Thanks UKB, fool and ferral.

I hope we can continue this conversation one more round.

I've already got Norton Internet Security installed, and I update it regularly. I think my machine is pretty secure. I looked at peerGuardian2. It looks like it adds one more layer of spyware and firewall-like protection, and it's free, and opensourced, so it's probably a good thing. But I'm not sure it's going to give me a lot more protection than what I have already.

Am I missing something?

It seems peerGuardian2 offers unrealistic hope of protection from RIAA lawsuits for p2p users. The copyright police are going to appear like ordinary p2p users -- even to peerguardian2. The copyright police mainly identify p2p users from their IP addresses. It isn't possible to cloak your IP address and still share files on a p2p network.

The way to download anonymously is to use a wifi hotspot -- not your own, of course -- that is not password protected. That's almost unbeatable. The IP address cannot be traced to the p2p user in that case. But there might be a few flaws in that method.

One possible flaw is the one I mentioned. It seems likely that a little hacking of an opensource Gnutella client, such as Limewire, could easily reveal the path name of each shared file on the network. If the path name contains identifying information, that could be a problem for the p2p user who wants to remain completely anonymous.

As more and more p2p users get anonymity from unprotected wifi hot spots, the RIAA is going to be looking for other ways to identify p2p users. It just seems sensible for p2p users who use wifi hotspots to think about the path names of their shared files.

But I'm not an expert. Maybe I've misunderstood something. Comment?

KH