Request: The Do's and Don'ts of P2P File-Sharing

[stray]

I haven't used much of anything since Kazaa came out, and before that, not a whole lot else. Any tips and/or software suggestions that I should make use of? How do I keep myself relatively safe?

EDIT: This is not a warez or piracy question. I'm just out of the loop and want to know what works and what doesn't, and what additional software I should be running alongside a p2p client.

[Kenrick]

I don't really do any of that anymore, but most recently when I did I used winmx.

http://www.winmx.com/

[Dark Vengeance]

Waste makes for a good private filesharing network. Anyone with access to the network has the ability to add more folks into it, but otherwise it is private.

Kazaa and WinMX are more along the lines of the old Napster.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

[Rodent]

Of the mainstream filesharing apps out there I say DC++ is the best if you can find yourself a couple of decent hubs. Protection wise you won't need anything more then a firewall and an antivirus program, and you should be running thoose anyways.

I suppose if you're the paranoid kind you could also use Peerguardian or something similar.

[Flashman]

I wouldn't bother with peerguardian or anything else that promises something like that. It's pretty much useless.  It's just a block list of IP addresses of companies. Its not as if blocking the public RIAA IP address is going to prevent them from downloading from you. They just use a bot from an IP address  that's not public to connect to you., so to you and to peerguardian it just looks like another user trying to connect.

All it does is give you a false sense of security.

[Ezdaar]

If you have access to a university network I would suggest i2hub. You get nice Internet2 speeds along with so far no interference from the **AA, since they don't have a legitimate reason to be on I2.

[Llava]

My brother's been using a program called BearShare for a little bit.  Seems to work well.

[Joe]

Grab DC++ if you have stairs in your house. There are a few good hubs there. If not, I'd wager a guess and say WASTE is relatively safe, since you have to send specific keys to other users.

[WonderBrick]

Shareaza is a great multi-protocol program, that supports Gnutella, Gnutella2, eDonkey2k, and BitTorrent.  Alot of great, out-of-print and regional material can be found.  Some amazingly obscure stuff can be found.  Often patience is needed, but eventually you will find what you are looking for.

Azureus is a great BitTorrent-only program.

For security, besides the basic firewall/antivirus lecture, you will want to be carefull of small file sizes.  Often searches lead to malicious machines that generate files with that same name of the item you are looking for.  It might be a virus, trojan, or advetisement.  Common-sense should make these files stand out to you, but it should still be stated.