It's actually quite funny...

Sharing a hard drive with p2p... Well maybe with Kazaa, but blimee, you have to jump through hoops with Bittorrent... I loose patience after just sharing a couple of files!

All the way through their scare tactics I was thinking, odd, no mention of the tools to protect yourself from a nasty evil virus posing as Britney's latest hit... A few urls like
http://free.grisoft.com
And
http://www.safer-networking.org
Wouldn't have gone amis...
Curiously there was no mention of the safepeer plug in for Azureus, or peerguardian... Odd that. They could save daddy from Mr Big in the showers.


Among my favourite clearly-untrue gems:

'P2P software opens “doors” in your computer which may compromise privacy and security. It is possible to inadvertently share private and confidential details including financial information with other
file-sharers.'

'...each hard drive is accessible by all other users of the P2P network at that moment.'

'File-swappers...can also be at risk of leaks of personal details possibly resulting in identity theft.'



There's also something odd about encouraging teaching staff to shill for the BPI (et al) and discuss copyright law in the classroom. Especially in such a dishonest way.

I rang childnet today about this. The leaflet is sponsored by the music industry and is directly targeted at kids and teachers to protect the revenue stream of the music industry, under the guise of "informing children about the dangers of the internet". The only reason we have such cheap low cost music, is because its so easy to copy now, that they can't demand absurd prices, because people will copy it instead.

When I asked them why they felt that they had to advise school kids on civil issues in this manner they had no recourse other than the fact they were paid to do it.

I said it was a job of the parent not them or the schools, and why was the music industry allow special favours to promote themselves? - They paid for the priviledge and Childnet is a charity.

So it seems you can get free propaganda advertising to the most vulnerable and impressionable people in our society, by flinging money at struggling charities and bribing them to do your dirty work, or so it would seem.

I read the leaflet, its very carefully worded to scare and seem plausible at the same time.

I rang the school my kids go to and instructed the school that they must not give this leaflet to my kids, and my kids are not to participate in any school "education" classes based on information in this leaflet.

Simply put, its misleading propaganda (we call it FUD in the it industry I believe) and I want my kids to have no part of it.

Its scare-ware for the music industry. 

Most importantly why are schools advising children on civil and economic matters of this nature.

Very very wrong indeed.


The leaflet states "Some P2P programmes come with extra software, called “spyware”.
This may report which websites you visit to marketing companies, or
even record your passwords and send them to fraudsters."

Just the same as BT and Phorm then

If that comes to my school!!

We will fight them on the beaches....