RIP - LimeWire

Born : 29 May 2000

Died : 27 October 2010

. It is with a heavy heart and a not-so-heavy yawn that we bid adieu to LimeWire today. A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against the file-sharing network, the results of a 4-year (!) trial. LimeWire now joins entities such as Grokster, Napster, SuprNova, Pirate Bay, and MiniNova in that great P2P Neighborhood in the sky. You can read the Daily Telegraph's article on it here. . The article's claim of "50 million users per month" seems overblown to me. LimeWire was my first experience with P2P, but that was a long time ago. It wasn't too long before the site became so infested with viruses that only a naive 12-year-old or a master hacker would risk downloading anything from it. I am neither. . I also could never quite get past the sneaking suspicion that the site was actually a proxy spy-site for the RIAA. I mean really, guys. Why would you develop a feature that forced you to show your whole music library to anyone and everyone? Could things get any more convenient for the brownshirt thugs from the RIAA when they came a-trolling? . So while we're minorly bummed that another file-swapping site has been squashed, I was frankly surprised that it was still even around. Vaya con Dios, LimeWire. Sadly, I barely remember you.