On Wed, 15 Mar 2006, Marc Levy wrote: > FUD? no.. But why not minnimize risk? I agree. I minimise risk by not running closed-source software from unknown sources on my computer. You're suggesting that we should be running questionable closed-source software to block a nonexistent threat. I don't believe in avoiding nonexistent threats by making my computer's contents even less known than before. > http://securitypronews.com/news/securitynews/spn-45-20051107FirstSuccessfulCopyrightViolationCase.html There is nothing about law enforcement monitoring Bittorrent in this article. The article provides no details whatsoever on how the guy's activities were tracked. However, given the "Nai-Ming was convicted of posting movies to his website" sentence, I suspect he was posting .torrents to his site, and then seeding them. That's quite a bit different from casual downloading using .torrents pulled from someone else's site. > http://www.kanai.net/weblog/archive/2005/08/29/15h13m51s HBO != Law enforcement. HBO, Universal, MPAA, RIAA, and likely others are definitely monitoring Bittorrent. But they're doing so from throwaway dialup accounts, so blocking "known law enforcement IPs" is not going to help one bit. Is this a valid argument against using Bittorrent? Maybe so, but don't exaggerate by claiming that law enforcement is involved, because there's just no evidence they are. LEAs are generally uninterested in copyright violation and only bother caring when copyright holders bitch. I, too, have received a letter from a copyright holder. In my case, it was Universal, whining that I was sharing X-Men 2 on my eDonkey server. It was an automated mail with tragically flawed regular expression matching. Check out what they thought was X-Men 2: ------------------------------ Infringement Detail: Infringing Work: x-men 2 Filename: Doctor Who - 126 Mawdryn Undead 1 of 4 HQDivX.avi ------------------------------ Why yes, the filename DOES contain the characters X, M, e, n, -, and 2, but not even in the right order. Needless to say, I told them to smeg off and haven't heard a thing since. These guys are NOT on the ball and they are NOT prosecuting except in a very few isolated cases. I agree with your original statment, that NNTP is safer if you've got it. I'm lucky. My job is running news servers, so I've got it available. But for those who don't, Bittorrent is an excellent resource, and the risk involved is tiny. Now, whether or not it's moral or ethical to use it for these purposes is an entirely different conversation. -andrew Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DMCForum/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: DMCForum-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/