P2P File Sharing Is Never Free

Wi-Fi, P2P and copyright infringement.  Some terrifying subjects.  WIFI is a very nice convenience.  You get the internet in your house, you buy a WIFI router, put a password on the access and boom, everything that can connect to the internet can connect wherever you happen to be.  The desktop computers, the laptops with the WIFI cards, the Wii, the Xbox, the iPhone, the iPad.  Everything that you used to have to pay separate for is now covered under that one internet fee (at least while you in the range of your router).  But it’s nice.  A week ago I thought that if I had a password on my WIFI I was protected.  I did not know that there was a layer of security below that that actually protected me.  I checked my setting.  My router uses WPA, not WEP, thankfully.  So I am secure.  I did give my password to my neighbor so they could piggy back on my internet to save them a couple of bucks.  But who knows if she didn’t give that out to a friend who was staying over and that person gave it to someone else.  Sort of defeats the purpose of my security.   So as a result of this new knowledge I have changed my password, outside of that, I think I’m safe.

As far as P2P and the copyright infringement that goes along with that I’m under control on that front.  I don’t do it.  I will definitely not say that I never did but I no longer do it so I have nothing to change.  Why did I stop may be a good question?  I did not stop because my conscious told me to because I was basically stealing.  I stopped because it was a hassle.   I’m 40 years old so when I was doing the downloading it was a while ago, it was soon after Napster got busted and Kazaa and Bearshare was the popular engines.  Internet wasn’t superfast then and 128MB of RAM was high performance.  You were also lucky to have Windows 98 still and not have bought a unit with Windows ME on it too.  I would download music and movies.  Music wasn’t so bad but the quality of the songs were not always great so you’d have to re-download until you got a good one.  The movies were disgraceful.  You’d click on a movie to download and 5 hours later it would be complete.  You open the movie to watch it when you find out you just downloaded a black and white Fred Astaire movie and not the one you intended.  Very frustrating.  Wasn’t worth the time for either.  Then the virus attacks and the malware.  Kazaa told you it was installing stuff which you accepted but some of the downloads had malicious programs attached and the anti-virus could not keep up with the black hatters who did this.  So I gave up.  I didn’t want to waste the time downloading garbage and I didn’t want to waste the time fixing my computer once a week to get it moving over 10 mph again.  To conclude, I don’t use P2P and I really don’t have the intention too.  I’m too cheap to spend money at iTunes.  The reason is with the iPhone there are apps where I can listen to music that I want, and with uTube there are outlets for video entertainment.  I use Netflix for my movies.  I’m satisfied with paying what I pay for the digital entertainment I can get.

Here is a copy of my router settings.  As you can see my router uses  WPA and has a password.  The name of the router is Bubba, has nothing to do with me, my family, or anything else that a passerby could relate to me.

Having done the research on my router I was interested what the local businesses are using for theirs.  So I installed some Wardrive software on my laptop, called inSSIDer and parked my car in front of Panera bread which is in a plaza with Home Depot.  As you can see from the screenshot Panera is a totally open, free, hotspot, network.  Same as a couple of the Home Depot ones.  But outside of their open one’s Home Depot uses WPA also. 

For the purposes of our class at NCCC I’m adding something to this blog that is very interesting with the P2P.  In 2002 Kazaa was pretty much the most popular engine to get freebies.  This article explains something that most of us were not aware about.  http://www.niagaracc.suny.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=6626574&site=ehost-live.  While we all knew they installed stuff we were all so excited to get free music and other stuff we flew by the EULA (End User License Agreement) and just hit accept.  This article tells us that there was something hidden in that EULA.  We were giving permission to Kazaa and its affiliate, Brilliant Digital to not only put a shared folder on our hard drive but to use our computers resources for their benefit.  They didn’t care if your computer was connect to Time Warner or your colleges server, you gave them access to use those resources.  This could partly explain why our computers were so slow back them!  But looking at the article it seems it didn’t take long for the active community to put a stop to it, or at least slow them down.  This is just another example of how nothing in life is truly free.  If you are getting something for free there is usually a cost, it just may not be of the color green.