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Canadian Computer Consulting
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File sharing programs, commonly known as p2p systems, almost always either a) cost money or b) are loaded with spyware/adware programs. The ones that are free (such as Kazaa, Gnutella, Napster, Morpheus, Limewire, Grokster, eDonkey, iMesh, BitTorrent, etc.) are often loaded with spyware, and the ones that cost money are usually just modified versions of the free ones where you pay money to have the spyware removed. This does not make them any more legal/moral, it just means they won't infect your computer with loads of junk software. Note that not all of them do have spyware, in fact the current version of Limewire I know to be spyware-free, but many of them do. While file sharing is indisputably illegal in the United States, here in Canada the courts are still debating the issue. Currently, to the best of my knowledge (and you can't quote me on this), while perhaps not moral, they are legal. As far as I know, this means that you can download music or movies from any artist you like and you cannot be prosecuted or sued for it. At least not in Canada. What is illegal in Canada is allowing people to download files FROM your computer. If I'm wrong about any of this, and you can send me case law or newspaper articles that show it, please do! Many people, however, feel that it is morally wrong to download music from artists without paying for it. For those people, iTunes has solved the problem. For about $1 a song you can purchase all the music you like without feeling guilty. Some of the proceeds (I cynically believe it's about $0.001 per song) goes to the artist. They even offer discounts if you purchase the whole album. How does iTunes work? Well, you browse their database, find a song you like, and you can usually listen to a preview of it. Then you click on the "Purchase" button, and your credit card is billed. The song can then be played on up to 5 computers at a time -- all you have to do is enter your iTunes username (email address) and password to play the song. It's really simple, and it works very well. And you're guaranteed a good quality version of the song. For the more adventurous and slightly less moral people out there, there ARE good file-sharing programs out there that are available for free and that have no spyware or adware. Unfortunately, most of the companies that product these programs have been sued out of business by the music industry. At the risk of being asked to remove it (or worse), I am providing a link to Kazaa Lite, also known as K++, Kazaa Gold, and Diet Kazaa. This is the last version of Kazaa Lite that was available for free before it was removed from the internet. This is the program that I use, and I can assure you that this program works and is completely free, and that it contains no spyware at all. For the moment, you can download the program from here: www.ComputerConsulting.ca/kazaa.exe The first problem with this program is that it sometimes takes a matter of hours to connect the first time you run it. After the first time you should have no problems connecting, but the databases are a little out of date so be patient at first while they're updated. The second, and biggest, problem with Kazaa, and most other free file-sharing programs, is that there are more "junk songs" than there are real songs. It seems that the music recording industry is attempting to put the file-sharing industry out of business by distributing millions of songs that seem real, but are really nothing but static. If you're only looking for older, less popular, songs you may not experience this problem at all. But if you're looking for Top 40 type stuff, you're going to have major difficulties. The best way to get around the "junk song" phenomenon is to look up in a music database, such as www.cdnow.com, and find the correct length for the song. Also, you should check the "bit rate" and find songs that are listed as 128. Most songs, recorded at 128 bit, are a little under 1MB per minute of music, so check the file size before downloading! Another tip is to avoid downloading overly popular versions of a song; what I mean by that is to look and see how many people you can download it from. Look for a version of the song that 5 (or less) people have and download that one. Even so, if you're download really popular stuff, you're likely to get 50-70% junk. If you do download a junk song, please help everyone else out by deleting it as soon as possible! On the flip side of the coin, if you're one of the people that STRONGLY feels that file sharing is wrong, then the music industry has kindly provided software so that you too can help to screw up the file sharing industry. It allows you to enter the name of your favourite artist, and the name of some of their songs, and to create fake versions of these songs that are the correct length, etc, but contain nothing but static. If you're one of those millions of people out there who installed Kazaa already and are now realizing you have spyware problems, removing Kazaa will NOT fix the problem. Removing Kazaa will leave the spyware it installed on your computer. Visit my spyware page for more information. |
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Vancouver: 604-249-4486 Victoria: 250-412-1593
Edmonton: 780-701-7167
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