Limewire

Limewire, in my opinion, can qualify as a single good enough reason for having internet connectivity. I have friends who have assiduously developed a database of their beloved music running into several gigabytes by making use of Limewire.

Music, text docs, animation, videos, films… and not just run of the mill stuff. I have personally found and downloaded some very cool Sinatra, Dean Martin, Rosemary Clooney classics plus so many all-time great music scores. Limewire is based on the eminently secular and socialist concept of peer-to-peer sharing (P2P). So, if you have a file being searched for on Limewire by some guy in some corner of the world he can access your PC and download it. Of course the dangers in this are self-evident as your PC can easily get infected by malware but these are outweighed by the lure of free music and downloading the latest films.

Till so far, Limewire has been luckier than other P2P file sharing programs like Kazaa in that it has escaped heavy lawsuits. For most of us, the free version of Limewire is good enough. Type in a search term and throws up enough results for you to select from; the only issues being those of your machine’s security (big issue) and slow download speeds. Limewire was the first to offer firewall-to-firewall file transfers and for some time now it has been offering BitTorrent support as well.