I see what you are saying. This would be feasible as long as we could reach enough people to do this. I noticed that you underlined very in your last post. How soon do you think it will happen? What influences your thinking in this way? Please let us all know. Also, what scheme do you think they could use to block the ports? Would the ISPs do it individually?

I can think of one thing that the RIAA could do. If they modified a gnutella client, they could load it on several hundred conputers hooked up to the internet. Right now, you're thinking "So What??" But, using this vantage point, they could broadcast random, automatically generated quieries, searches, pings, etc. If they had enough of these clients adding massive amounts of traffic to the network, the network would slow to a crawl. It could clog and and not be worth anything to users. The network would be completely jammed and no one could find anything in their searches.

If they did try to do something like this, their effect could be minimized by blocking the hosts that are doing this. We would have to organize an effort to discover all these "bad broadcasters", and we could tell everyone to block them. Or, we could release a script or executable (with LimeWire's permission of course) to block all the known offenders automatically. This is a rather depressing subject, but I know we should all be actively planning for the future. Any ideas, Kirby?

--
I underlined very for a few reasons, like universities have already started blocking. Mainly because the RIAA is starting to mess around with Gnutella. One guy here had a nasty letter sent to him, so it couldn't be long before they try to get ISPs to block 634*. 5190 isn't too congested at all, I was just downloading on it.

Kirby

[IMG]http://**************.com/ms/kirbykore/images/kirbywave.gif[/IMG]

Universities started blocking a long time ago. Universities also, the majority of them, started refusing to block a long time ago. You are wondering into the area once again of the gov't having to make things illegal, except now your talking about open ports! LOL. I'm sorry, but it seems this conversation is getting more and more ridiculous. Most colleges have already made their decision as to whether or not they wanted to block access, and most have decided not.