I'm connected just fine using the default hosts ... however, I have a concern, which is that obviously, I'm connecting to the cetral server provided by the nice Guntella/Gnotella/etc folks (I'm using Gnotella) .... If (when) the lawyers get around to messing with gnutella, I think the central server will probably vanish, while gnutella peers live on and try to share with each other ... My question is if and when this happens, how do i continue to share files?

The obvious answer is that I connect to others I have connected with in the past, and bypass the gnutellahosts.com and router.limewire.com hosts altogether. The question is, though, how smart is my client? Does it have a large cache of all hosts I have connected to? If so, I can't find it. Do I have to just pay attention and go through the tedious process of adding hosts i see connections to/from to my pulldown list? Does this vary from client to client (probably so)? If so, what clients are best for recording and retaining hosts that I have connected to for future use?

1. I prefer Furi to LimeWire as it is true Freeware and no company is behind it.

2. I prefer Furi to LimeWire as it has this enormous list of servers available on the gnutella network (even the ones i am not connected to).

3. If one of those central servers (which only hold a list of peers, nothing more, nothing less) get kicked, it is only too simple to set up a new one.

Don´t worry, there is nearly anything that can be done against gnutella.

Unless ... if some of the "Bad Guys" figure out how to find the individual user easily and find ways of punishing him (or her). I am pretty sure the americans (NSA, FBI, M$ or whoever) are working on this right now.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Well, I doubt the FBI or NSA can be bothered to deal with this ... I'd wager they're more concerned with investigating our former president in order to deflect scandals surounding our current president, but that's another story ....

What *can* be done, as per my posts in other threads is for the RIAA to dowload copyrighted material, track the ip addy of the servent (very very easy to do ... ever typed "netstat" at your command prompt?), and go after the individuals by demanding their isp drop their service. Will they do this? Hard to say ... my guess is "probably" ... afterall, that's how Metallica got lots of Napster users banned from the service a while back. Only difference here is that you're shutting down the offenders' access to the entire internet, instead of just to napster.
Will it be effective? Only time will tell.

Wouldn't be very hard to write a perl script people can run on any web site that allows gnut clients to post their IP's