By default, Limewire has you sharing your download folder, if not more. So no, you wouldn't have to be an idiot, just a member of the larger segment of the P2P community. By the way, the term for those who are not sharing is "leech".

As far as the whole child porn red herring, sure, that's possible. The word unwitting means unknowing or unaware, like by accident. Nearly ANYTHING is possible by accident. For example, someone could unwittingly let the forums know that they are part of the IPod spammers by continually butting into a conversation regarding said spammers with a bunch of non sequitur comments intended to derail the discussion.

So anyway, the bottom line is it looks like the spammers have changed their tactics and are now enabling chat. I currently have an open search query with a 122.4 kb .wmv file and 29 hosts, chat enabled.

Any meaningful information, opinions, experiences, or tactics would be appreciated.

I don't know anything about computers, and can't offer a solution to this problem; Just add to it's mystery.
On a search for a specific movie, "God's army" with Christopher Walken,
for once the search turned up completely blank!
NOT ONE SINGLE HIT (without any filters turned on).
Even the second search produced the same result!
However, when i turned it around and searched for "army of god",
i got a lot of suspicious looking hits, all of which from T3 connections.
If the "fake i-pod" is auto generated, one would at least expect one or two hits in any search?

__________________
Don't waste time searching for your conscience. If you've got one, it'll find you!

The "turned around" search came up looking like this.:

__________________
Don't waste time searching for your conscience. If you've got one, it'll find you!

Sorry. Same post was sent twice??

__________________
Don't waste time searching for your conscience. If you've got one, it'll find you!

I've seen the same thing. Sometimes you get them, sometimes not. This can be hours apart or even within a few minutes of each other.

I think it's either that...

...the spammers aren't always online.
...they can only do so many search terms at a time, or have certain words they key in on.
...Limewire doesn't always return all possible search results (maybe I don't have access to all possible nodes, etc).

OK, I have HAD IT.

I did a search for images with query "y z" (query words replaced by letters because, frankly, it's none of your damn business what I'm downloading or searching for). One of the results has the filename "x y z" (x is a word not in my search query), only one source, and a modem speed.

IT TURNS OUT TO BE A ****** IPOD SPAM.

This is ridiculous. Even normal, legit-looking search results can no longer be trusted, nevermind the ones showing swarms of T1 sources that are always named after your search query. There was no way even in principle to spot this thing lurking among the non-spammers in the search results -- it had a typical size and format for a photograph (a jpeg in the 20-100k range). At least the wmvs are anomalously small in filesize compared to legit videos, but there seems to be NO FRIGGING WAY TO AVOID THE JPEGS. This HAS TO CHANGE!

I don't care what it takes. MAKE THIS STOP. NOW.

I can't even delete the damn thing until the next time I want to reboot, since when I do, the next time Limewire downloads a file explorer will hang and the whole machine will become slow and unusable -- yes, this happens any time I delete anything from the download directory and then download something new, no thanks to ****** Microsoft and their incompetent armies of Middle Eastern minimum wage programmers. Most computer companies are smart enough to hire those only in their call centers, for crying out loud.

Needless to say, I don't autoshare my downloads or share the directory either...and this is a large chunk of the reason why. (Limewire choking if you share 10,000 files is another. Illegal files masquerading as normal content is another. Other spams are another...)

This bullshit has to end. NOW.

I for one totally understand your frustration. The main rule of thumb I live by to avoid these files is the same as what you mentioned, look at the file size. If you're looking at downloading a movie that's only about 98k, it's an IPod ad.

Also, I've only seen these ads only pop up as Images or Video. Make sure that, whenever possible, you target the search towards the file type you're looking for, instead of doing an Any Type search. If you are searching for Audio, do an Audio search. If you want a movie file, search for Video and check the file sizes (a decent sized .avi file should be somewhere near 180mb for 1/2 hour). If you search for Images, you're on your own. If you search for Programs, Heaven help you!

Sorry to hear about your deletion/download hang problem, that's a new one. While it may be a Windows problem, I hardly think it's cause to put the blame on a one particular segment of all programming professionals, let alone slander an entire region of the world. But that's just me

Well the rumours I've heard are that an anti-spam filter will be introduced into LW in version 5 or 5.2 or thereabouts (with any luck!) Apparently one of the people who donates code to LW has already developed one but it still needs a little more work on it.

Well, we all know how far we can trust rumours, don't we...

Hi All
Im new to this so please bear with me..
I have been a limewire user for sometime
but recently i have noticed that everytime
i search for music , in the results there is always the same three porn files. I have tried everything to try remove it from blocking to running Spybot to Spyware docter all in vain. Though i think the auto download has ceased. Still its very annoying to have those porn files show up each time.Does anyone know of a way to rid it? I have also tried unistall and install newer version of limewire.
thankyou heap
Jane

I noticed this a few weeks back. But seems more prevalent now. 134.4 KB for mp3 spam. And 60.5 KB for a zip which I believe is no doubt a virus. I haven't checked their contents or attempted to download them. But arranging your downlds by size will at least put these files at the bottom of the list. (ie: double-click the top of the size column will arrange the search results with largest at the top. See sample Arrange search results by size (click on link).) After all, how many true mp3's are less than 2 MB in size. lol I wonder if the RIAA have put a DRM license on these files. duh

Update: What these 134.4 KB files actually are: 1. bill clinton voice-overs, 2. Clinton Trojan Need a Fix Limewire!!!, 3. efreeclub.com (Notice the T1 source for the spam ... same as the earlier discussed type of spam.)

mp3-spam.gif

when do these come out

OK i know this thread is pretty old but the problem has only gotten worse. I started thinking of some fundamental changes to the software that could (potential) be a fix.

I use frostwire which I understand is open source. I plan on taking a look at the code this week to see how feasible this might be. Basically we need to verify our hosts before we display them in the search results. Here's what a conversation might look like now.

mycomp: Hey do you have this file "filename.ext"?
spammer: yeah i have "filename.ext"
mycomp: ok thanks, ill display it in the search results

What we need to do is verify the host is not automatically generating files before we consider them having the first file. Like this:

mycomp: Hey do you have this file "filename.ext"?
spammer: yeah i have "filename.ext"
mycomp: ok, well do you have "sdfgisdf.ext"?
spammer: yeah i have "sdfgisdf.ext"
mycomp: you must be a spammer because "sdfgisdf.ext" likley does not exist, ignoring search result.

What do you guys think? Without knowing a lot about how gnutella works i think this could be possible.

awesome that looks like it might work. also i agree spam sucks, u could just also disable viewing of T1 - T3 lines.. I think tho u'd also disable a lot of people esp. on a modem dialup that input that for better results. oh and where i live the spammers are on at around 11pm - 5am pacific time. Around that time frame or so.. I do download viruses sometimes to test AVG free, also avoid anything with wyzo in it it's a trojan, i got that sometimes when searching also I've been getting results that aren't what i searched for.

Example:

My search query: palm applications

Results: freescreensaver
setup
workgames
..........
i use frostwire by the way.....


edit: by the way i use comodo firewall with checksum verification on (disabled by default I believe) also i have all tcp incoming and udp incoming blocked and only have all tcp out allowed and udp only allowed out to two certain dns servers. Also with comodo firewall u can disable svchost.exe from accessing the net and i think that zonealarm u can't. U only have to allow it when visiting the windows update website and if using automatic updates, i got it disabled tho and timesync, so whatever it wants to sync to is a question in my mind, however when i dialup i get svchost blocked logs...