A new hope for BitTorrent?

(continued from previous page)

SuprNova site. It's "Kazaa and BitTorrent all together."

However, Sloncek's announcement has raised as many new questions as it has answered.

The program itself is being developed by an anonymous company that contacted him several months ago, the SuprNova administrator said. He's now officially working for that company as its representative, he added.

"Exeem has nothing to do with BitTorrent...It's just yet another warez tool."

--Bram Cohen, BitTorrent creator

Some hints may be given by the Exeem.com domain name, which is registered to a Swarm Systems. The listed address for that company is in the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts & Nevis, at the local office of IFG Trust Services, a company that helps set up and administer offshore companies.

A telephone number provided along with the domain name information appeared to be incomplete or out of service. An IFG representative did not return calls seeking comment.

Older file-swapping companies have tried to incorporate themselves outside the reach of traditional legal or tax authorities. Sharman Networks, Kazaa's parent company, is based in Australia but incorporated on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, for example. That hasn't prevented the company from being sued in courts in the United States and Australia, however.

The Exeem technology could find itself in some of the same difficulties faced by other file-swapping networks.

Much of BitTorrent's popularity has come both because of the speed of downloads and the assurance that files were real instead of the decoys or damaged content often found on other file-swapping networks. Indeed, a recent academic study attributed much of BitTorrent's strength to the influence of moderators at the SuprNova Web site, who hand-checked files to ensure they were genuine.

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