CERN Accelerating science

Over the past year or so there have been developed a number of programs for peer-to-peer communications across the Internet. The first, perhaps best known, of these was Napster, which was used across the world to exchange MP3 (music) files. Other programs developed since then have offered file sharing for more general types of files. A non-exhaustive list of these programs would be : Napster, Aimster, Gnutella, Morpheus, KaZaA, Edonkey2000, Napigator, Limewire, Bearshare, WinMX, etc.

These programs can be used for professional purposes. However, their usage in the general world tends to be for retrieving and sharing audio (MP3) and video files and pirate versions of commercial software. Such use raises issues of legality, and in particular copyright.

As for any software down-loaded from the Internet, these programs can introduce security risks such as viruses, Trojan horses and back-doors. In addition, these programs may contain "spyware" which can violate confidentiality. Spyware programs collect information about the user and usage of the computer (email addresses, types of Web sites visited and so on). They may also cause extra network traffic by regularly popping up browser windows to particular network sites.

Private use of peer-to-peer programs creates an unacceptable security risk for the CERN site. If they are required for professional use then please contact computer.security@cern.ch in advance so we can collaborate to secure them.

Users of any computers sited at CERN are reminded that their usage is always subject to the rules given in http://cern.ch/ComputingRules.