It's also the very "feature" that I dropped by to ask about. Every so often I have to go through my pending downloads to prune out all the single-source transfers from Limewire hosts that started and never finished - usually having stopped at somewhere between 100 MB and 500 MB out of 700 MB or so. Gigs of wasted bandwidth and disk space, and I'm still not able to think of one good reason why.

Not displaying your WAN IP in Limewire doesn't protect you. If you're behind a router, view your log. You'll see the destination IP of every single outbound connection listed. Any of them with a router can also see yours. If you're a Windows user, drop to a command prompt and enter "netstat -a". Voila - the destination address of every single active connection. Every other Windows user can do this too, and I'd bet everything I own that similar tools are easily available for Linux, Unix, and OS/X.

A return address is stamped on every single packet that Limewire sends, and Limewire doesn't really have any control over that. Whether or not you've heard of protocol analyzers, law enforcement has (for that matter, so have any "mad hax0rz" you might be concerned about). I'm not giving away any secrets here, folks - anyone that an IP would be useful to knows this and more. In short, Limewire reporting your LAN IP this way protects you from people who wouldn't know what to do with your IP, and that's about all.

Which brings me back to my purpose for dropping by - finding out the reason for this class C address thing. What in the name of creation is it supposed to accomplish, besides guaranteeing that an upload which stops will never resume?

When I first figured out why I had several GB worth of temp files for downloads which just never, ever resumed, I started trying to think of one good reason why Limewire would do that. I thought it was a mistake; when I found out that this was not only intentional, but default behavior, it blew my mind. Now, months later, I've thought about it many times (every time I prune garbage from my download list) and the only reason I can think of is "to make Limewire users feel safer than they really are". Is it worth it? Isn't that a disservice to... well, pretty much everyone?