Monthly Archives: December 2011

Often when people hear the term “peer-to-peer file sharing”, they think of torrents, illegal swapping of the latest movies and music, and resulting lawsuits by the record or movie industries for piracy.  That does happen; however, file sharing encompasses much more than ripping off the latest hits. Peer-to-Peer, or P2P, is the most widely used form of file sharing. It has become a big and growing part of the Internet, already accounting for 50-70% of consumer network traffic, with millions of P2P clients downloaded and in use.  In 2004, an estimated 70 million people were busily sharing files, and doubtless many more now. But P2P is not the only means to share files over the Net. It should not be confused with file hosting, which uses the more familiar client-server architecture of the Internet to stream files to users from big, centralized Web servers. In its purest form, Peer-to-Peer is strictly that: users’ computers directly linked across the Net to their peers; that is, other users’ computers.  They join in a network of equals, each machine devoting some fraction of its computing power, bandwidth, and memory to the network, ideally without any need for a central coordinator. In fact, P2P works pretty much the way the Web was originally intended to function. Collaborative computing Civilization is the story of how ever-larger tasks can be done, and done much more efficiently, with cooperation. As a form of collaborative computing between users, … Continue reading →