iMesh Review

Name: iMesh
Homepage: www.iMesh.com
Cost: Adware and Spyware
Recommended: No

iMesh. Proof that if you beat a dead horse long enough, it may very well get up and walk. (The horse being the idea of making money off file sharing, every time I say Spyware or Adware, take a drink.)

January 1999, iMesh 1 was released. It used a central server to facilitate connections. It could share any file type. It had a very advanced skin feature for the time. Its attempt at multi-source downloading was more successful than most other central server programs. Adware was there from the start. If you know your filesharing history, you know that central servers were easy targets. Napster, Scour, CuteMX, AudioGalaxy and others were crushed by the newly formed RIAA. iMesh knew they had to evolve, but it’d take some time before they had the brain power.

In March 2001, iMesh 2.0 came out. The central server was gone. They had joined Morpheus and Kazaa on the FastTrack network. They paid Zennström and Friis a monthly fee to access the FastTrack network just like Morpheus and eventually Grokster. They did have 1 unique feature; its users could be singled out from the rest of the FastTrack population. That month iMesh had 71,000 users. Spyware and adware were included.

iMesh, 3 and 4 eventually came out. Little more than GUI changes were added. The FastTrack network was the only feature that mattered. FastTrack was the biggest network in filesharing history. In November 2002, iMesh had 1,302,443 users. The rest of the FastTrack network had 3,930,267 users. This was the peak of iMesh’s life on FastTrack. By this time the RIAA was already spreading fear and lawsuits across the network. Even though iMesh was based in Israel, it was still within reach of the RIAA.

September 20th 2003, the RIAA fired the first shot in its long war against iMesh. A simple lawsuit of copyright infringement. That’s what brought most of the RIAA’s other victims to their knees. But thanks to spyware and adware, iMesh had the resources to wage war. On July 20th 2004, iMesh and the RIAA reached a settlement. iMesh had to pay 4.1 million(USD) to the RIAA. They were allowed to continue as a filesharing program but they had to become compliant with US law. That month, Slyck recorded that iMesh had 872,601 users. This was Slyck’s last iMesh count.

August 2004, iMesh 5 was released. It connected to FastTrack, Gnutella, G2 and ED2K. Still paying off Kazaa for the FastTrack support. The ED2K support wasn’t on by default; it was buggy and didn’t interact well with the rest of the program. The Gnutella and G2 support were taken from GnucDNA. GnucDNA had switched from the GPL license to the LGPL license. This meant that GnucDNA 1.1.1.4 could be used by anyone without having to publish the source code. Later that year, GnucDNA released 1.1.1.5 on GPL again. iMesh decided to use the 1.1.1.4 code rather than open source iMesh. Spyware and adware were included.

July 2005, iMesh reached a licensing deal with Sony. They had agreed on a method of mixing DRM media with the existing P2P technology. In the coming months, iMesh made similar deals with the other big record labels. This lead to iMesh becoming the first P2P program deemed legal by the RIAA.

August 2005 iMesh 5.5 was released. It started iMnet2, a P2P network between iMesh users. It also connected Gnutella and G2. Spyware and adware were included, Cydoor ads and MySearch.

October 25th 2005, iMesh 6 was released. This was no longer a P2P program. It was a subscription based download manager. Buy a subscription then have access to iMesh servers. The servers only had music and music videos. This made downloading with iMesh legal and kept the RIAA pacified. But finding people willing to pay for iMesh proved too daunting.

November 2005, iMesh 6.5 was released. It was once again a free P2P program. It connected to Gnutella, iMnet2 and iMesh Premium. The Gnutella network is filtered. It cannot download unlicensed material. It is more than likely that iMesh connects to this network just to spread its DRM files to LimeWire users. iMnet2 is the network between iMesh users. iMesh Premium is the connection to the iMesh servers introduced in iMesh 6.

After install, you have to register with iMesh to activate the program, this is free. iMesh 6 and 6.5 claim to be adware and spyware free. While there is no 3rd party code or software displaying ads or tracking the user behavior, there is still adware. The iMesh program itself now spies on its users. Every search term you type in is used to choose ads for you. The ad banners are bigger than any program I’ve ever seen.

This iMesh is heavily filtered. In addition to using MusicNet technology, you can only share a few file formats. All the Windows media formats (WMV, AVI, ASX, etc…) Movies using a MPG format (MPG, M1V, MPA etc…) and MP3’s. Music and video files must be under 15 minutes. No images, software, documents or archives are allowed.

Obviously iMesh can’t filter everything. There’s 10’s of millions of MP3’s on the Gnutella network that violate some copyright law. But when using iMesh, this isn’t a problem. The iMesh terms of service clearly state that iMesh users aren’t violating any laws “As a condition to use of iMesh you have agreed not to use the iMesh software to infringe the intellectual property or other rights of others, in any way”.

But for the sake of arguing, let me play devils advocate. Say you buy some CD, convert the tracks to MP3 form and share them with the world. In theory those MP3’s are now available to all iMesh and Gnutella users. What’s the RIAA going to do? They see you sharing a file that they claim to own. Are they going to spend legal fees to get just 1 person? Of course not. They can see the same traffic cause by users of Kazaa or LimeWire or pretty much any other P2P program. Suing people 1 MP3 at a time is impossible. But anyone from a capitalist country knows that with a big enough bank account, anything’s possible.

You are a registered iMesh user. There’s no way of knowing what information is sent to the iMesh servers. Best case scenario, marketing data only. You could’ve lied about the name and address stuff, but not your IP. You IP is now on that server along with every search term you’ve typed into iMesh. That’s how iMesh know what ads to send to your computer. They might as well be in the room with you.

Registering is in general a hassle. But iMesh is pioneering new technology. With them, registering could very well be a liability. They can do just about anything. One could argue that there’s no proof iMesh has any bad intentions. But one intention we can be sure of is iMesh wants to make money. They don’t want to fight the RIAA. If handing over your IP address to the RIAA will keep iMesh in business they will do it.

I do not recommend iMesh.

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