Xunlei

Xunlei Limited
Public
Traded as
Industry Internet, multimedia
Founded 2003 (2003)
Headquarters Shenzhen, China
Area served
 Worldwide
Website xunlei.com

Xunlei Limited (Chinese: 迅雷; pinyin: Xùn Léi; literally: "thunderbolt") is a Chinese multinational technology company and an online service provider founded in 2003. The subsidiary of Xunlei Limited, Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. (Chinese: 迅雷网络技术有限公司) was formerly known as Sandai Technologies (Shenzhen) Inc. and changed its name to Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd. in May 2005.[1] On 24 June 2014, it went public on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, raising just shy of $88 million.[2]

The main product of Xunlei Limited is the Xunlei download manager and Peer-to-peer software developed by, supporting HTTP, FTP, eDonkey, and BitTorrent protocols. As of 2010, it was the most commonly used BitTorrent client in the world.[3]

Products

Xunlei

Xunlei 7
Developer(s) Thunder Networking Technologies (a.k.a. Xunlei Networking Technologies)
Stable release

Microsoft Windows:
9.0.17.424 (12 October 2016 (2016-10-12)) [±][4]

OS X:
2.7.6.2272 Beta (13 October 2016 (2016-10-13)) [±][4]

iOS:
5.20 (18 June 2016 (2016-06-18)) [±][4]

Android:
5.25 (28 September 2016 (2016-09-28)) [±][4]
Development status Active
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS
Size 32.23 MB (Windows)[4]
Available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English with a language pack
Type Peer-to-peer file sharing
License Closed source adware
Alexa rank Negative increase 606 (As of 6 June 2016)[5]
Website xunlei.com

The Xunlei download manager, generally called Xunlei, is the flagship product of Xunlei Corporation, which also supports Xunlei Kankan, a video-on-demand website, and other desktop software. Xunlei is the most popular download software in China.

Xunlei

Through Xunlei, users can access a large portion of the files available on the Internet. Features in Xunlei includes a built-in browser, changeable skins, cloud storage, "offline" downloading, hi-speed downloading (only available for members), email service and more.

Xunlei is accompanied by a family of products including Xunlei 5, Mac Xunlei, Xunlei Mini, and Web Xunlei. As adware, Xunlei products feature banner advertisements, which can be disabled if logged in as a user (in the latest version).

Xunlei Kankan

Xunlei Kankan, also known as Kankan, is a video-on-demand service with a web interface as well as a client application. Xunlei Kankan is also available on mobile platforms including Android and iOS (including iPhone and Kankan HD for iPad).

Others

Along with Xunlei 7 and Kankan, the company also produces software such as a gaming client, a graphics editor, game "accelerator", software manager, and a web photo viewer.

Concerns and criticisms

File sharing

Xunlei is different from P2P tools in that it does not support active file sharing. While copyright advocates view Xunlei as a P2P tool that facilitates copyright violation, P2P advocates criticize Xunlei as a leech with much more downloading than uploading. Also it is often observed that Xunlei prioritizes file sharing with Xunlei users rather than other client users. Many pure P2P tools have blocked Xunlei, although this trend weakened after Xunlei began balancing the number of downloads and uploads.

Xunlei sets up its own storage servers to backup the files which are not active or shared any longer. This feature is named as High-Speed Channel and allows Xunlei users retrieve data faster than others. But only paying users have access to these servers and download files.

Direct linking

Direct linking, or leeching, concerns many site owners, who may feel that the practice benefits Xunlei at their sites' expense. In 2006, Huajun, the leading download site in China, started blocking Xunlei along with many other downloading sites.

User agent imitation

Since many websites recognized and blocked Xunlei via user agent (UA) string, Xunlei began to use common browsers' UA as camouflage. The default UA is: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) or Mozilla/5.0 Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6. However, if Xunlei determines it is blocked from a website, it will automatically change UA to imitate other browsers, such as: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)

Privacy

Xunlei shares files by default without additional notifications after installation. While Xunlei argues that this behavior is a common convention and that users can disable it, some users are still worried, since Xunlei's sharing policy is unclear. Investigations have revealed that Xunlei only shares files downloaded through Xunlei. Moving or renaming files may automatically disable sharing.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Company Overview of Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies, Co., Ltd.. Bloomberg L.P.
  2. ↑ "Xunlei IPO on Nasdaq raises $88m". Retrieved 24 June 2014.
  3. ↑ Van Der Sar, Ernesto. "Thunder Blasts uTorrent's Market Share Away". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on 15 September 2011. Retrieved 15 September 2011.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 迅雷产品中心 [Xunlei Product Center]
  5. ↑ "xunlei.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 6 June 2014.
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