ShareSniffer claims to be an alternative person-to-person service like Napster, but strikes me as a parody designed to embarrass Microsoft over the way MS deals with security issues in Windows.
Specifically, a lot of people who have set up home networks have turned file sharing on so they could share files and peripherals over their home LANs. In the process, however, a lot of them have also configured file sharing so that it shares part or all of their hard drives with the Internet. Anyone who knows the correct IP address can access such hard drives as if they were sitting at the computer.
Now Microsoft certainly has a bunch of excuses — essentially blame the users who are misconfiguring file sharing to pointing out that this wasn’t much of an issue until recently because few people had home LANs and even fewer had high speed connections.
The bottom line, however, is that the option to share files over the Internet should not be built into a consumer-level operating system the way Microsoft has done. It shouldn’t even be an issue because it should be something that the average user can’t accidentally do (the irony here, of course, is that while it is often extremely difficult to configure Windows in ways that would be helpful to the average user, it is relatively easy for users to do something almost nobody intentionally wants to do such as placing the contents of their hard drive on the Internet for anyone to come along and access).
And it’s not long the ShareSniffer folks are the first people to realize users are making this mistake. This is a longstanding problem that Microsoft has done nothing to deal with. The obvious way to deal with this would be to take out the option to share the HD over the Internet and put that option in a separate program under the accessories area that explains in detail exactly what enabling the feature will do before users set this option. A few people will still make the mistake of installing it, but nothing like the large number of people who today set it inadvertently while trying to figure out how to make a network function properly under Windows (which is a pain in the neck unless you have a dedicated IT staff, which most home users don’t).