I had to laugh at the responses some of them are just cute. Cute as in japanese cute but Im deviating from my point.
On the NAT subject, NAT is just a way to solve the problem of sharing an internet conection with many people on the same IP address, simple as that, it also provides protection against hackers cos of port numbers etc etc but thats another story.
But yes, once a hacker has managed to bypass what you have you are screwed, your job is to make it as hard as possible for them to gain access, the more time and effort they have to use to get into your machine the more chance they will just give up, there is no "fun" in spending 4 hours (example) breaking into some joe nobody's pc just to stare at their porn collection
As for protection via p2p goes, i just laugh at the stupidity of some people. not using p2p, hahah i cant believe the comments of some people, those comments in themselves show lack of knowlage of the internet and pc's, im amased they manged to get their post count so high.
If ur gonna use p2p great , ur perfectly safe as long as you know what you are downloading. If you dont then thats where you get "stung". EG using kazaa or something and search for britanny spears naked or something along those lines, and instead of selecting the media type you just search under everything, and then u get these 23kb files that pose at pictures but are viruses.
Thats y viruses propagate, people blindly clicking on anything they can get their hands on, and not running ANY AV. which in itself is a must along with a firewall , software and hardware.
I think what rocket was referring to with norton is its personal ID blocking feature and program launcher blocker, these features are very usefull, I use it, i Know exactly what it does, i know how to use it
as
THIS states
Quote:
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"Forty-five percent of the executable files downloaded through Kazaa"
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note exevutable files, not mp3 or pictures, apart from that flaw in jpeg which was fixed not long ago, downloading exe files bat , scr's etc etc is a no no,
from
THIS
Quote:
Hughes used such keywords as "Britney Spears," "Microsoft XP," "nude" and "porn" to choose the files he downloaded on Kazaa, focusing on some of the common files that users might share and the most popular keywords placed in search engines. He looked only at executable files -- program files that launch when a user double-clicks them, and that usually end with .exe extensions in the file name. These are the types of files that most often contain malicious code.
He said a lot of the malicious code he found was embedded in program files that are designed to bypass or break copyright protections placed on software files like Microsoft Office to allow users to share pirated copies of the software.
So far, however, music, picture and movie files have not been infected with malicious code, because they aren't executables, Hughes said. Users can't run them simply by clicking on them. People need to open them through another program, such as a multimedia program like Real Player.
Hughes said an attacker could trick a user into thinking a malicious file is a music or movie file by giving the file name a double extension such as .wav.exe (for music) or .jpg.exe (for images). If users don't know .exe indicates an executable file, they would click on it and launch the malicious program.
Hughes said it is also possible that someone will eventually find a way to infect movie and music files with malicious executable code, although it hasn't been done yet.
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Though...
that site was just plain BS , wrote to scare and put people off from using p2p software. yes there can be spyware, which is highly bloated atm, with kazaa etc you are told what is installed on your machine, the bigger problem with spyware are the cookies and the embedded code into sites that does stuff to your machine that you dont know about, at least with kazaa etc you are told whats going on to an extent , i just wont go into that debate atm, yes it does have some good points, but anyone who knows their worth of pc's can easily avoid these things
Not suprised it was endorced by the RIAA
having p2p software on your pc is NOT , i repeat NOT illegal. its what you use the software to do IS. like using a vcr to record a program on tv to watch at a later date is not illegal, using it to copy a video IS.
screw those people who try to scare you into not downloading, if ur not downloading or uploading millions of files then they wont do anything, they cant possible prosocute everyone like that, there is a back log of cases going 3 years back yet to be resolved in the courts for the minor offences of sharing one file.
as far as i know it there a very few ways to force a P2P software to download something you dont want,
So to recap
P2P good, just be carefull
NAT , simple way to share an internet connection with many users
RIAA sucks
Norton/panda/AVG good stuff, a must have
Norton/ZoneAlarm/Sygate etc good to have
AND dont forget, USE YOUR BRAINS, if a file looks suspicious it probably is and you shouldnt download it
--- Xanex