many times has Friday the 13th’s Jason met his maker? What’s the body count if one adds together the celluloid heart-stoppages of Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers from Halloween? Was Fatal Attraction’s Glenn Close dead, or simply enjoying a relaxing bath? In any event, if it means making money, it seems that Hollywood is always happy to make evil breathe again.
That said, one monster Hollywood really hoped would stay dead after its drawn out torture and subsequent recent slaying was the hugely popular LimeWire file-sharing client. However, rather like the abuse suffered by the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, the sustained attack by the RIAA turned out to be a mere flesh wound.
Although alternatives are available and growing in popularity, a secret dev team remained focused on reanimating the lifeless corpse of LimeWire and like an irrepressible file-sharing zombie, the world’s favorite Gnutella client is back.
“On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company’s servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off,” a source told TorrentFreak.
“Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.”
And so, LimeWire Pirate Edition (LPE) was born. Based on the LimeWire 5.6 beta that was briefly released earlier this year and then withdrawn when Lime Wire LLC lost its lawsuit, LPE is now in the wild. In many ways, it is better than the version killed by the RIAA.
“All dependencies on LimeWire LLC’s servers have been removed, all remote settings have been disabled, the Ask toolbar has been unbundled, and all features of LimeWire PRO have been activated for free,” our source explained.
“LimeWire Pirate Edition should work better than the last functioning version of LimeWire (5.5.10), and it should keep working for longer. There’s no adware or spyware: the piratical monkeys are doing this for the benefit of the community.”
Currently only available for Windows, in our tests LimeWire Pirate Edition functioned perfectly well and is already circulating on BitTorrent.
Next up, Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the Sinclair C5 but before anyone gets any ideas, let’s leave Kazaa where it is.