The Great Firewall...

[Lanigiro]

...has apparently started blocking G1 as well as G2 hub-leaf connects that cross it now, judging by my seeing several times lately Shareaza trying large numbers of Taiwanese G1 hubs fruitlessly.

Fortunately it doesn't seem to get stuck with the G1 hostcache polluted so heavily by these that they exclude everything Occidental, unlike the case with G2.

Still, it seems as if G1 is becoming gradually harder and harder to establish and sustain connections to. This needs investigation and action, I suspect, or else Shareaza might eventually lose the ability to get any use from G1 at all in a few more months, if G1 ease-of-connecting continues to worsen at a similar rate to that of the recent past.

One cause to consider is if, in addition to the GFW beginning to interfere with G1, there is a G1 client becoming popular that has incompatibilities with Shareaza. In fact, I suspect that is indeed the case and that it's a suspect we've already fingerprinted in connection with other incompatibilities: GTK-Gnutella. A lot of the failed non-GFW'd G1 connects I've seen for a while now have been GTKGs. The fail rate when trying to connect a hub seems to be markedly higher for GTKG G1 ultrapeers than for other G1 ultrapeers, and even with that being the case, at any random time half my G1 hubs tend to be GTKGs (the other half, of course, tending to be Limewire or variants on that theme). So GTKG is becoming a very common G1 ultrapeer, perhaps significantly more common now than the *wire family.