What I don't understand is that the localisation file for Limewire actually has the strings for the handshake settings. It says it's in the advanced tab, but it's not there. Plenty of other programs actually appear to have removed this functionality such as Toadnode.

blacklist/whitelist strikes me as not idea if they're ip based because some of the network members will be on dialup with dynamic addresses.

My god, what a tool you are. Did it occur to your feeble little mind that actually what we want to share is not warez and we do not want to have it shared with the world but the rest of the features of a P2P filesharing network with swarming are desirable.

No, didn't think so.

Well exactly, it's a huge security risk. The protocol handshake feature (or rather the ability to change it) was in plenty of Gnutella clients before but now it appears to have been removed. This is what I refer to regarding decline in availability of those features in Gnutella clients.

It seems that most Gnutella client authors are of the same opinion and the feeble minded chap above, that the only reason you'd want to use this is to swap stuff which ought to be swapped with the world. I appreciate they want the Gnutella network to be busy but this is kind of irritating nevertheless.

We'd pay for the right client, even.

So it seems likely we'd just use opennap with user accounts instead, it's just that this doesn't offer swarming capability which is rather handy for broadband connections which don't have particularly fast upstream rates as is common in the UK.