One important thing with RetroShare: Don't add random strangers that you don't trust.
Once you have someone as your "friend", random traffic will go between you and him (the network works as sort of p2p). If that "friend" is actually some government agent/copyright enforcer, you can then have troubles with illegal sharing of files, even when you didn't share them yourself.
This is not theoretical, this actually happened in... Germany or France, I am not sure. Probably France.
Quote from the post:
the IP's of the sued user "rechner3" was from an IP Range from the lawyers (Rasch Legal).
The e-mail of the user "rechner3" was "pm.hh.04@gmail" it is possible that pm stands for the anti Piracy Company "ProMedia"
hh == "Hansestadt Hamburg".
and other indications that lead to the lawyer company and anti-piracy company.
The maximum value of discussion was 10k. If a lawsuit had been started, this value would have been cut down.
There was never a lawsuit to discuss the case and start a prove collection or discussion.
There is only a contract with rechner3 and the anti-piracy company, where rechner3 committed to not use RetroShare again.
rechner3 was never seen afterwards.
It looks like, this was a "forged" case to be present in the media with a high value sentence.
Does it imply that any random (p2p and/or encrypted) traffic between two hosts or users makes them suspicious of illegal file sharing activities ?
What about protocols and implementations such as bitmessage then (p2p network, hosts and nodes share everyone's messages, only intended recipients can decipher messages that are sent to them)? Is there a tacit understanding that encrypting any communication is suspicious ?
Once you have someone as your "friend", random traffic will go between you and him (the network works as sort of p2p). If that "friend" is actually some government agent/copyright enforcer, you can then have troubles with illegal sharing of files, even when you didn't share them yourself.
This is not theoretical, this actually happened in... Germany or France, I am not sure. Probably France.