quote:
Originally posted by likurtgerty
but is there something that will tell me when it does go through p2p and it is possible to know who downloaded it?
This has nothing to do with somebody "stealing" the DP.
You could do that but what is the point?
Also, you can never conclude
"person X has downloaded it". All you could conclude, at best, is that
something related to person X has downloaded it. Because as I said before, there are many many occasions where person X doesn't even realize that his client program downloaded or syncronized your DP, be it Messenger or whatever other program which uses display pictures connected to Windows Live. Remember that Messenger is just one of the many programs and online services which use the display picture (and other info for that matter). Messenger, and everything you use in there like DP, scenes, etc is not just a standalone, isolated program anymore, it is part of a big suite where all this stuff is shared between it. And those services and programs will only grow larger in the future (eg: connection between the Windows Live platform and Facebook, Twitter, etc etc)... And because of that most stuff will be syncronized via servers, not via p2p.
So, yes, you could make a script or whatever which might* detect that someone on your Messenger contactlist has the same DP as you. But that would only be a fraction of the potential duplication which might have occured. Not to mention the copies of copies which you have in no way control of or that you in no way can detect. And, also as said before, you can never know if the 'download' was intentional or if it was because a client application syncronized all the DPs on the list (usually it is the latter anyways).
So, again, what is the point? If you want to prevent people from intentionally duplicating your DP, then make the DP very personal to you (so it makes no sense that they copy it) or don't share a DP at all...
* I said "might" because in some cases your DP is saved in a different format or resaved as a JPG making the picture look the same but byte by byte it is not the same (especially true when people intentionally copy a DP; making the whole detection scheme even more useless). You must use intelligent algorithms to compare two photos to be able to detect such similar (but not exactly the same) photos.
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