Mp3 faq - Is Napster safe to use

Is Napster safe to use?

Well that's certainly the *theory*. But how sure can anyone be sure that it's totally true? Certainly programs running on your computer *can* allow outside parties to do all sorts of things on your machine via a web connection... look at the Back Orifice software, for example, which worked exactly this way. So it's basically a question of whether you completely trust Napster:

a) not to have sneakily included any functionality into their software beyond that declared, and

b) not to have inadvertently left the potential in their software for exploitation by cunning hackers for functions beyond those intended.

Call me paranoid, but that's stretching the limits of my trust, so I haven't given Napster a try yet. When you run Napster, you *are* allowing file access tasks on your computer to be initiated by a third party through your web connection... and you have to *trust* that those file access activities *cannot* exceed read-only access to the files and directories you have specified.

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