26CAB40  I don't really see the point of the court case.

Is there actually any REAL content on Limewire any more ?

All I ever see is a growing list of trojan infected files with every permutation of possible name or what may turn out to be child porn.

It's odd that all successful cases against people sharing files have come from Limewire users, not bittorrent or anything else.

I and many others have suspected for some time that Limewire is now simply an IP collecting service for the RIAA.  
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26CAB40  Yep, nailed it.  
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JAKE THE SNAKE  Trolls and noobs with more time than brains.  
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SHOTGUNWEDDINGS  JAKE THE SNAKE you nailed the trolls n the head.

What losers! Must be the same scare mongering morons that created frostwire!  
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26CAB40  JAKE THE SNAKE = Paid Shill  
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ROAMING NOMAD  Your point about LimeWire's interface and its core that relies on Java being sub-par. I would have to agree with, LimeWire relying on Java and the interface are both horrible. But I doubt there is any hope of change to either because I don't foresee the developers of LimeWire spending any money to have 3 coding teams rewrite the Unix, Mac and Windows releases from scratch streamlined for each platform using faster and prettier programming language.

Your point about LimeWire having limited LEGAL uses can also be said about almost any software. It could be used for legal or illegal purposes. You can use a Hex editor to look inside files or you can use it to manipulate files to bypass the security in commercial software that requires a license. You could use data recovery or backup software to duplicate your files or you could use it to steal data from someone else's drive or duplicate copyrighted material. I use LimeWire to search for software that is no longer available from the developers or from any shareware service.

You say that LimeWire keeps damaging your drive and you are a technician. I've used LimeWire on and off for many years and this would be a first.

You have either got to be the worst technician with over a decade of inexperience or you haven't been properly trained and whomever was your instructor should be a psychic counselor instead. Any decently trained technician knows the rules of thumb with all repairs; follow through on the process of elimination , was it a single issue or multiple factors, was it software or hardware related or both, was it an isolated, a reoccurring or intermittent issues. And most importantly can the problem be reproduced if needed.

Jumping to conclusions without sound logic or fully executing the process of elimination and throughly going through the checklist are bad traits for any technician. Here is where your reasoning falls apart. Java manipulates files and folders through calls to the OS. Knowing that already lays to waste your theory and would already mean that neither Java or LimeWire would be at fault for damaged drives. That would leave other avenues to be looking at like; bad sectors, drive partition corruption, a corrupted Finder, a corrupted OS or hardware failure.

I have been fixing Mac's for 3 decades , not 1, and LimeWire has yet to ever damage any of my Mac's or client's hard drives.

I would suggest taking a closer at the hard disk's health more often and the OS it is running on. 10.3 and 10.2 were quite reliable and can run quite smoothly for years. 10.4 I found had a bad habit of corrupting itself especially after crashes and kernel panics. 10.5 runs smoothly for many months or years until a rare combination of events corrupts it too. To the point, re-installing the OS with the original installers using the archive and install option is the only method to fix the corrupted OS after it has been determined the hard disk is healthy. For 10.6 I cannot comment on considering it is too new nor have I encountered any clients brave enough to upgrade in fear of down-time and lost production. And 10.6 already has the archive and install option set automatically in case someone needs to reinstall the OS.

Good luck.  
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PRIMEWAVEZ  I know a few people who have used LimeWire without issue for years. Those folks are FAR fewer in number than the count of those I've had with nightmares due to this application.

The conclusion that I've drawn is that machines with LimeWire and severe catalog corruption do not experience recurrent symptoms after a zero out of the hard disk and cessation of the use of the LimeWire application. In the vast majority of cases (5-10 machines per week, for years) there is not a hardware malfunction that can be reproduced with any available diagnostic tool.

Sure, there are machines with LimeWire that were running the good old IBM 75GXP disks, or the MacBooks with the disks prone to failure now covered by Apple for a free replacement, even out of warranty. However, when a machine is perfectly functional after a low level wipe of the drive and running a restart loop and memtest or Apple's hardware test for days, it's usually pretty clear what the cause of the issues is.

Also, I've not seen any issues like this on the Windows version of LimeWire, though my exposure to it is significantly less than that of the Mac version. I see rare incidences of catalog issues with folks running Acquisition, and a few more with folks who run FrostWire and Vuze. LimeWire is the primary discernible culprit.

If you use LimeWire and it works for you without destroying your drive, then go for it. I will not let it touch any of my personal machines EVER, and I'll continue to fix my customers' computers by backing up the data, wiping the drive,and suggesting they do not run this application in the future.  
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PRIMEWAVEZ  I never spoke of LimeWire's interface, nor its reliance on Java as a matter of discussion or a cause of any of the problems it has. I also didn't say that it corrupted my drive, as a technician or otherwise. I'm not a fan of Java by any stretch, but I do not believe it is relevant to the conversation. Thanks for bringing up the straw men, though.

Hundreds of folks have brought me their computers looking for a resolution to their disk catalog problems, and a lot of "repair shops" take a look and simply say the hard disk is failing once they see invalid extents or keys out of order in Disk Utility. Others like you, sir, may suggest an archive/install as the solution which is exactly the WRONG thing to do, especially if the customer lacks a backup of their data. A decent Mac technician knows that disk catalog issues aren't fixed by an archive/install, since you're just writing data back to a disk that doesn't know where to store information properly. Just what someone doesn't need is a MORE corrupted operating system than they got into the situation with.

I'm not saying that disk corruption isn't caused by other things like frequent hard shutdowns, bad RAM, failing disks, or pinched data cables. Assuming a hardware failure is cavalier and profit driven. With a proper backup, zeroing out a hard disk and reinstalling an operating system takes a few hours and can be done at home with little cost to the customer. Getting a computer repaired is rarely convenient for the owner of the computer, so getting a proper diagnosis through thorough testing and isolation is key.  
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JAKE THE SNAKE  Trolls and noobs with more time than brains.  
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26CAB40  JAKE THE SNAKE = Paid Shill  
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26CAB40  Actually, the majority of high profile cases that have appeared in the press, the ones with astronomical fines, are from people caught sharing music on Limewire.

There are a very small proportion of torrent cases, NONE from private trackers and none from darknets.

To put it simply, it's easy to catch people on Limewire, harder on public torrent, almost impossible on private trackers because they cannot decode the hash files using DPI, so although they know you are using bittorrent, they don't know what the files are.  
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JAKE THE SNAKE  Trolls and noobs with more time than brains.  
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26CAB40  JAKE THE SNAKE = Paid Shill  
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