YEAH! Only 2 days ago I noticed this. Inside around 10 minutes, I had been showing over 8 megs outgoing and the figure was still climbing, rapidly. I, too, panicked, except that I disconnected, straight away. Every sensitive file that I own is now encrypted 3 different ways and all are off both hard drives and on a disconnected Zip drive, instead...until I find out what's going on. We trust too much and question too little.

I'm not good with the Net, so I thought I'd try some things.

1. I reinstalled ye olde Napster (no, honestly!). I'd heard, somewhere, that they use a different server system/idea, so it seemed like a good place to start. I put NO files in the uploadable files folder because I thought this would result in cancelling me out as a candidate during anybody else's searches. I planted a search, saw my list of possibles and, as the first 3 files began their invariably doomed downloads [ surrounded by Remotely Queued Transfer Errors, of course! ] I took a look at the bytes-in and bytes-out rates. THEY WERE FRANTIC! Now, that sounds as if it backs up the theory about the searches being run through a person's machine during a Gnotella, Gnucleus, etc., download.

IS MY MACHINE BEING USED TO PASS SEARCHES THROUGH ON NAPSTER, ALSO? Does anybody know?


2. Then, I went to a freeware site or two and downloaded lots of files, from them. During the downloads, the bytes in-and-out rates were fast and furious, but not as such as they had been with Gnotella and Gnucleus, etc..

SO, WHAT CAUSES SUCH AN OUTGOING BYTES RATE TO GO THROUGH MY MACHINE DURING SIMPLE DOWNLOADS OF FREEWARE FROM THOSE SITES?

Any ideas, anybody?

__________________
You must do to truly want to do!