limewire/bearshare...how bad is it?

[97tbird]

I've never used Limewire/ Bearshare or any other file exchange stuff...But I've become curious of late: How bad/dangerous are those things if you just download music? With Norton, Adaware, Spybot and Spywareblaster on my laptop with regular win update (xp pro), router firewall, windows firewall, is it too dangerous to try or shall I give it a try?

any experiences/users?
Thanks.

 

[Virtuoso]

The only danger is downloading stuff with virii. Limewire/Bearshare itself won't harm ya.
Been using it for years with no ill effects.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Personally, I've been using bit torrent stuff for years with freely available anti-virus / anti-spyware apps. Never had any problems with music files. Now, applications downloaded that way are another story...

 

[CivicFan]

Do people still get caught by the record companies and get sued if one downloads music files through these services?

 

[blupupher]

they mainly go after those that upload it (have it in shared folders) not those that download, but not always.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

If you want viruses & spyware, use it.

 

[NJC]

Bearshare installed a lot of extra crud on my Dad's PC and I wouldn't recommend it. But I've been using Limewire and it is excellent. No problems with viruses or spyware although I'm sure it's possible.

 

[JustinH]

Most of the non music files will have virus/trojans.

Its fine for downloading music besides the fake titles that you get sometimes.

 

[CivicFan]

I installed limewire and downloaded an mp3 file. It worked OK.

 

[Drew99GT]

The actual Limewire program itself is totally and completely spyware free but you can end up downloading bad stuff by accident. That's why you scan everything that you download, or use powershadow when you use Limewire, scan and check in shadwoed mode, then move safe downloads to another drive and transfer them back to your main partition. I've downloaded TONS and TONS of stuff with Limewire, never been infected. Never even seen a virus or spyware on the network.

 

[ikeepmychevytoo]

Fake results are very easy to detect with common sense. Mouse over should give bitrate and a reasonable lenght in those yellow boxes. A 197kb of mp3 file with the exact search phrase you entered from 99 hosts is 100% malware.

I found some impossible to find obselete recordings this way. Sharing is great.