limewire search
 

Just what do Limewire think they are doing allowing some third party to muscle in on searches that have few results. I put in a search on my surname and found it was available as a html file and a mpg file. This was strange as it is almost unique and no other results turned up. I then entered other strange search words, and they had the same result, a html and mpg file turned up with the search name.
Nothing wrong with this you might think, except if you double click on any of the icons you will be taken to a hard porn site.
I resent that my surname is , being used in this way
and hope that Limewire will stop this practise, or I will get them closed down.

What you are encountering has nothing to do with Limewire. It does have to do with unscrupulous folks who match almost any search request returning bogus files that link to porn sites. I have encountered this on 5 different P2P clients, including Limewire. With Limewire you can set a filter to reject any results coming from a specific IP address. To do this go to Tools / Options / Filters / Hosts. . . in the window marked filter hosts enter the IP address of the offending site. From that point on no results will be returned from that specific address. There are several sources of these porn files so you can add them as they appear... this should greatly reduce if not completely stop this from occuring. Again this is NOT a Limewire issue... the Gnutella network is open to everyone which, as you have seen, has it's seedier side.

I failed to mention in the tools / options / filters / keywords section there are check boxes so you can ignore HTML documents all together as well as results that contain certain "adult" themed wording.

Re: limewire search
 

Its an interesting exercise (that I'm sure programmers play all the time) trying to work out just how legislation could be drafted that would close down p2p clients such as LW - if you targeted he company it'd be very easy for the company to close and reappear with a new name so fast users would notice nothing except a change of logo - if you target users the best you could hope for is a few long drawn out cases targetting 'excessive' sharers (which might not even result in wins for the prosecution) - if you target ISPs you might have a chance - the ISP could identify the 'signature' of individual p2p programs and automatically block them but I'd bet good money that long before the action started everyone would have 'upgraded' to new versions that have constantly changing signatures that are very much harder to identify and block

the threat to close down LW is so ill informed its hilarious - the stable door is open, the horses have bolted, and they've bred like rabbits

the real clincher though in terms of trying to legislate against p2p (and the reason RIAA hasn't tackled it) is that the attempt is probably doomed before it starts - its like the philosophy 101 exerecise of trying to define what a 'game' is - no matter how you try every definition ends up including things that clearly arn't games and/or excluding things that clearly are games

the biggest threat to p2p is not quixotic legal initiatives but (as above) gnutella spam making the network clumsy and fragile

bad_vlad

but on the other hand
 

notwithstanding my somewhat optimistic previous post - there are developments which should be (and obviously are) of real concern to the p2p community - if the bill currently being presented in the US to legalise attacks by RIAA on the computers of p2p users becomes law - and - microsoft gets their new palladium chip into all new computers (disallowing almost all mp3 type file sharing) - then - you have a genuinely vicious hardware and software attack on the gnutella network - it could even work

this would be an example of 'vulgar' capitalism at its most crass and greedy as well as representing an appaling attack on the very civil liberties that capitalism has made possible (if indeed not essential)

the real danger is that too few will realise just what is being planned untill its too late and like napster,- LW, shareaza, morpheus, bearshare etc just become fond memories of a short lived period when consumers had some power to influence immensely popwerful companies that basically couldn't care less about the people providing their 'income stream'