What is P2P software?

P2P is a technology, but more than that, it is an idea, with the potential to change the entire foundation of the Internet.

(1) The concept of p2p

P2P is an acronym for peer-to-peer, and peer in English has the meaning of "(status, ability, etc.) equals", "coworkers" and "partners". "partner" and other meanings. In this way, P2P can also be understood as "partner-to-partner" or peer-to-peer networking. It is now seen as promising for enhancing human communication on networks, file exchange, distributed computing, and so on.

Simply put, P2P connects people directly to each other and allows them to interact directly through the Internet. p2P makes communication on the Internet easier and more direct*** enjoyment and interaction, truly eliminating the middleman. p2P means that people can connect directly to other users' computers and exchange files, rather than connecting to servers to browse and download as they did in the past. another important feature of p2p is that it changes the way the Internet is now based on large scale, large scale, and small scale. Another important feature of P2P is to change the current state of the Internet, which is centered on large websites, to return to "decentralization" and return the power to the users. P2P seems to be very new, but just as B2C and B2B are common things in the real world transplanted to the Internet, P2P is not something new. In real life we interact and communicate face-to-face or over the phone every day according to the P2P model.

Even from a network perspective, P2P is not a new concept; P2P is the foundation of the overall architecture of the Internet. The Internet's most basic protocol, TCP/IP, doesn't have the concept of client and server; all devices are equal ends of the communication spectrum. Ten years ago, all systems on the Internet functioned as both servers and clients. Of course, the software that has evolved since then that is architected on top of TCP/IP does use a client/server structure: browsers and web servers, mail clients and mail servers. However, for servers, they are still peer-to-peer networked with each other. In the case of email, for example, there is not one giant, unique mail server on the Internet that handles all the email, but rather peer-to-peer networked mail servers that collaborate with each other to deliver the email to the appropriate server. Instead, peer-to-peer networked mail servers collaborate to deliver emails to the appropriate servers. In addition, email has always been a peer-to-peer contact channel between users. Of course, over the past 5 years, the Internet has evolved away from P2P, at least superficially, and most of the nodes on the Internet are not able to communicate directly with other nodes; Napster has awakened the peer-to-peer networking that was hidden behind the Internet, and Napster's file ****-sharing feature has made sharing directories on LANs a commonplace occurrence. But Napster's success prompted people to realize the possibility of extending this "peer-to-peer networking" to the entire Internet. Of course, in the eyes of many, Napster is not pure P2P, and it still requires a centralized coordination mechanism.

In fact, many existing services on the Web can be categorized as P2P. Instant messaging systems such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Pager, Microsoft's MSN Messenger and China's OICQ are among the most popular P2P applications. They allow users to communicate and exchange information and files with each other. The exchange of information between users is not direct and needs to be coordinated by a server located in the center. However, these systems do not have features such as search, which is very important for enjoying large amounts of information, and the lack of this feature may be one of the reasons why instant messaging has been around for a long time, but has not had the impact that Napster has had.

Another example of P2P is auction sites such as eBay. eBay's model is summarized by the term C2C, which is similar to P2P. eBay is a community that connects people to each other and trades items. eBay makes it easy for users to search for items that other users want to sell. eBay offers a number of services that make trading go smoothly, but the transactions are done directly between users. eBay provides a number of services that make trading go smoothly, but the trading is done directly between users. If you generalize the concept of "trading," C2C is a special case of P2P, where people are exchanging goods with each other.

But if you look deeper, Napster and Instant Messaging, while giving users the ability to communicate directly with each other, and eBay, while enabling them to transact directly with each other, undermine the idea of peer-to-peer networking that has existed on the server side of the Internet since the beginning of the Internet, because they require a centralized server to coordinate them rather than many servers spread out in different parts of the world. many servers in different parts of the world. This is why people like Gnutella and Freenet keep claiming that they have created "pure" P2P, P2P services with no central server at all.

(2) The origin of the idea of p2p: back to the nature of the Internet

If we look back, we can see that P2P was one of the essential features of the Internet from the beginning of the WWW. People built their own web pages and made links to each other, and people surfed along the links. At that time, the web was the real "web" (web). But when Yahoo! and Lycos established search engines and portal sites, the way people surfed the Internet was changed, and people went to one place to get all the information. Remember, _blank">Sina used to say for a while that they were a "destination site" model, but if you ask one more question, now people read _blank">Sina's news one by one, is there still a concept of "web" in their mind? But if you ask me one more question, now that people are reading news one by one from Sina, do they have a concept of "web" in their minds? The biggest problem is that these sites control the flow of information, are filled with outdated information, prevent real communication, or for many people, have too much advertising on top. P2P is all about returning control back to the user. People can ****enjoy files, directories and even entire hard drives through P2P. This kind of energy is very exciting, those who bother to store on their hard disk are certainly the things we consider the most valuable, and everyone ****enjoys what they consider the most valuable, which will make the value of the information on the Internet increase dramatically. Isn't there a sense of the same excitement as when the WWW first appeared? A little bit.

