Name: Ares
Homepage: www.AresGalaxy.org
Cost: Free
Recommended: Yes

Ares came into existence in 2002, started by Alberto Treves. Originally it was a Gnutella client. But later that year they moved away from Gnutella in favor of its own network; the Ares network. This new network used the SuperNode connection method developed by FastTrack. One important difference between the Ares network and FastTrack is that Ares does not use a partial hashing algorithm. It uses SHA1, just like Gnutella. One could almost call it a hybrid of Gnutella and FastTrack.

In 2003, Ares sold some key code to 2 different organizations. These 2 organizations went on to found the Warez P2P and Filecroc files haring programs. Both are adware/spyware infested clients. Warez P2P did see some success due to its users-online statistics. This lead to Slyck listing the Warez P2P network in its P2P stats on their main page. But the Slyck admin pulled the Warez listing when they found out the number was an estimate based on the search horizon. The last recorded statistic for the Ares network put it at over 1 million users.

In January 2005 a 4th file sharing power made its way onto the Ares network, giFT. giFT and KCeasy developer mkern reverse engineered the Ares protocol and developed an Ares plugin for the giFT core. Ares had no ill will towards giFT for reverse engineering their protocol. For the most part, they ignored it.

In February 2005 Ares hit a rock in its development. Connection problems were occurring for every client on the Ares network. Alberto was releasing updates to Ares almost weekly. He was making so many changes that when version 1.8.1 Build 2965 came around, there was a whole new network. However, Wares, Filecroc and giFT were all quick to catch up.

In September 2005, the RIAA started a fear campaign against the big P2P programs. This resulted the death of WinMX (though network patches do exist). eDonkey2000 cut a deal with the RIAA. Ares, rather than die or cut a deal, decided to go open source. This signaled that Ares wasn’t going anywhere.

Today Ares is a 100% free, simple and stable filesharing program. Its interface is almost identical to that of Kazaa. In addition to sharing files, Ares also has built in chat rooms. These chat rooms are un-moderated and can be started by anyone. Ares comes in 2 different versions, Ares regular and Ares Lite. Ares Lite is designed to be less resource intensive. Another interesting feature is the Firewall to Firewall transfers. This allows Ares to connect to the network even if your software or router’s firewall has your ports blocked.

On the down side, Ares does take more RAM than most other P2P applications. On average it uses 20MB. This has in part to do with it being written in the programming code Delphi. On startup, Ares creates a hash for every file you’re sharing, this can monopolize the CPU for a long time, depending how many files you’re sharing. The population of the Ares network isn’t as high as some of the other big networks. ED2K has around 5 million users. Gnutella and FastTrack have about 2 million. While there’s no statistics on the Ares network, most experts put the network still at 1 million users.

Download Ares here.

~Allied - File Sharing Place P2P Critic [May 1st 2006]