Comments on: Congressman Proposes Banning P2P from Govt PCs

By: P2P Gets Banned in Antarctica

P2P Gets Banned in Antarctica — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:47:59 +0000

[...] Edolphus Towns, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has already proposed banning P2P programs like Limewire from govt [...]

By: DrewWilson

DrewWilson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:16:38 +0000

Yeah. I figure that in some cases, US politicians are paid to deliberately not know what they are talking about.

By: mountain_rage

mountain_rage — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:32:53 +0000

You can flag files, and leave comments for files on gnutella. Generally you will only get a virus on gnutella if you are downloading archives or executables. Anyway, I would say both systems have an equal number of viruses, people just seem more adept at avoiding them on torrents, but trust me they are there.

By: norm1515

norm1515 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:11:44 +0000

Sorry, I thought that was understood. Yes, limewire is just a gnuttella client. But in my experience, gnutella is more likely than bit torrent to have viruses. Bit torrent trackers have moderators, after all.

By: pk

pk — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:15:18 +0000

people forget. “limewire” is not a network. gnutella is the network, which is completely open and not owned nor governed by any company. several filesharing clients utilize the network, and no one client “invites viruses” more than the other. it’s up to the user to be responsible and intelligent in using these tools.

By: norm1515

norm1515 — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:42:42 +0000

Admittedly, limewire invites viruses more than other p2p networks, so if you want to secure government computers, you should leave it off. It’s a shame that politicians are out of touch with technology and don’t understand the issues behind p2p, but at least in this case, their actions are justified.