Can anyone suggest any decent alternatives to limewire?

kwikbreaks

I reckon the writing is on the wall for this type of file sharing. Once the new legislation has kicked in and a few collars have been felt the pirates will move on to other technologies.

Mr_Oink

The big winners under the Digital Economy Act will be (1) small ISP's (2) Proxy and overseas VPN providers. But there comes a point where people spend more money to work round the laws so they can digitally shoplift music and films than it would cost to buy genuine items.

As for 'infected mp3s' Yep, IIRC there was a header issue that could be exploited, along with a plain old setting the MIME type to mp3 audio, but having an executable file extension. Not seen it for quite some time now.

Not forgetting the oldest chestnut in the book:
somefile.mp3{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}{space}.exe

rpsheridan

Cheers for the advice, there is no way I am paying for music!! :eek:

I will have a look at some of your suggestions.

Mr_Oink

I used to know a mobile DJ who downloaded all his music. Never paid for anything. Still expected paying himself mind you. We know it's wrong, we know it's not legal - but people keep on stealing media and thinking it is OK. May the virus writers keep infecting the machines of those that steal :-)

sporedude

*agrees with above* Produces a few lols when someone downloads a virus, or !!!!!!.

weegie.geek

People advocating piracy should be ashamed of themselves. We're moneysavers, but it doesn't mean we should steal to save money. I'm not anti piracy by any means, but I am against people plain refusing to pay for things. If it's worth paying for, pay for it. If you find it useful, pay for it.

As I said in an earlier post though, most people use things purely for the sake of using what is assumed to be "the best". Photoshop being one of the main examples. How many people need the full newest photoshop, with 10 grand's worth of plugins? Not many. But since it doesn't cost them anything, lots of people use it. Sure, it's slower than something like paint.net which would do everything most people need it to, it take up many times as much HDD space or RAM, but hey, it costs nothing. Some people pirate for the sake of it, because they can. Not because they want to avoid paying for something, because most of them wouldn't be able to afford it anyway, and certainly wouldn't be able to justify the cost in comparison with their needs.

I *AM* against profiting from piracy. That means torrent sites which accept donations, usenet providers who know fine well what 99% of their customers use the service for, pay per download services like hotfile, and all the other companies clearly profiting from piracy, and in some cases blatantly making it their business model.

Of course, in music/video terms, things like spotify make it less of an option to pirate. Why bother when more music than you could fit on your hard drive is sitting ready to be streamed? You can't get spotify on your ipod of course, but give it time.

aliEnRIK

Mr_Oink wrote: »

May the virus writers keep infecting the machines of those that steal :-)

What about legit people who dont steal? Are the virus writing scum ok to infect them too?

[Deleted User]

kwikbreaks wrote: »

How do they arrange execution? Exploiting that ridiculous "hide known extensions" virus inviting feature of Windows maybe?

I've never tried it, but thinking things through it wouldn't be unfeasable to manipulate the header of the MP3 file to either try and coerce the user into downloading some form of fake codec that while looking legitimate actually wasn't, or a better (read more complicated) way would be to try and manipulate the header of the file to permit some form of overflow into memory which would permit 'executable' type behaviour to occur.

In either case, I think you'd have to rely on the fact that either the demographic you're trying to infect either uses a certain media player or is quite naive.

tl'dr: it'd be quite complicated.

Mr_Oink

aliEnRIK wrote: »

What about legit people who don't steal? Are the virus writing scum ok to infect them too?

No - only digital thieves ;-) The downloaders of 'warez' et al by well known and infected routes. There is an issue for those that genuinely don't steal and happen to do p2p and torrents but MD5 etc springs to mind for genuine use. I guess if you fly with the crows you can't cry when you get shot at!

There is also the view that the 'virus writing scum' keep lots of charlatan 'computer engineers' in work - so it's not all bad but sure, not a good thing for someone with an entirely legal PC that has just been a bit careless.

joeypesci

aliEnRIK wrote: »

Im suprised no ones been in to shout out about the forum rules yet

or Utorrent.

Because torrents and torrent apps aren't illegal. They can be used to share LEGAL, FREE music, LEGAL and FREE movies (like the documentary Steal This Film), used for software patches, linux distros and all manor of legal things.