Well I think that in reality our tech-savvy friend
napho will rather surrender to Dawn than to spyware
but the question is good and deserves discussion. If we Napsterites - a well-connected online community blessed with many technically skilled people - are having hard time following the latest tricks of spyware vendors and protecting ourselves from them what can an average p2p user without such good contacts do? Not much. Probably run Ad-Aware once a week and pray that it keeps him/her protected from these repeated assaults on his/her privacy.
Like
snowman I myself have zero tolerance for spyware. If an application refuses to work with its possible spyware removed I can and will live without it.
As for the true long-term solution to the problem, I fully agree with
pod. There is no doubt whatsoever that free software movement will provide us with all the p2p tools we need. There is nothing in FastTrack technology or other existing commercial p2p products - even in the advanced Groove - that cannot be recreated and enhanced by voluntary contributions of community-oriented programmers. It
will be done, just look at what happened to Napster technology. However fancy and 'corporate' Napster seemed just a couple of years ago now there is safe and free Napster server software available to anybody willing to set up a server.
So the time window for the the abusive p2p vendors like Kazaa and BDE to make money with our privacy and community resources is limited. They probably understand this even themselves and just try to make a quick buck with any means imaginable while the transitional phase lasts. In this quickly evolving situation we as end users need to protect ourselves as best as we can, preferably shifting our support away from the worst abusers to the non-commercial software and those commercial vendors that seriously seek business models that are not based on systematic violation of user privacy.
- tg
