eDonkey on top

File-sharing fans at your house are more likely to be using eDonkey than Kazaa now, at least according to the latest calculations by California-based BayTSP, which monitors P2P activity for the media industry. BitTorrent's right up there too, ZDNet UK reports, while Kazaa's lead has been slipping for over a year. BitTorrent and eDonkey are file-sharing's third generation, after Napster and then Kazaa. Your kids will probably tell you which service they're using to download tunes, if they are at all, and ideally you'll go into the software together to see how it's configured to protect the other files on the family computer. If not, some monitoring software - e.g., Spector Pro, Guardian Monitor, and Media Fence - detects file-sharing activity and identifies the P2P programs being used on your PC. As for the risks involved (privacy, PC security, porn, legal, etc.), see "File-sharing realities for families" in my 5/28/04 issue.