Hi everyone, thanx for reading, didn't know if this quite qualifies for the
security forum, so I put it here.

Currently use slack10 and win2k with limewire installed on win. I love
lime, it's given me no problems, I've never noticed any extraware,
never noticed it maliciously using (or even hogging) my bandwidth.

Now I'm trying to remove win completely, so I start searching google
and lq for limewire security issues, and this summarizes what I found:

• Limewire's great, good results and no spyware/adware.
• Limewire gives good results, but installs spyware and adware, use apollon instead

And wherever I read about lime causing extraware, it always at most says
'slowed down my bandwith even after I uninstalled' or something like that.
Now no offense, but for casual M$ users, extraware could coincide (time-wise)
with any program installation, which would explain conficting reports.

Can anyone speak to this with maybe a link to some documented results
showing evidence of one or the other? Has anyone ever seen limewire create
extra files/processes? Can anyone tell me what process names I could look
for on my win2k to see if it really is causing trouble?

Of course I'd like to hear testimonials, too, but I wish I could have some
evidence if anyone knows.

If I do decide to run limewire (or other p2p) on linux, would it be wise to
install it completely under ~/ instead of /usr/ and run it chrooted?

ty in advance

I don't think limewire has spyware... what often happens is certain people bundle it (and other programs) with spyware and put it on download.com or something. Make sure you get it from the official site. And I'm guessing that guy's reports of bandwidth usage even after uninstallation were from a) something else on his system b) peers still trying to connect even though the limewire is gone. I've used it under windows without problems, you should only see a limewire.exe and some javaw.exe. I doubt you have much to worry about in linux, as spyware there is extremely rare if it even exists.

Edit: Oh and as for a link as proof www.limewire.com

aaa, thanx.

How does everyone else do their p2p? What do you use and
what precautions do you take? (Obviously not running any
downloaded files, and keeping the share dirs low in the tree).

If anyone suggests torrent, I never had any luck with it. I used it
but it just sat there at a max of 7Kb/s.

I know on cable modems your upload bandwith is limited, and that
torrent penalizes for this, but come on, 7Kb/s?

Well, maybe I had something misconfigured, then starting using lime,
and everything worked great so I really didn't consider torrent anymore.
Does anyone use torrent to successfully get music/movies on
a regular basis?

Most likely, the low speeds you are getting is because your firewall is blocking torrent. Try fowarding ports from the rage 6881-6889 to the machine running torrent.

I use basically two p2p: aMule and Torrent. They are pretty good. Been using Limewire for a while, liked it a lot (nice piece of Java software, I must add), but the search results were, sometimes, odd for me. I rarely could get a movie downloaded either for the lack of sources :\.

aMule is good, it has everything I've ever searched, including the most odd of the anime's. The drawback is: can be really slow and a lot of things are in French, German or Spanish. And the funny is, comments are usually in Italian, wtf? I have nothing against that, but at least they should put the name of the file so we know what we are downloading something like: Ah! My Goddess 1x01 - SPANISH and comments as "Good, english subs". I think everybody can make such comments in English, can't we? \end rant

Regards!

For me bittorrent needs some time to get up to speed, at first it is very slow for up to half an hour, then it speeds up.

Megaman X, that was a really fun game (on a related note, if anyone
out there hasn't discovered the joy of nes and snes emulators, then
you really don't know what you're missing).

A p2p that's good for searching anime? I'll definitely be checking that out.

Btw, regarding my previous suggestion, you can't run lime chrooted (unless
of course you want to install java down there with lime specifically for the
purpose of lime, which is sort of dumb and a poor use of disk space).

Damn VM langs, making me prove myself wrong.

Does anyone use p2p from a live cd? (The theory being that the only files
getting to your hd will be the ones you explicitly put there) Of course you'd
have to make a custom disc and you'd have to reburn if you changed your
p2p prefs, but all in a day's work, right?

I lime & torrent according to need.
I use azureus and have had torrents up to my 2 mbps max. In lime I've had similar speeds aggregated across several downloads.

Both seem very good.

I REALLY like Lime's preview feature as it saves me wasted time downloading some fool's porn labelled as something else....why do people do that?

and it really annoys me when I have to download some fool's something else labelled as porn

Everyone thanx for your input.

So is the consensus at this point that lime truly is free of
spyware and adware? That's what it looks like since no
one has said otherwise. If I'm wrong, please let me know.

Megaman X, all the packet filter/forward, and NAT stuff is
something I've been wanting to do for a while, but so far I
have not had the time to sit down and play with it. Thanks
for the port nums, if I ever read up on iptables and nat,
I'll try it out.

Hell, if lime DOES have spyware, who says you have to use limewire to use gnutella? gtk-gnutella is da bomb app for linux (and I guess windows with gtk installed) so use that. I found that it's a really slim program and does a good job. http://www.gnutelliums.com/linux_unix/

@ shakezilla:

No problems mate! I hope you get faster speeds with torrent after fixing the ports ^_^.

Very cool to see another emulator fan around. Not getting too of topic, but I've a few tips for emus and Linux right here. Emulators are basically what made me go into PC's, because I always preferred to game on consoles.

Now, getting back on topic, I also don't think Limewire has spyware either. It could be running multiples process/threads that weren't killed even after it got uninstalled though. And TomalakBORG is quite right, gtk-gnutella is pretty neat ^_^.

Regards!

Limewire doesn't bundle spyware although they did once upon a time.

Personally I use aMule, an eDonkey client and Azureus, a Bittorrent client. You'll find that there is much more available on the eDonkey network than on the Gnutella network (what Limewire connects to).
aMule isn't UPnP compatible like Azureus & Limewire so you'll have to setup the ports in you firewall manually.

Good call, amule provides more files than gtk-gnutella - must be a better network. -Bill

I think Limewire did bundle that stuff in the past but not anymore. Anyway its been open-sourced since then which is almost a guarantee that it doesn't do anything like that.

I use Limewire and Bittorrent for P2P on my Linux box and both work fine (and no spyware or other BS).

cool everyone, thanks for your replies.

I'll be trying out lime on linux and probably the others mentioned as well. I will
look for anything suspicious and post it if I see anything.