Xunlei
Encyclopedia
Xunlei is a download manager
Download manager
A download manager is a computer program dedicated to the task of downloading possibly unrelated stand-alone files from the Internet for storage...

 developed by Thunder Networking Technologies , supporting HTTP, FTP, EDonkey
EDonkey network
The eDonkey network is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer file sharing network best suited to share big files among users, and to provide long term availability of files...

, BitTorrent protocols. , it was the most commonly used BitTorrent client worldwide.

In June 2011, Xunlei filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $200 million in a US-listed initial public offering
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

.

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. In Baidu
Baidu
Baidu, Inc. , simply known as Baidu and incorporated on January 18, 2000, is a Chinese web services company headquartered in the Baidu Campus in Haidian District, Beijing, People's Republic of China....

's Most Searched Software List, Xunlei and Xunlei Kankan both usually appear among the top 3 most popular software applications.

Xunlei

Since 2006, Xunlei has been one of the most popular software applications among end-user
End-user
Economics and commerce define an end user as the person who uses a product. The end user or consumer may differ from the person who purchases the product...

s in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

.

Through Xunlei, users can access a large portion of the files available on the Internet, even though most of the content is pirated material.

Features in Xunlei includes a built-in browser, changeable skins, cloud storage, "offline" downloading, hi-speed downloading (only availible for members), email service and more.

Xunlei is accompanied by a family of products including , , , and . As adware
Adware
Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertisements to a computer. These advertisements can be in the form of a pop-up. They may also be in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during...

, Xunlei products feature banner advertisements
Web banner
A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser...

, which can be disabled if logged in as an 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 which provides higher-quality content. Kankan claims to have copyrights and cooperates with many content providers and service provider
Service provider
A service provider is an entity that provides services to other entities. Usually, this refers to a business that provides subscription or web service to other businesses or individuals. Examples of these services include Internet access, Mobile phone operators, and web application hosting...

s in China. Kankan often surpasses Xunlei in Baidu search traffic.

Xunlei Kankan is also availible 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.

P2SP

P2SP stands for "peer-to-server-and-to-peer," and describes Xunlei's content delivery network
Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network or content distribution network is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network....

, which is similar to a magnet URI. It collects HTTP and FTP sources along with sources from a variety of peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 protocols. These URI
Uniform Resource Identifier
In computing, a uniform resource identifier is a string of characters used to identify a name or a resource on the Internet. Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network using specific protocols...

s are searchable in the Xunlei application.

Copyright issues

Content holders often find that users are downloading their material through Xunlei, and accuse Xunlei of helping, actively or passively, others to violate their copyrights. Xunlei claims that the product is only a tool, and that the company has no right to control how users use Xunlei.

As copyright protection has become more strict, Xunlei has attempted to protect itself from accusations of copyright violation. In 2007, Xunlei announced a new service that enables copyright owners to claim and protect their content on Xunlei's platform. Later, Kankan claimed to host only authorized content
Authorized domain
In the DVB Project's Content Protection and Copy Management scheme, an Authorized Domain is a set of CPCM-compliant devices that "are owned, rented or otherwise controlled by members of a single household", according to the DVB Project. Industry observers saw Authorized Domain as having the...

.

File sharing

Xunlei is different from P2P
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 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 P2P vampire with much more downloading than uploading. Many pure P2P tools have blocked Xunlei, although this trend weakened after Xunlei began balancing the number of downloads and uploads.

Experience has shown that Xunlei version 0.1.0.0 refuses to upload any data for a torrent that has only two leechers (i.e., when the only seeder is offline). All chinese ISPs limit BitTorrent bandwidth, as a result the chinese users can't upload as the rest of the world (http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Bad_ISPs).

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.

This problem seems to be fading as more and more downloading tools embrace P2SP and bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

becomes cheaper.

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.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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