I posted the following on the Bearshare.net forum and it was removed with 12 hours. I can only assume that Mr. Falco removed it because he threatened to do exactly that, and more, including shutting down the forum most critical of Bearshare and the bundled spyware that it's installation contains. There is NO REASON to continue to use Bearshare. Gnucleus is a better gnutella servant and is open source, no spyware. The post that was censored on the Bearshare site follows:

[In followup to a thread about Mr. Falco's threats to shut down the Adware forum and censor posts]

"Vinnie's attitude recently is the reason that have uninstalled Bearshare from my box and have moved to Gnucleus. I have always been disturbed by the spyware bundling, but put up with it because I thought Bearshare was the best servent available. Then I found out about the encrypted message packets that Bearshare sends out and that disturbed me more. I have never heard a pausible explanation for these encrypted messages from Vinnie to this date. Finally, within the past week, Vinnie has posted several messages which include vitriolic comments about folks who may have questiond his judgement in using the spyware and has threatened to shut down this forum. That was enough for me.

I decided to try a couple of servents that I had never tried to find an alternative to Bearshare and I stumbled upon Gnucleus. Let me tell you folks, Gnucleus is as good, if not better than Bearshare. In many ways it IS better than Bearshare. It is more stable, seems to return more search results which are better organized, and the download resume features are a lot more intuitve. But best of all, there is NO SPYWARE, it sends no encrypted packets, and is OPEN SOURCE. I uninstalled Bearshare and I'm not looking back. Gnucleus is serving all my Gnutella needs without all the hassle and worry associated with Bearshare. I'd urge anyone who has doubts about Bearshare to check it out.

Hope this helps..."

DON'T USE BEARSHARE IF YOU VALUE YOUR PRIVACY!