Limewire

[Maryna]

My Friends are using something called LimeWire to download music and videos. They call it a a P2P file sharing program. Can you explain what that means, and how safe it is to use?

[Michael25]

Limewire is a free file sharing program, which allows individual users on the Internet to make music, video and other files available for direct access by other users. Limewire also allows a user to search for desired content on other users' computers and download those files.
P2P system means Peer to Peer services,or client-server model, in which all the systems on the network are tightly coupled.

On other website, the LimeWire developers claim that "LimeWire has absolutely no spyware or adware. Zero. None. We do not bundle any other software with LimeWire." My testing has shown this to be true. I installed LimeWire on a test machine, then after using it for a few days, I did thorough scans with anti-virus and anti-spyware software. I also examined all the startup tasks, active programs, browser helper objects and other possible points of infiltration.

LimeWire gets a clean bill of health, in terms of freedom from viruses and spyware, and uninstalls cleanly if you no longer want the software on your computer.

In recent usage, peer-to-peer has come to describe applications in which users can use the Internet to exchange files with each other directly or through a mediating server.