People who engage in illegal activities using the file sharing capabilities of BitTorrent could one day face prosecution because of a technology being developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Raymond Borges of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate is creating software tools to monitor BitTorrent traffic and find producers of illicit material such as child pornography. While law enforcement agencies have tools to monitor abusers who use software like Gnutella to download this material, the real goal is to find the producers. BitTorrent, which was designed for deception, poses a significant challenge, said Borges, because its users usually go undetected.
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