Because each Peer represents the people who come after it, online communities based on self-organization are also emerging. Unlike portal sites, which build communities from the top down, people will form communities in a spontaneous way.

When people join a P2P network, everyone has an equal opportunity, and everyone has the opportunity to create "content" on the Web very easily. Of course, the number of people who actually create or provide content on the Web is still small; according to statistics, only 2% of Gnutella's users provide content to other users, and even the more active Usenet posters account for only 7% of all users. But for the first time, P2P has given equal access to all people online.

The following is an attempt to reveal the impact of P2P in three sentences:

Peer-to-peer is the end of the read-only Web

Peer-to-peer allows you to participate in the Internet again

Peer-to-peer allows you to participate in the Internet again)

Peer-to-peer networking: steering the Internet away from TV)

As mentioned above, P2P is not a new idea, and in some ways it is even the most basic idea of the whole original creation of the Internet. In some ways it is even the most fundamental idea of the entire original creation of the Internet. Let's take the time to do a little review.

The development of the Internet is not unlike the development of many modern, cutting-edge scientific and technological developments, which began in the military industry and then moved to civilian applications. The Internet was born out of a strategic idea that is still novel: what should be done to prevent an enemy's destructive weapons from hitting the nation's military command and control centers? The traditional approach was to do everything possible to prevent the enemy from knowing the exact location of the centers, and to improve their ability to withstand a strike.

But in today's nuclear weapons era, the other side has even a planet can be blown up by nuclear bombs, and then solid as a golden soup of defense measures once attacked certainly immediately into nothing. And as long as there is a secret existence, there is always a way to find out the secret, so the method of relying on the location of the secrecy center is not a long-term plan. In this case, the U.S. military personnel to give full play to reverse thinking, the idea that since it is impossible to protect the center of long-term, effective protection from attack, then it would be better not to set up the center at all!

Let each base and even each computer can operate independently, so that there are countless centers, the enemy unless the planet really bombed, or one of the base or computer damage, but also does not affect the other bases or computers to continue to play a role. It is this idea of "decentralization" that has become the most fundamental concept in the formation of the Internet.

But many technologies don't develop exactly as originally designed, and the server/client architecture has gradually become the dominant form of the Internet, with browsing becoming the main way of life on the Internet. The average Internet user seems to be slowly degrading and becoming as passive as a TV viewer, browsing the content created by the big sites.

People's main activity on the Web has been visiting portal sites, reading news, participating in discussion groups, and chatting. But this makes one of the characteristics of the Internet designed to disappear - what happens if Yahoo interrupts service for any reason? It's a hypothetical that's not easy to see, but the chaos caused by hackers attacking major Web sites earlier in the year seems to give us a little clue as to what to expect.

While Napster and instant messaging still require centrally located servers, a quote from Gnutella's Web site may be indicative of the "decentralized" nature of the "pure" P2P they promote: the design of Gnutella is based on the idea that "pure" P2P involves "decentralization," and that "pure" P2P involves "decentralization.

Isn't it the original ideal of the Internet that an attack on users in New York would affect only a fraction of those in that area, while Gnutella users elsewhere would be able to use it as normal, as described on its Web site?

(3) Napster brings revolution

Napster was developed last year by Shawn Fanning, who was only 18 at the time, to provide a service allowing music fans to exchange MP3 files. The difference between it and MP3.com, which was also previously pushed into the dock for offering free music downloads, was that there was not a single song on the Napster servers, and Napster offered a new software for music fans to ****enjoy song files on their own hard drives, search for other users***enjoying song files, and go to the hard drives of other users who were also using Napster's service to download songs. Napster attracted 50 million users in a short period of time, and eventually it came into the world's spotlight when it was put in the dock by five major record labels for copyright infringement.

There has probably never been an industry in which the survival of a small piece of software has been so y threatened as the recording industry. There's been a lot of talk about the copyright issues raised by Napster, but it's worth spending some more time discussing them because this case will determine the future of this branch of P2P file*** sharing and how copyright on the Internet will be handled in the future.

On Oct. 31 one of the plaintiffs, BMG, and Napster reached a settlement agreement. Opinion is that this shows that the recording industry realizes that releasing music digitally will be an unstoppable trend, and that wiping out Napster won't stop other Napster-imitating providers from popping up. So it might as well work with it to change Napster and turn it into a channel for online music sales. Instead of crushing it like an egg, the recording industry is now faced with the challenge of turning Napster's 50 million subscribers into its own customers. That is, turn the Napster model into a "legalized Napster" model. The record industry's dilemma is how to prevent Napster imitators from continuing to offer their songs for free.

On Feb. 12, 2000, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the music Web site Napster was infringing on the copyrights of the major record companies. But instead of deciding to shut down the Web site immediately at the request of the record companies, the three judges sent the initial ruling back to a lower district court. The judges said the ruling was too complex and needed further clarification. But the convoluted legal process and the 58-page judgment reflect both a lack of Internet-related copyright law and corresponding judicial practice.

