My fellow Cypherpunks, Ray Dillinger believes that scanning would assist oppressors as much as regular users. Joseph Ashwood agrees with this and further thinks that the Internet overhead of a scanner would be a serious problem. I still think that scanners would be effective. Here's why: Gnutella still exists, Napster doesn't! Security does not have to be bulletproof in all cases. Gnutella is a harder target than was Napster. There may be other reasons why Gnutella is alive and Napster is dead. I would think the ability to pin blame on the target might be another reason. A scan enabled Gnutella would be a much harder target than a central service provided Gnutella. The scan enabled version would be much harder to shut down due to various kinds of expenses - legal, administ- rative, politics, etc.. Not impossible to shut down - just harder, slower, and with various expenses we would like the oppressors to pick up :-) Also, with lack of centralization, it would be much harder to pin legal blame on the servers(users). - Much harder, slower, and politically expensive. This is generally a sort of economics problem for oppressors. As far as Joseph Ashwood's claim that the Internet overhead would be too much. Is his point exaggerated? Would it be possible to write low overhead scanners? I do not have the "skill set" to say. Maybe he is right, maybe not. Anybody got something definitive to say on this? Yours Truly, Gary Jeffers BEAT STATE!!! _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp