Is limewire and bearshare and any the others virus free?

• Answer:

  A variety of p2p clients come bundled with adware, spyware, viruses, or varoius other forms of malware and that is the only threat that a p2p client itself could pose to your computer. There are more p2p clients that are unsafe themselves than there should be so I'll tell you some of the ones that are safe for you to use. As far as Gnuetella clients go Limewire, Limewire Pro, and Frostwire are completely safe but out of those three I suggest you use Frostwire because it has the most capabilities out of the three and it won't have the content filtering that Limewire will eventually put into place. Now for the bittorrent clients I suggest Azureus because I've grown quite fond of it since I started using it but there are of course other safe clients such as utorrent and a variety of others that are too numerous for me to bother to list here. The real danger posed to your computer by using p2p file sharing networks comes from dangerous files that you could potentially download using them. This makes it rather obvious that the greatest security flaw of the computer is the person using it. In order to avoid downloading dangerous files such as viruses, trojans, and all varieties of malware you must think about what you're downloading before you download it. Oftentimes the dangerous files will be exe files and therefore you should avoid downloading these especially if they are under 1MB. You should pay attention to the file sizes as well because if something isn't nearly as big as it should be then it probably isn't what it's labeled as. Even if you pay attention to file sizes and avoid downloading small exe files you may still accidentally download the occasional piece of malware. To protect yourself from your own slip ups you'll need to have a good anti-virus program installed as well as an anti-spyware program. At the bottom I will list download locations for free and effective versions of every type of program that I recommend you should have for a safe and enjoyable p2p experience. Using on access scanning your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs should deal with the majority of malware as soon it finishes downloading. There are ways of encrypting the contents of an exe file which makes your anti-virus incapable of detecting the danger it may pose until you actually run the file yourself. The on access scanning will deal with it when you run it but to be on the safe side you should do a weekly scan of your entire computer just in case your anti-virus program wasn't running when you downloaded a file. Another risk of using a p2p network doesn't come from the clients you use to connect to the network or even the files available on the network. It comes from the government, RIAA, and the other numerous anti-piracy organizations. In order to decrease the likelihood of finding yourself involved in an extremely costly legal dispute with an organization that has virtually unlimited resources and more lawyers than you can count you need to take a few preventative measures. One of these is to download an IP blocker such as PeerGuardian 2. PeerGuardian 2 once installed will automatically block the known IP addresses of anti-piracy organizations and it will automatically update to the most recent block list available to minimize the risk you take using p2p. That takes care of the computers that are known to be used by these organizations that would enjoy giving you hefty fines and perhaps even some jail time but there is still the chance that an unknown computer being used by these organizations can bust you. In order to minimize the amount of evidence that they would have available to prosecute you with you would need to encrypt your downloaded files. If you're using 256 bit encryption and a good password then it should be impossible for any organization on the planet to gain access to your files within your lifetime using our current technology. My personal preference for encryption is Truecrypt. I've been using it quite some time now and it's easy to set up. If you wish to learn more about file sharing networks then a good place to read up on it would be the InfoAnarchy wiki which you can find at http://tinyurl.com/2d58s4 it has helped me learn a great deal more than I once knew.