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Winny Screenshot of WinNY v1.0b61 Winny (also known as WinNY) is a Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program created in April 2002 by Isamu Kaneko, a graduate research assistant in computer engineering at the University of Tokyo in Japan. The software takes its name from WinMX, where the M and the X are raised one letter in the Latin alphabet, to N and Y. Written in C++ and loosely based on the decentralized design of Freenet, Winny became a very popular file-sharing program in Japan. Until recently, WinNY has been the primary source of raws in fansubbing for the last few years. Its emergence promptly overshadowed previous forms of raw acquisition, increasing accessibility more than ever before to TV shows that were still airing in Japan, affecting raw providers almost to the same extent that Bittorrent had on fansub distribution?. With Winny, fansubbers in general no longer required close connections to cappers in Japan, conversions of old VHS materials, daily watches on newsgroups, or importing LaserDiscs by mail. As long as raw providers were capable of running their operating systems with Japanese regional settings and concealed the fact that they were foreigners, Japanese users on WinNY would readily share anime episodes with raw providers at large. In May 2004, an English patch was written for WinNY v2.0beta66. Future versions of WinNY were programmed with an internal self-check to prevent patching into other languages, making WinNY v2.0beta66 the only version of WinNY to have an English translation patch written for it. While this patch exposed more English users to WinNY, its creation was viewed by the Japanese as the first step in a potential scenario many of them feared: that foreigners would eventually discover, overrun, and despoil WinNY through content dilution and merciless leeching. In light of this English patch, some Japanese users have abandoned WinNY in favour of an even more obscure program called SafeNY, a experimental p2p client focused on keeping foreigners out. The last known version of WinNY is v2.0beta71, released November 11, 2003. Although Kaneko was arrested and sent to jail on May 10, 2004, then released on bail less than a month later, WinNY is no longer being developed. While the WinNY network remains relatively large, a newer, more annonymous network called Share has begun to rival WinNY in popularity. Related Links |