The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect
end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other
resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the
systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive
potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to
ordinary users.While this book is mostly about the technical promise of
peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise.
Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they
have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network
newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these
media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings,
structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If
tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each
person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the
possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer
technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of
people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical,
you name it.This book presents the goals that drive the developers of
the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the
technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of
peer-to-peer from leaders of the field:
Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund of target="new">Popular
Power, on a history of peer-to-peer
Clay Shirky of acceleratorgroup, on where peer-to-peer is likely
to be headed
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, on redefining the
public's perceptions
Dan Bricklin, cocreator of Visicalc, on harvesting information
from end-users
David Anderson of SETI@home, on how SETI@Home created the
world's largest computer
Jeremie Miller of Jabber, on the Internet as a collection of
conversations
Gene Kan of Gnutella and GoneSilent.com, on lessons from
Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies
Adam Langley of Freenet, on Freenet's present and upcoming
architecture
Alan Brown of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content
distribution system
Marc Waldman, Lorrie Cranor, and Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs,
on the Publius project and trust in distributed systems
Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, andDavid Molnar of
Free Haven, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed
systems
Rael Dornfest of O'Reilly Network and Dan Brickley of
ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata
Theodore Hong of Freenet, on performance
Richard Lethin of Reputation Technologies, on how reputation can
be built online
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