Ares Connect

Guns n Roses’ long-awaited new album has been 14 years in the making. We aren’t all that excited about the album because we can’t remember who Guns n Roses are. Ha! The youth of today. Anyway, the surprise of their new album has been somewhat spoiled after tracks were leaked onto filesharing networks before the official release date.

The nine tracks first appeared on little-known rock website www.antiquiet.com. They then made its way onto filesharing networks and onto peoples’ computers and iPods.

The album reportedly cost the ridiculous sum of $13 million to produce. Must have been a lot of hairspray.

After 14 years of making an album, it’s no surprise that it ended up being leaked before it was due for release. If there are any Guns n Roses fans left, they will likely have got the album through filesharing networks first before they buy the CD, so it’s unlikely that sales will be affected too much.

Foxy singer Joss Stone is the latest celeb to come out and say that she supports filesharing. Joss Stones allegedly said that piracy is brilliant.

In a bit of a twist, Joss Stone said that she loves music, but she hates the whole music industry. Don’t we all! When asked after a show what she thinks about people who download her music, she said, “I think it’s great,” which raised a few eyebrows.

Joss Stone went on to say that music should be shared and it should be free. So filesharing is a good thing.

She may come under flack for saying that people should buy music, burn it, share it on filesharing networks and so on. It’s rare for a singer in her position to come out and speak so openly about this subject.

Record labels have brainwashed artists into thinking that filesharing and priacy is bad, she added.

After hearing these comments, we went and downloaded Joss Stone’s latest album using Limewire. Thanks Joss!

If you have ever typed a word into Google – or any of your other favorite search engines – then you will know that sometimes you get the spelling of the keyword wrong. Despite this you still – usually – get to precisely the site that you want.

So it is with people searching for Ares and getting to aresvista.com. Ares is not a difficult word to spell once you’ve seen it and are used to it. It is a difficult word to spell, though, if you’ve never seen it or are from a different country.

Those interested Ares users from Latin America give the most numerous misspellings to our list of Ares ‘versions’. Their attempts at Aires and Aries come out first. Of course others around the globe misspell Ares this way too, but it is in Latin America that the misspelling is most common.

Other common misspellings include Aeres, Aris and Aers. We have no idea where these originate from, and there is seemingly no country-specific areas related to them.

Next on the list is, interestingly, Areas. The majority of users misspelling like this come from Greece and south eastern Europe. Arez is the fourth most popular misspelling and that comes from those users in French speaking regions.

People from all over the world visit the Official Ares site, and when you look at the range of spellings of the word Ares that ultimately bring the visitors there, you realize how big and diverse the planet is.

The correct spelling is obviously Ares. A close spelling – and one which many people would recognize – is Aries. That this is an astrological sign is, I suspect, no accident. It is interesting that the majority of people who go for the Aries version of the spelling Latin America.

Two other ‘real’ words that are typed into the search box when people really want to find Ares are Aires (as in the city) and Areas. Both could well be mistypes from people whose fingers work quicker than they should. Interesting the Areas misspelling is most common amongst visitors with languages with a strong Greek influence.

Other misspellings are perhaps even more unusual and interesting: Aeres, Aris, Aers and Arez. The latter sounding slightly Hispanic but in fact coming more from the visitors in French speaking countries.

Aers is possibly just a true misspelling because there seems to be no pattern in the location of the visitors typing it. Aers is, naturally, an anagram of Ares so it’s not too far away.

Miles Doughty, the frontman of Slightly Stoopid, a band we’ve never heard of, has gone on record and said that filesharing is good because it gives people who would not have otherwise heard your music a chance to listen to it.

This is in line with many bands and artists who have sung the praises of filesharing for making music available to the masses in a way that was, until recently, virtually impossible.

Filesharing is said to give artists direct access to fans and would-be fans while putting record labels in the precarious position of not really having any point. Miles Doughty has praised filesharing for the exposure it has given his band, although that exposure wasn’t enough to make it to our iPods. Or perhaps it was, given this news report. The mind boggles.

Anyway, Miles Doughty says that filesharing increases a band’s ability to tour and play live shows, giving a band the opportunity to do what it’s supposed to: play music.

It is sometime a little difficult to let go of something that you know and trust. So it is with the Ares Galaxy P2P filesharing software. I have known and trusted this version of Ares for a long time now and I have had no reason to change; this is the original brand name of the Ares software – it is to Ares software what Kleenex is to tissues. Nothing could possibly be better than Ares Galaxy, could it?

