Vinnie this question is directly for you.

Is BearShare helping the RIAA spy on Gnutella and are yall teamed up with the RIAA?

YES OR NO?

VINNIE IS NOT THE ONLY DEVELOPER OF BS!

Syfonic, after doing a little research, I have a question for you.....

Aren't you in fact an RIAA employee sent here to discourage people from using BearShare (and other p2p servents)?

You've chosen your nic as a code for other RIAA people to track your efforts. "Syfonic" is merely a shortened version of "symphonic", a term used on vinyl records back in the 60's.... records that the RIAA would want to protect.

tsk tsk.... your little scheme isn't working. Go bother the real crooks in the music business - the record companies themselves!!!

Why do you take the freedom to ask such a ridiculous question??
Do you have any *evidence* or reason to ask this?

Hello!

Yes the question might seem rediculous now days but it was not back in the middle of the year 2001.Some suspicion rised back then when rumors where floating around that some BS developers have been payed a large sum of money to help out the RIAA cathing individual users.The way they where supposed to do that was to incorporate special hidden spy functions in their client and send the data back to the RIAA as evidence of distribution of illegal copyrighted material.Also the indroduction of the Extended QueryHit message back then by BearShare further increased suspicion.I have looked after the article where I read this but it seems that it is no where to be found anymore.

Personally I do not think that BearShare developers are cooperating with the RIAA and the introduction of Secure channels and anti Hostile host functions in the most recent release of their software is proof of that. Even if those functions is not completely secure either from beeing caught by the RIAA.But atleast it is harder for the RIAA to catch sharers.

__________________
<img src="http://www.jordysworld.de/emoticons/blob16.gif">Sincerely Joakim Agren!

I gather only a handful of people have bothered to read the BearShare EULA.

We're thinking about removing the EULA for various reasons, it could be of benefit to everyone to get rid of it.

Besides, the protections afforded by secure channels are likely to be bypassed soon so we must roll out the next generation of security features.

Who does and does not work for the RIAA is none or your business.

Not all RIAA employees are bad, some support filesharing and just help the RIAA and in return the RIAA protects them.

I support filesharing

How can someone "support filesharing and just help the RIAA" at the same time?

Last I read the RIAA didn't support filesharing. Infact they seemed to think that filesharing was causing the end of the world (or their world, to be more exact).

Any help that you give to the RIAA is helping to stop filesharing, not "support" it.

Some people help the RIAA with their programming and not just trying to shut down the P2P world.