Mississippi Attorney General: Be Aware of Inadvertent Sharing

If you think file sharing technology might take a break from being attacked (whether is politicians, record industry or the Attorney General’s office that does it), well, think again. In this case the scoffing comes from the state of Mississippi.

The Mississippi Attorney General's office has issued a "Cyber Warning", warning users that some popular P2P applications like LimeWire or FrostWire might open door to dangers such as inadvertent sharing. Though the release doesn’t say it, this type of sharing brings up problems on older or outdated file sharing programs. Some say that P2P developers failed to anticipate the danger of sharing the entire hard drive and this explains why older versions of Gnutella clients LimeWire and FrostWire were not concerned with preventing the end users from sharing their root directories. Currently, however, developers like LimeWire are investing considerable time and efforts to put a stop to this sort of risks. This still doesn’t mean some users don’t “manage” to find new ways to expose their personal data over the Internet.

“If you are not careful when you download programs such as eDonkey, Limewire, Frostwire, BearShare, Kazaa and Morpheus, you can end up sharing your entire hard drive with other users,” said Attorney General Jim Hood.

To be a fair judge, that’s not quite accurate, at least in what concerns LimeWire and FrostWire, which are still actively developed. If we refer to eDonkey, BearShare, Kazaa and Morpheus, these apps are lingering way behind in the current file-sharing market. To enumerate some of them - BearShare and eDonkey (MetaMachine) got sued by the record industry, and settled for $30 million. eDonkey was put down, and BearShare was acquisited by MusicLab, the company that also owns iMesh. Kazaa is hardly preferred by savvy file sharers and Morpheus is out of business. So what we're trying to say here is that these 4 aforementioned applications no longer bare the relevance that we can credit LimeWire and FrostWire with.

To make the matter clear – the current versions of FrostWire and LimeWire are developed so as to prevent the end user from sharing their root directory. To cut it brief, using LimeWire or FrostWire, you there is NO risk sharing your entire hard drive.