Criticism
On February 15, 2010, LimeWire reversed its previous anti-bundling stance and announced the inclusion of an Ask.com-powered browser toolbar which must be explicitly opted-out to prevent installation. The toolbar sends web and bittorrent searches to Ask.com, and LimeWire searches to an instance of LimeWire on the user's machine.
In LimeWire versions before 5.0, users could accidentally configure the software to allow access to any file on their computer, including documents with personal information. Recent versions of LimeWire do not allow unintentional sharing of documents or applications. In 2005, the US Federal Trade Commission issued a consumer warning regarding the dangers of using peer-to-peer file sharing networks, stating that using such networks can lead to identity theft and lawsuits. On May 5, 2009, a P2P industry spokesman represented Lime Wire and others at a U.S. House of Representatives legislative hearing on H.R. 1319, "The Informed P2P User Act."
One investigation showed that of 123 randomly selected downloaded files, 37 contained malware – about 30%. In mid 2008, a Macintosh trojan exploiting a vulnerability involving Apple Remote Desktop was distributed via LimeWire affecting users of Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. The ability to distribute such malware and viruses has also been reduced in versions of LimeWire 5.0 and greater, with the program defaulting to not share or search for executable files.
Prior to April 2004, the free version of LimeWire was distributed with a bundled program called LimeShop (a variant of TopMoxie), which was spyware. Among other things, LimeShop monitored online purchases in order to redirect sales commissions to Lime Wire LLC. Uninstallation of LimeWire would not remove LimeShop. With the removal of all bundled software in LimeWire 3.9.4 (released on April 20, 2004), these objections were addressed. LimeWire currently has a facility that allows its server to contact a running LimeWire client and gather various information.
An identity theft scheme involving LimeWire was discovered in Denver in 2006. On September 7, 2007, Gregory Thomas Kopiloff of Seattle was arrested in what the U.S. Justice Department described as its first case against someone accused of using file sharing computer programs to commit identity theft. According to federal prosecutors, Kopiloff used LimeWire to search other people's computers for inadvertently shared financial information and then used it to obtain credit cards for an online shopping spree.
LimeWire automatically receives a cryptographically signed file, called simpp.xml, containing an IP block list. Blocking certain IPs has become commonplace and even considered essential in P2P filesharing.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)