I got a Cease & Desist Letter!

[ali usman]

But its forbidden in the EULA.

[Drew K]

You mean the one where everything is opt-out?



While I admire open source, and while I firmly believe that BearShare will be open source in the not too distant future (after some rather challenging problems that have been pointed out get solved), it is unfortunate that open-source Gnutella servents have a critical vulnerability - they cannot implement secure security features.



Not to worry - if the situation gets out of control we will move the secured features to a second, parallel private Gnutella network and give users the option of operating on either one. The "regular" Gnutella network (open source, vulnerable to spammers) will be freely supported by our public.bearshare.net host cache, and the "secure" Gnutella network (read: proprietary BearShare network until we can figure out how to open it up without allowing it to be attacked) supported by a private anchor server which accepts no incoming connections and cannot be attacked.

[princess]

insulting is low, moderators please have a look on it.

[oramirez012]

For e.g. german law (european law too?) an EULA on install time does not care, it's void. I'm no lawyer, at least it can not limit basic rights, free speech or reverse engineering are some.

Btw, for an application that mainly is used to copy/hurt DMCA protected material, an EULA building on DMCA is a funny thingie. Oops, I shouldn't have mentioned this....

[.:Icecream:.]

i live in the uk, do i have to worry about this?

[arturo m]

I said ONLY time will tell who is right... now I see I was right, after Vinnie confirmed his future split!

@ Vinnie

And now what next? Will you use Gnutella as a leeching pool, or will you be "fair" and leave the net?

Morgwen

[Rebecca A]

Of course ssh, SSL, PGP and all good commonly used secure protocols or hashs are available as open source.

So why security by obscurity? Instead of working on a better protocol, Bearshare tries (again) to get an advantage from proprietray extensions. Needless to say what's good for Bearshare isn't automatically good for Gnutella.

[Justinian]

Damnit Vinnie, go get a lawyer and quit trying to do this legal stuff yourself.

Everyone is missing the big problem, we would have to depend on your ability to PROTECT YOUR EULA.

So I want to know, how many $$ did you put in a fund to protect all of us in a law suit against the RIAA enforcing your EULA? If they violate your EULA and you win against them, does that mean the copyright violation charges against one of us are dropped or do we still get fined and you walk away with a million in settlement?

Now if you put in several hundred thousand to protect us all, I would be happy to jump on the BearShare BandWagon and become a BearShare BrownNoser and even donate some $$ to the separate TRUST FUND managed by a neutral party.

What would actually hold up in court is if every BearShare node on the [now] separate BearShare Network had the ability to allow PASS THROUGH file transfer, and no one can tell if it's being used or not, so then you have no idea where the file originated, and can claim in court "that file could have come from anywhere, not just my node".
(for those of you who are about to post "that would slow down the network", don't bother posting and use the search button)

How do you justify that feature? Oppressed countries like China need it bad.

Go pass that by your lawyer after you get one that is, and all you who have (come with) this idea should too.

Why isn't file pass through working in this version of BearShare?

[Bryndon M]

freenet-style transfers through multiple nodes are the future of filesharing [read: free exchange of data]. freenet, however, has a good number of issues that make it quite hard to use, and anyways, it was neither meant as a filesharing network nor is it mainly used as one. nevertheless gnutella could learn a lot of these secure transfers. would they slow down my downloads? certainly they would. but if i got the choice between speed and security, i would go for security.

the perfect P2P Network of the future would use gnutella's decentralized selfstructuring network model, error-tolerant information storage methods like kademlia and untraceable data transfers like those of freenet. ah yes, and public key cryptography because of them spooks that pay my isp to log all my traffic...arghs, i guess it's still a long way to go until we get there, but i have some hope left...

ps: Vinnie, good luck with your proprietary bearshare network, you're gonna need it...