Oh yes. My complacency with Ares Galaxy matched the software’s complacency with itself. The new crop of filesharing software contains some absolute gems which do most things as well as the old Giant Ares Galaxy, and some things markedly better. One thing that I noticed straight away was that implementations like Ares Ultra, Ares Ultimate and Ares Vista all offer customer support. This was something that Ares Galaxy could never bring itself to do. What I didn’t know at the time was that these newer versions are better at connecting to the network. This becomes important when some of the startup servers are down and users have problems with Ares connecting.

Where there is good there is also bad. I looked at Ares Destiny and Ares Gold last year and they were the versions that helped me decide to stick with the decrepit Ares Galaxy; not only are they inferior versions that appear to be attempting to cashing in on the name, they also come with the added ‘bonus’ of nasty adware.

Perhaps it is time for Ares Galaxy – the old stalwart of Ares P2P filesharing software – to give up its crown. Here we have one of those situations where newer versions of Ares, versions like Ares Ultimate, Ares Ultra and Ares Vista, are all proving to fare better than the original Galaxy in many ways.

Ares Galaxy is living of its name and its reputation somewhat, but this façade of modern competency must surely be about to crumble.

As a result of more years of technological advance and the power of hindsight, the newer versions of Ares noted above are generally just better (allowing for exceptions like Ares Gold and Ares Destiny which, as well as being a step backwards from Ares Galaxy are also packaged with some pretty horrible adware). As well as an improved customer experience (i.e. these versions have some customer support, something never seen in Ares Galaxy) there are also a wealth of advanced features that I’ve never seen on the older Ares Galaxy.

Ares Galaxy was – and still is – a competent version of Ares, and it served to introduce many of us to the world of P2P filesharing. Now, though, old boy, is the time to relinquish this particular throne in favor of a more worthy version.

Despite music pundits insisting that CD sales are dead and that filesharing is the only way people are getting their music, Lil Wayne’s new album Tha Carter III has sold by the bucketload since its release on June 10.

CD sales in the US have dipped by about 11% in the past year, thanks to filesharing and other ways of getting music, but that didn’t stop Lil Wayne shifting 423,000 units in a few days.

Predicted figures for the album put CD sales at anything up to and above one million. So people are still buying CDs and filesharing has yet to kill the music industry. Interesting.

Lil Wayne’s new album is more popular than the likes of Mariah Carey and Usher. This kind of reception to a hit album is rare and is perhaps something that the music biz can learn from. Despite Lil Wayne’s new album finding its way onto filesharing networks before its release, sales of Tha Carter III appear to have not been affected at all.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has come under fire after the announcement that it is teaming up with Virgin Media to send warning letters to people who use filesharing services, such as Ares.

There was a BBC article about the issue that suggested that Virgin Media is more concerned about the music industry than it is about its customers. The article went on to say that such a move only really highlights the fact that Virgin is monitoring its customers’ Internet usage.

A rep from BPI responded to the BBC article by saying that action must be taken against illegal music downloading in order for licensed music services to make any money.

It’s a typical case of the filesharing community versus the music industry. The only difference here is that the filesharing community is represented by someone in a powerful position, namely a BBC author.

Ares Lite was one of the gold standards of Ares file sharing. Designed as an efficient cut down version of Ares Galaxy – the daddy of the Ares world – Ares Lite is an oft misunderstood piece of software.

When entrepreneurs started bundling versions of Ares with adware and malware (will the makers of Ares Destiny/Dealio bundle please stand up? I realize that people have to make a living, but still…) their users were understandably a little miffed. They searched around for an alternative and, through a stroke of genius, the makers of Ares Lite managed to convince people the ‘Lite’ bit meant that this was simply Ares without the adware. Anything other than ‘Lite’ would leave them wanting.

This is not true and many of the later versions of Ares – applications like Ares Ultra and Ares Ultimate – do the job so much better and completely without malware.

One of the problems with Ares Lite is that it was designed in an age where the small resources used by the Ares core were a substantial part of a computer’s processing capacity. With increases in efficiency of hardware and decreases in associated price tags this ‘Lite’ version has rather served its purpose. Ares Lite was great when it first emerged but some of the later versions are by far the superior choice.