Basically what Kazaa is doing is allocationg the extra resources of all of it's User's PC's. It could potentially use this to make money for themselves. (That's the upside) The downside (as if your PC being used for other people's designs wasn't bad enough) is that if Someone were to hack the Network (Remember, your PC is already exposed and can be used by this network for any purpose) the Hacker(s) would effectively control hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of PC's for whatever purposes they desire. It's a huge security risk, and not just for a single user, that many PC's could be used for Brute force hacking (Constant bombardment of random usernames and passwords attempting to gain access to pay sites/info), denial of service attacks on massive scales, and tons of other things (In addition to stealing people's personal information) (Btw, this is just the tip of the iceberg, far worse can be done with this level of processing power...)
Anyway, it's a bad thing as a whole.
Get a nice Newsgroup program, it works just as well as any of the others (Except not everything is always available.)
Another great option is to subscribe to a service like Easynews (www.easynews.com) It's 9.99/month.
back orrifice are the only two words that will come to my mind if they use my computers space, they have no right, i can sue them for it, or take the risk and give them a trojan !
Well, even if you have a firewall, what this does is open a port adress on your PC so that whatever is that they want to do, it will allow them access. (Much the same way that allows them to download MP3's off your PC)
Firewalls are nice, but not foolproof.
