Bitbeamer, wherefore art thou?

December 22, 2004 8:22 PM

Augh! What happened to Bitbeamer.com? (No link 'cuz it's gone.) Bitbeamer was the shareware successor to freeware LeechFTP. I just tried to reinstall my (paid for!) copy, and the registration routine failed when it could not connect to its home base. Google reveals nothing. Has anyone noted what happened -- did it get acquired by another company? Did the author abandon the product? Do I have any hope of using my favorite ftp client again?
posted by Tubes to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

There was a successor to LeechFTP? Hotdamn, I'de be interested in finding out about this, too.
posted by jmd82 at 9:11 PM on December 22, 2004

Looks like its gone, or at the very least someone forget to renew the domain.

What did LeechFTP and Bitbeamer do that you like so much over the other ftp clients? Possibly I could suggest some replacements.

I do understand being passionate about FTP clients though. Despite being a stupidly easy protocol and about a million years old, the free clients out there seem to mostly suck serious ass. Maybe we could just add our own favorite FTP client to help Tubes out. [I use SecureFX by VanDyke which is payware provided by my company. I am curious whats the best free/shareware client out there now.]
posted by PissOnYourParade at 9:11 PM on December 22, 2004

Personally, I really liked the queueing and throttling facilities LeechFTP provided. You could batch up an huge number of downloads, then activate some number of threads to perform simultaneous downloads, from multiple sites, and throttle each download (or thread?) to a particular transfer rate. And then walk away while the downloads went on, retrying failed and rejected downloads at periodic intervals, even resuming downloads on servers that support it. It worked really well.

(I didn't know about Bitbeamer either.)
posted by xiojason at 11:06 PM on December 22, 2004

I've been using Xnews for a while now. It's pretty decent and free, but I'd also like to hear if anybody's found a better solution.
posted by SteveInMaine at 1:44 AM on December 23, 2004

The domain got bought out by one of the usual-suspects DNS squatter scumbags.

Whether this was due to the project being abandoned or simply a bureaucratic oversight is unclear. But either way, this is one of the major reasons you should never buy software covered by an activation scheme.
posted by BobInce at 2:26 AM on December 23, 2004

if you really wanted, you could set up a web server of your own, put the address in your hosts file as the site name that it's connecting to, and see what the request is. if you're lucky it might be possible to infer what it's waiting for as a response - you might also see if google has a cache for the url (if you're very lucky perhaps the connection alone is sufficient).

or you could pull the code apart and hack the call to the routine that does the calling. i've never done this, but i imagine it's not too difficult if you have a disassembler and know the relevant call. again, though, luck will play a part - if there's a routine that simply returns true/false then you're ok, but if some complex processing is done on the return value, you might not be.

i imagine this could be quite a fun project if someone wanted a introduction to hacking software. if i had more time i'd give it a go myself.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:31 AM on December 23, 2004

Response by poster: Hmm. I have no hacking experience, but spoofing the host might be worth a shot when I have some free time. As it was, I had some work to get done so I just installed Filezilla to get me going. It's free and seems nice so far.

Bitbeamer was like a polished, built-up LeechFTP with all the multithreaded queueing and throttling that xiojason mentioned. It was neat to transfer a ton of files and watch all the little gauges monitoring the performance of each thread. Plus I had it all loaded up with presets for all my projects and servers.

Though Bitbeamer is still available for download from various software collection sites, it seems other people have had problems registering or getting support starting a few years back, so maybe it's just time to move on.

If the author just walked away from the whole thing without explanation, knowing the download was available everywhere, it seems pretty irresponsible. But maybe he was hit by a bus or something.
posted by Tubes at 1:31 PM on December 23, 2004

This is why "phone home" centralized registration schemes like Valve's Steam are bad. In any case, faced with your situation, I'd just go ahead and crack the damn thing and be done with it.
posted by majick at 5:13 PM on December 23, 2004

I LOVED BitBeamer. Was happy to pay for it. I always pay for shareware I like enough to use regularly, and that was no exception.

A year or two ago, I lost all my shareware reg codes... I e-mailed the various companies/authors, and they all gave me quick and helpful responses, except BitBeamer support. So I mailed them again. Three times. Got angry. No response. So I think it's safe to say that the company is probably (long) dead. The support e-mails didn't bounce, but I never got a response.

As for replacements, I'll second a recommendation for FileZilla because it's good, and free/open source, too. I used SmartFTP for a while before I discovered FileZilla, as it is free for non-commercial/personal home use, but I got annoyed with the way it bothers you to register during the hours of 9-5 ("just in case" you're a commercial or corporate user, I guess). I wonder how many people got pestered into registering by that feature even though they fell under the aegis of free use.
posted by Kosh at 5:42 PM on December 23, 2004