The sky is falling, didn't you know, and if you're not careful, your favorite P2P application might fall right on your head. File-sharing technology, often times scorned by political heavyweights and the entertainment industry, is once again the target of the Attorney General’s office. This time, it's not from the state of New York, rather, Mississippi is deriding the nature of file-sharing.
So what nefarious act has P2P been up to this time? The Mississippi Attorney General's office has issued a "Cyber Warning", alerting consumers that some popular P2P clients such as LimeWire or FrostWire might leave the end user susceptible to inadvertent sharing. Although not mentioned on the release, this type of sharing is problematic on older or outdated clients. P2P developers never anticipated that people would end up sharing their entire hard drives, therefore, older versions of Gnutella clients LimeWire and FrostWire didn't prevent the end user from sharing their root directories. Today, developers such as LimeWire have gone through extraordinary lengths to prevent this from happening.
Still, human nature being what it is, people are still finding novel and inventive ways to expose their personal information online. Take Mississippi AG Jim Hood's reaction to some popular P2P applications.
“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.
That's not exactly true, at least for LimeWire and FrostWire, which are still actively developed. As for eDonkey, BearShare, Kazaa and Morpheus, these applications have have lost considerable relevancy in today's file-sharing market. BearShare and eDonkey (MetaMachine) were sued by the music industry, and settled for $30 million. eDonkey was discontinued, and BearShare was purchased by MusicLab, the company that owns iMesh. Kazaa has fallen out of favor, while Morpheus is no longer available. The point being, these latter 4 clients no longer carry the same lineage that LimeWire and FrostWire do.
Today's versions of FrostWire and LimeWire deliberately prevent the end user from sharing their root directory. In other words, with LimeWire or FrostWire, it’s virtually impossible to share your entire hard drive. If you try, this is the warning message you’ll receive in FrostWire:
In order to circumvent this error, the end user would have to go into the source code of either LimeWire or FrostWire, remove the security feature, and recompile the software. To say the least, for the average end user, it has become very difficult - if not impossible - to share an entire hard drive.
But Slyck, the AG said that people shared documents such as bank statements, tax documents, and other sensitive data. Can’t the evildoers find a 1337 user like me?!!11111”
Just about anyone can find resumes and other interesting documents on file-sharing networks by conducting wildcard searches for files ending in “EML”, “XLS”, “DOC”, etc. Most people keep these types of files in their “My Documents” folder, but sharing this folder takes a bit of work. Nevertheless, as the AG points out, it happens.
“In one recent instance, investigators with the Attorney General’s Office found where one Mississippi family was unknowingly sharing tax forms, social security numbers, checking account information, personal photos and videos with other users of Frostwire, a popular website commonly used to download music.”
Although we couldn’t find any music downloads on the FrostWire website, we discovered that trying to share the “My Documents” can’t be done without a certain level of effort. If selected, the end user receives this warning message:
If the end user unintentionally tries to share their “My Documents”, he or she will have to defeat the warning screen designed to prevent such an action.
File-sharing applications and developers are often blamed for the follies of their userbase. LimeWire CEO Mark Gorton was grilled by the US Congress in July of 2007 over this very issue. But file-sharing software by its nature is not simplistic, even such applications as LimeWire. They take some effort and knowledge to use, and, considering the lack of computer literacy outside of checking email and Googling, properly setting up P2P applications is often times outside the knowledge scope of many users. The result is the current sharing fiasco exemplified by politicians. The Mississippi AG office recommends deleting these programs to avoid problems, however, reading pertinent documentation and keeping software current will yield an identical effect.
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