No surprise here. As the Recording Industry Association of America steps up its campaign against individual music downloaders by tracking who downloads what and then sending them warning letters - a plethora of new tools are appearing online which help users hide their identity while they download and which can spot those fake MP3s that record labels are sneaking online.
One peer-to-peer news site, Zeropaid, is now providing lists of net addresses known to be used by the music industry to provide fake MP3s and track who is making music available via peer to peer systems. Technology can then be used that stop industry agents operating from those addresses from accessing your MP3s or, more crucially, your identity. Others are using the Kazaa Lite programme which lets you restict who can share music with your computer, thus allowing downloaders to bar industry spies from inspecting their hard disks.
As with the Napster debackle, it might just prove that the industry's legal attempts to block downloading sends the peer-to-peer systems even further underground - file sharing will continue we just won't know where or by whom!