Bearshare Shut Down by RIAA
Pichu0102 writes "According to WebProNews, Bearshare has been shut down by the RIAA." From the article: " Online file-sharing service BearShare, along with operators Free Peers Inc., is packing it up due to a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. The conditions of the settlement were agreed to by the P2P company to avoid further copyright infringement litigation."
If you do some lookups on the IPs and corresponding owners of some of the most popular eMule servers (Untouchable 2.0, for instance), you'll see that they're owned by anti-piracy firms. They are most likely logging and building evidence for further litigation by the RIAA.
I imagine they see it as being more worthwhile to their cause to moniter these networks and sue users than shut them down and risk a more secure/anonymous service replacing them.
Be very careful what servers you allow your client to connect to; always doublecheck who owns them and their corresponding nameservers.