David Van Couvering 's Blog

P2P a major force in Internet Traffic

This blog in the Long Tail shows an impressive trend of P2P traffic, where it is growing in leaps and bounds and in 2004 was 60% of all Internet traffice, with BitTorrent in the lead at 30% of this traffic (in 2005 eDonkey has taken over as the leader).

During the World Cup, I tried to use Azureus to do a BitTorrent download of a game I missed. I was stunned at how I had to leave my computer naked to the world - turn off firewalls, open up ports. I actually was never able to get it to work, but I also was turned off from P2P because of the security risks involved.

Am I missing something, or are folks doing P2P file sharing (all legal, of course) willing to bare themselves to all the insidious trojan horses and worms constantly seeking unprotected computers on the Internet?

Comments

• Turn off firewalls? Just allow the specific program to use the specific port. What firewall are you using? Usually it's very simple to configure.

  Posted by: kirillcool on December 07, 2006 at 04:52 PM

• The threats you risk using p2p is enormous. For example, if you use Ares regular you are most definetely going to get at least one virus everyday, at least that has been my experience.

  Then again, with good antivirus technology on one hand and common sense on the other its been a great experience using p2p for me.

  Posted by: carter on December 08, 2006 at 05:25 AM

• 
  kirillcool: I have a Linksys router, and I tried enabling various ports, none of which worked. I feel like I'm missing something pretty basic. But to be honest, I don't have the time nor motivation to grab movies or music (two kids, one infant). last.fm is quite good enough for me.

  Also, carter seems to be agreeing with me that you're asking for trouble. BTW, it's not viruses I'm worried about, it's trojan horses and worms, parasites that use my computer as a host. I have yet to be convinced this is safe, or at least the value P2P brings for me does not appear to be worth the risk...
  

  Posted by: davidvc on December 08, 2006 at 09:36 AM

• I have Sygate personal firewall (that was since acquired by Symantec, so they are no longer free), and it is quite good. It pops up a window every time a new program tries to contact outside world or is contacted from outside. You can then choose to Allow always, Allow one-time, Disallow always and Disallow one-time. When you install a new version of software (such as Firefox upgrade), it detects this and pops up a relevant dialog. Combined with AVG anti virus, Adaware and Spybot (all four are free), the only time a had a virus was when my wife opened a mail attachment from her friend which got infected :) The only definite risk you are exposed to is downloading a file that turns out to be a virus itself (masked under a different filename).

  Posted by: kirillcool on December 09, 2006 at 11:04 PM

• 
  Here's one that I thought up. If a guy really wanted to infest machines, he would create a program called "Super Duper PC Cleaner Purifier Delux". He would ask the user to download, install it and give it permission to browse all his directories and files. He would ask the user to let it stay resident and monitor all his usage and traffic. Meanwhile it would steal all his private information and forward it to some boiler room in Minsk.

  Posted by: jbailo on January 03, 2008 at 03:10 PM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.