I use Time Warners Road Runner Cable Service in S. Western Ohio to access the Internet. On March 14th (2 hours before I posted this), I received a call from Time Warner Services. They informed me that the MPAA had contacted them about certain movies I had downloaded (Dogma, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and I found out LOTR even though I never had it) and (apparently) requested them to contact me. The service person on the other end of the line politey suggested that I stop downloading movies. During the conversation, I also found out that the MPAA had gotten my ip address or whatever by monitoring bearshare and the gnutella networks. After Morpheus went down, I started using other p 2 p clients, Dogma and Hedwig were the only 2 movies I downloaded from Bearshare before getting rid of it. Apparently, some movies are "marled" or something. The whole point is that someone or some organization was able to monitor the internet and eventually deliver a warning message (even though it was in a round about way). Kind of Scary isn't it. Well, there are the FACTS, let me know you're opinions.

Michael Knez

That sucks man. But I am happy to see someone else knows about Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I was starting to feel all alone.

Good thing bearshare checks into the bearshare home page each time it starts. This really helps out the RIAA.
Why sell bear t-shirts when you can make a deal $$ with the RIAA for big bucks?

Think simple:
If I were the movie industry and wanted to know, who downloads my movies, I would put them up on gnutella by myself, and look, who downloads. If it comes from a cable or another fixed-IP-connection, I could make a name out of the IP adress I see. Only good proxies can make you invisible to that.

Crypt the connections. SSL? Since we are already using HTTP would this be easy?

Then the only way they will pick you up is by serving the files themselves .. and you can get around that using <A HREF="http://www.samair.ru/xwww/proxy.htm">an anonymous proxy</A>.