ahh those zany guys at the RIAA. I hear they are hiring ninja's now to assassinate 12 year olds for downloading hanson.

Bittorrent is LESS secure?

bittorrent requires a central server (the tracker) to process transactions. Every time you download something you tell the tracker and other users your IP address, therefore if one of those other users happens to be the RIAA for example they have your IP address which i enough to identify you if they go to your ISP.
That's why so many new p2p systems are being released that support encryption and software like peerguardian has appeared.

[Edited on Sep 05, 2004 by sync]

Mwahahaha...it's good to be young and careless.

Mission: Break into AOL Headquarters, and swap files on the system so that all AOL discs distributed will have Metallica mp3s on them instead of AOL install files.

I love bash.org for greatness like that.

If the RIAA ever sues me, I'm filing a countersuit seeking compensation for hundreds of albums that had decent singles but were utter trash as records.

And there still is no definitive evidence this is hurting their bottom line. On the contrary, there's data that would make a good foundation to argue they're benefitting from P2P.

Fuck the RIAA.

right, i'm off to download the new bjork album. communism is so sexy!

Um... Im going to resort to using a word from about 8 years ago...

No Duhhhhhhhhhhh

Ya know why I love P2P networks, because I hate the record industry. I like the musicians and I'd rather send them directly the 12 cents that they get off of my cd than pay the 15 bucks that goes to the recording industry.

Maybe there will be more freedom in the music of today rather than the industry giants tapping the people they find as marketable and selling them to the crowds.

The amazing thing is that FastTrack continues to grow regardless of the fact that it's a spam-and-virus infected wasteland of poorly encoded music and false hits for files.

BitTorrent really is incredible if you know how to use it... much more reliable.

As for filing suit against P2P users... good luck. I'd bet half the lawyers hired by the RIAA would have to file suit against themselves.

I love bittorrent. I use it predominantly for legal (yes you heard righ!!!) purposes, downloading fansubbed anime which hasn't been licensed for western consumption.
I also use soulseek as it is by and far the best place ever to get hard to get and exciting new experimental music. The best thing about slsk is that alot of the people on there who are artists publish their work for free on slsk so you can download it. Some of the collaborations on there have been legendary, like the one minute massacre.

do all these P2P networks give you viruses? When I tried Kazaa and Bittorrent I got viruses and it screwed up my computer.

I bought some cds at a used record store the other day and it got me wondering if the artists or RIAA get any money from the reselling of albums, because if they don't get anything from them then its the same thing as P2P and the shop's owner is profiting from it.

Stick with something open source (i.e. Limewire) and your chances of getting viruses are much less.

No, they don't. I always found that interesting, too.