Klingon Empire, call your home world: the peer-to-peer file swapping community has developed its own cloaking device.
It's a freeware called PeerGuardian, and its creator says it can build a personal firewall that blocks as many as four million IP addresses to where, if they're P2P snoops, they can see what's being swapped but not touch the file to see if it was copyrighted material, according to Wired.
PeerGuardian began development in 2002, and its creator all but admits that he developed the freeware as much to hit back at the Recording Industry Association of America as to serve the P2P community.
Leonard told Wired he began work on PeerGuardian after file swap service Audiogalaxy was shut down last June to avoid RIAA litigation. "I was determined to do something in revenge, but something legal," he told the magazine. "I guess PeerGuardian is the closest I've come so far."
His timing couldn't have been better: the record industry, which long enough said it wouldn't target consumers while trying to stop copyright-infringing P2Ping, got its opening to do just that when a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that file-swap services can't be held liable for copyright infringing that happens through their systems. And, last week, reports came forth indicating five major record labels back testing of programs that all but hack computers to zap MP3 music files right off the hard drives.
