332
Free Download Manager site redirected Linux users to malware for years
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
332 points (99.1% liked)
Linux
48329 readers
639 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How much faster are we talking?
I’ve honestly never looked at my downloads and though huh you should be quicker, well maybe in 90’s.
FDM does some clever things to boost download speeds. It splits up a download into different chuncks, and somehow downloads them concurrently. It makes a big difference for large files (for example, Linux ISOs).
It only makes a difference if the server is capping the speed per connection. If it's not then it will not make a difference.
I guess many servers are capping speeds them. Makes sense since I almost never see downloads actually take advantage of my Gigabit internet speeds.
It's interesting to me people still download things in that fashion. What are you downloading?
I occasionally download something from a web server, but not enough to care about using a download manager that might make it marginally faster. Most larger files I'm downloading are either TV shows and movies from torrents and usenet, or games on steam. All of which will easily saturate a 1Gbps connection.
Im curious as to how it would achieve that?
It can’t split a file before it has the file. And all downloads are split up. They’re called packets.
Not saying it doesn’t do it, just wondering how.
It could make multiple requests to the server, asking each request to resume starting at a certain byte.
Interesting.
I feel I’ll save this rabbit hole for weekend and go and have a look at what they do.
The key thing to know is that a client can do an HTTP
HEADrequest to get just theContent-Lengthof the file, and then performGETrequests with theRangerequest header to fetch a specific chunk of a file.This mechanism was introduced in HTTP 1.1 (byte-serving).
Huh.. that’s super interesting and thanks for sharing.
Right? I've not thought about download speeds since the 2000's.
just grabbed a gig file - it would take about 8 minutes with a standard download in Firefox. Use a manager or axel and it will be 30 seconds. Then again speed isnt everything, its also nice to be able to have auto retry and completion.
I was just going to recommend this too; Use axel, aria2 or even ancient hget.