Introduction:

Back in May 1999, Nineteen year old Shawn Fanning created a computer program which allowed millions of users to share music from each others computers from all over the world. This technology is known as peer-to-peer(P2P) software and is now very popular and used for a variety of things. This sparked a begining of music file sharing that still exists today.

What other p2p filesharing software are there?

Many people know by now of the famous filesharing programs such as: Aimster (now called Madster), Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster. All of which have been sued by Record labels. These programs have the same basic purpose...to allow file swapping.

Whats so bad about them?

With the arrival of these new programs comes new files to swap, including movies, games, photographs, programs and more. The illegal part in these are,

    1. Most of the music that is swapped is copyrighted.

    2. Most movies swapped are movies that havent even reached theaters yet (Star Wars Episode II reached files sharing             programs weeks/months before it hit the theaters.

    3. The games that are swapped, like movies, come before they are officialy released.

    4. Also the issue of pornography...

"U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, who presented the report with Largent Friday at a news conference, said his investigators had searched for Britney Spears videos on one site called Aimster and that 70 percent of the files that were returned to them were, in fact, pornographic videos. "

"This is so graphic and so accessible that it may be difficult for some parents to appreciate the magnitude of the current and potential problem," Waxman said. "But we must face it because it is facing our children." -cnn

Just one more problem filesharing brings, exposing children to pornography. Whether it be intentionally or intentionall. Statistics show that the #1 thing shared using programs such as these is porn.

For more information on this see www.safekids.com, www.getnetwise.org, and www.netsmart.org

I hope Bruce Taylor (National Law Center for Children and Families, which aims to protect citizens from "the harmful effect of illegal pornography by assisting in law enforcement) does everything he can to put an end to the sharing of porn.

Another thing bad about filesharing software is that most of them contain spy-ware. Spy-ware is a program that these fileshare programs put on your computer. They all differ in what they do, but basically they gather personal info about your (email addresses, name, ect.). They can be found and removed by using a program called Ad-Aware which can be found at http://www.lavasoftusa.com/. Instructions to use the program are on the lavasoft website.

Todays E-School was prepared by Aaron Jones.