Perhaps Germany has always been an anomaly with the
law. Different mindset, I guess, where people and their
rights count for nothing before the almighty State.

Everywhere else, what I said is quite accurate. The rest of
don't live in a surveillance society where tips are enough to
get things like that to happen, not even if a cop claims to
believe the tipster. In the real world, a police officer has to
swear that he can corroborate his suspicions with probable
cause before any judge will grant a warrant to arrest or
search. That, by definition, means he has seen a crime in
progress or gathered evidence, not that he believed the
word of someone else. If Germany suffers from having a
much lower standard, that's too bad for you, but I suggest
you ask an experienced officer about it before you continue
to paint such a backward picture of law enforcement in your
country. Remember, even in Germany or any other EU
nation, the police and courts know the difference between
reasonable suspicion and probable cause. It's time you
learned it too.

It still doesn't matter if downloading is illegal or not in
Germany. Accessing or possessing such files is illegal
virtually everywhere but those who accidentally downloaded
and deleted such files are still in no greater danger because
of it, since there is still no possibility of prosecution if
they do not share the file and simply delete it, proving their
innocence by action, and having never actually created any
evidence against themselves.

The download mesh is not enough to call probable cause.
That's still just another uncorroborated tip or lead which
they would have to follow up on to get a shared file list.
Since an accidental downloader is not actively sharing the
file, any browse host will not have the suspect file in it and
more importantly will not show the usual suspect pattern of
many more such files, therefore that lead will always be
discarded in favour of real suspects with real collections of
such files.

In addition, even if they had an IP address to look at, any
broad search for such files will never include them as a
source, even if the police managed to connect to them as a
peer. In fact, the lack of response to the files they were
looking for would be proof of innocence as far as an
investigator is concerned, and he or she will move on to the
many suspects for which they actually do have large
quantities of evidence.

Please be more careful what you tell unsuspecting users,
especially since you won't be the one running into problems
from your info, but others might pay for your carelessness.
You are so intent on scaring people unnecessarily over a
theoretical danger which you hold dear but in fact has never
actually occurred, or if it has was so rare and so quickly
dismissed that it may as well have never happened at all.
What you are saying is, in effect, that people's lives can be
totally ruined by random chance simply because they used
Phex, LimeWire or any other P2P to download anything at
all. Do you really want to scare people away from P2P so
much?

First: It's a tip they can follow up on in the most simple way: Getting a search warrant.

And I don't want to scare people away from p2p. I want to make them aware of the dangers of p2p, so they take the proper precautions to decrease the chance of getting into problems.

Sharing copyrigthed files (which aren't licensed under free or open licenses) in p2p is illegal in almost every country.

And I would be able to spot you as another downloader of a file I download myself - and I could do that at this very moment. There's no mumbo jumbo involved: Just having a look at the candidates section in Phex will get me the IP of anyone who isn't behind a LAN router (about half the people).

That's why I go for anonymous p2p, even though its speed is much inferiour to non-anonymous p2p.

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As for the rest of you ( and sageecl ), you should always
be in control of what you share.

Some P2P applications share the downloads folder by
default, but you can easily change that. It has been a
longstanding problem that some junk files and worms
spread easily simply because so many people are sharing
their downloads without first checking what they actually
have.

Also, don't forget to check the advanced settings for sharing
of partial files, which enables your software to share bits
and pieces of your downloads even before they are
complete files on your own disk. Most software comes with
this enabled by default too.

If you take care of these two details there's no way you can
ever be sued or charged for sharing anything you didn't
intend to share.

It is good to see that there is at least one other person around here who is trying to tell people about these two fundamental errors commited by most developers. The two default settings mentioned are one of the biggest problems affecting all users and the Gnutella Network.

Allowing the sharing of downloads and partial files, by default, is a disaster for all of us and should be considered as the definition of irresponsible file-sharing.

Yes, but it is so freaking efficient for the network to do so...

Sidenote: Only abut 1/4th of the people of whom I download have the file as partial file, so sharing files you're downloading at the moment doesn't really increase speeds that much. But it's likely that the download mesh wouldn't work without partial file sharing.

The "What's new?" search should make it far more efficient, though.

And in anonymized p2p (for example i2phex) sharing partial files by default doesn't create problems. And i2phex works, albeit slow.

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So is going about without knickers or your trousers when you have diarrhea...

That doesn't make either of them socially acceptable!

I was spanking Vinnie over this when he proposed doing it but he was
adamant that it would be good for the network. Partial files is not so
bad but I've been cleaning up after those unchecked downloads ever since.

So was my long lost cousin at BS Forums !

btw, now I understand why Vinnie was so happy on certain days... Spanking, huh ?

why is it that people who try to educate others as to the true nature of what they are doing are considered as trying to ''scare people away from P2P''?????????????

and really, AW, what is your great concern about people using p2p??????? sure, its great for the network and such, but is there some reason you constantly promote the use of such an insecure way of transferring data?

let's take the concept of someone downloading a highly illegal file by mistake...yep, it happens...and the most insidious way it can happen is if you, for example, download a file named 'dscn-1121'....or so it appears in your search result/browse host....if one had taken the time to expand the results (hitting that little +) one might have found that it had another widely used title...but skipping that thought process, you have mistakenly downed a nasty picture of a young child...even if you don't have sharing enabled and immediately remove the file, you will still show up as a search result on another's search for a while!!!!!!! and that may be all that the law needs to start work against you!

if you want some 'education' as to how the law works when it comes to protecting children pay close attention to what going on in El Dorado right this moment....maybe watch a few of those Dateline shows about catching predators....etc, etc, etc...basically take your head out of that hole in the ground and pay attention to what is actually happening across the world right now!....sure, the lawmakers apparently don't regard CP as a big thing, but there is certainly a rather large grass roots campaign being waged against the practice, let me assure you!..and many law enforcers don't give a big flip about the lawmakers anyways, as there are quite a few good laws already on the books....

what really irks me is that the penalties for having a few CP images on a HDD are often harsher than if the offender had actually had physical contact with the child....sheeshus....like life in prison on Arizona for a very small number of files, while a relative who actually rapes a child gets off with a much shorter sentence....


so you go right ahead with your way of thinking AW, but you are seriously uneducated as to what is going on in the world...

and really, what matters here is giving proper information to those who ask for it...how they use it is up to them....

most times the destruction of a HDD is not needed, but if it makes the person who does it happy, then what is the problem???...they are certainly 'safer' than having kept using it...do you argue that logic also???

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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It isn't that bad: If you have sharing disabled, you won't turn up on a search (Shareaza had that enables, as far as I know, but all others don't - because of technical concerns, not security: Polluting searches with incomplete files was seen as bad).

But you will be seen as download candidate by people who also download the file.

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