Peer to Peer Sharing Software: Whats the Safest and The Best

[vsp]

I tend to believe that there is no such thing as a truly "safe" P2P program. If you're sending packets, _someone_ can find you. The trick is that it usually takes either legal threats or truly egregious behavior on your part for someone to spend the effort necessary to hunt you down, much less for your ISP to feel the need to cut you off.

That said, the primary targets of the Copyright Police are generally the most popular programs at that given time. Hence, I avoid Kazaa and Kazaa Lite, as that seems to be the RIAA's preferred whipping boy these days.

If I'm searching for music, I use SoulSeek. It started out as a Napster clone for European techno/electronica, but now music of all sorts pops up there, and the smaller userbase often means faster download speeds.

WinMX is a second choice, though anything popular there is generally queued beyond recognition.

eDonkey is useful for specific servers that whitelist files, such as the Digital Archive Project, but not necessarily so good if you don't know where to look for what you're looking for.

If I'm digging out files, such as old game ISOs, eMule is slow but steady.

If you can find a BitTorrent group that has what you're looking for, that's often your best bet, though keep in mind that you're leaving your IP wide open via that protocol. As such, try to avoid Suprnova (the biggest BitTorrent dumping grounds around), as it's well known that the MPAA and such are watching it.