eXeem

» see exeem.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Suprnova closing in December 2004 is one of the few file-sharing events I remember as an event rather than as a slow fade. I was at university on a Turkish connection that had finally become fast enough for this to be worth the trouble, and Suprnova was simply where you went. Then one day the index was a message instead, and the message said something better was coming.

The problem eXeem claimed to solve was real. A torrent in 2004 needed a tracker, and a tracker was a server with an address, which meant it was a thing a lawyer could reach. Take the tracker down and every swarm pointing at it stops. eXeem proposed to move the index and the coordination into the network itself, so that there was nothing central left to serve papers on. It was written in C++ on top of the open source libtorrent, ran on Windows only, and was itself closed source, which people noticed immediately.

It went to public beta on 21 January 2005 after a private test with five thousand hand-picked Suprnova users, and by the following day there were around twenty-nine thousand people on it. That number never got much larger. The installer carried Cydoor's ad component and a LookSmart toolbar that hijacked searches and threw pop-ups, and a scene that had just spent five years learning what Kazaa did to a machine recognized the shape of it on sight.

What I remember is not the client, it is the verdict on the client, which formed within days and never moved afterwards. Swarm Systems tried to answer it. They put out eXeem Lite and BIT eXeem without ads, and from version 0.21 they swapped Cydoor for WhenU, which is a bit like answering a complaint about the smell by changing which drain it comes from. By the end of 2005 the network was switched off.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Andrej Preston, who ran Suprnova as Sloncek, was the face of the launch and by most accounts not much more than that. His involvement was promotion. The company was registered offshore, the code was not open, and the funding model was advertising, so the whole proposition asked a suspicious population to trust an anonymous business with root on their machines because a name they liked was standing next to it. That trade had already been offered to them, by Kazaa, and they knew what it cost.

There was also a design problem underneath the trust problem. Putting the index inside the network makes the index as noisy as the network, which means fakes and poisoned entries with nobody able to delete them. Tracker sites were centralized partly because moderation is centralized work. eXeem never got far enough for that to be the thing that killed it, but it was waiting.

~ what replaced it ~

The trackerless torrent shipped in 2005 anyway, just not from eXeem. Azureus added a distributed hash table that May and the mainline BitTorrent client added its own around the same time, so within months of the beta the exact feature eXeem had been built to sell was in two free clients that everybody already ran. The magnet link finished the job a few years later.

The index went the other way entirely. Instead of dissolving into the swarm it recentralized onto new sites, Mininova and isoHunt and the one that outlived both, and the takedown-and-successor cycle Suprnova had started just kept running. eXeem is remembered as the moment the scene proved it would rather lose a site than accept an installer it did not trust.

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