But whatever the outcome of the Napster case, it doesn't change the impact that the technology and ideas behind Napster have had on the Internet. The "devil" is out of the bottle, and the bottle has been broken. For the recording industry, at least, the way they sell records has been revolutionized. Next could be the Hollywood movie industry, where compression and broadband networks will make it easy to stream entire movies over the Web.

In fact there are already a number of companies trying to launch "legalized Napster" models on the legalized Web, such as lightshare.com and Flycode.com, which were started by one of the founders of Napster. P2P is indeed attractive to record labels, if they can charge users for it. For utilizing, for example, a centralized site to provide paid mp3 music downloads, the site has to pay a volume fee to the telecom each time a user downloads from the site, whereas using P2P makes this fee non-existent. As a result record labels make more profit and users should be able to get their music cheaper.

In a sense, software also seems to have predicted the potential impact of mass piracy and file **** sharing, thanks in large part to the "brainstorming" that open source software has brought to the software industry. In Asia and Eastern Europe, the software industry is already fighting a losing battle against piracy. That's why Microsoft is trying to promote a "software registration model" that sells software as a monthly service, rather than hard copies that can be easily copied and pirated as in the past.

Of course, there's still a lot of skepticism about the so-called "legalized Napster" model, where P2P's file-***-sharing capabilities don't seem to add much value, even though the process can be a lot of fun. On the other hand, there may be value in the way the technology can be used to drive people back to participating in the Internet and creating their own content. All community sites have the "dream" of having users interact to generate content, but that dream has never really materialized because of the fundamental problem of creating communities from the top down, and P2P may change that.

The miracle of Napster is also a revelation that ordinary people have the power to change the world in the Internet age. When Shawn Fanning developed Napster on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston, he was just trying to enjoy mp3 song files with his friends in Virginia. Now this little piece of software has changed the whole world.

(4) What has p2p changed? Content moves to the "edge"

After reviewing Napster's problems and dilemmas, here's a look at more exciting things about P2P and dispelling the misconceptions surrounding the neologism, as well as a look at where P2P's opportunities lie in the main.

One of the changes that P2P has brought about is a change in the location of "content", which is moving from the "center" to the "periphery", i.e., content is going to exist primarily on a few major servers, not on a few major servers. Instead of being on a few major servers, it will be on the PCs of all users.

Napster's success leads us to question two long-held assertions, that "application service providers (ASPs) are the future" and that "the PC is dead. A basic assumption of ASPs is that it is too expensive for most customers to buy and maintain high-performance servers, but P2P allows everyone's desktop computer to become a "server". Whereas a user would prepare data on a desktop computer and then upload it to a server, this process is no longer necessary with P2P. "The assertion that "the PC is dead" means that the PC will be used primarily for Internet browsing, word processing, etc., and that the simplest thin clients will be sufficient. P2P makes the PC the "center" again. P2P makes the PC revitalized, no longer a passive client, but a device with the characteristics of a server and a client, and the PC will become the center of the Internet again.

The Internet's storage model will change from the current "content at the center" model to a "content at the edge" model. From this perspective, P2P brings several changes:

First, customers no longer need to upload files to servers, but only need to use P2P to provide **** enjoy the information;

Second, the PC running P2P does not need a fixed IP address and permanent Internet connection, which allows those who have dial-up access to enjoy the changes brought by P2P.

Finally, P2P completely changes the client/server model that used to control the Internet, eliminating the distinction between client and server.

There has been much discussion above of the legal problems encountered by Napster, but put another way, the piracy problem is often indicative of a large unmet need, and Napster's phenomenal success (in this case, attracting a large number of users rather than making a profit) is a rare demonstration of the conceptual viability of P2P, and reveals the potential for it to transform the Internet. The fact that broadband networks that go straight to the desktop are becoming a reality, and that PCs are becoming more powerful enough to function as "servers," is another way to ensure that P2P will be utilized to its fullest potential.

The replacement of the central server by the PC as the primary repository of content will have far-reaching implications for several major directions in the evolution of the Internet: it could change the "war" that Windows and Linux have been waging for several years, and as the "desktop" and the server converge, it could change the way the Internet is perceived. As "desktops" and servers converge, Microsoft could push its Windows 2000-based Web services and "content-at-the-edge" (content-at-the-desktop) model hard, potentially undermining the foundation of Linux's presence in the server market.

One of the reasons companies that offer free personal home page services exist is that the Internet currently makes it difficult for the average user to have their own server to host their own content. It is predicted that services like Napster will emerge for people to publish home pages and content on their own personal computers.

Mobile service protocols, such as WAP, are currently focused on getting people to use centralized commercial services such as news and stock information. But more often than not, the information people need most is the information that is on their PCs, and P2P makes this possible. People can access their PCs via wireless P2P networking, which some companies are touting as the "wireless version" of Personal P2P.

That's not to say, of course, that P2P-enabled PCs will replace servers, where secure backups and data that needs to be kept up to date by specialists will still reside in a centralized server. The shift to P2P can be seen in this way: the "content-at-the-center" model is better adapted to the early days of the Internet, when PCs were too underpowered to require dedicated servers, and bandwidth was too narrow to allow PCs to degrade to passive browsing. The broadband Internet and more stable, higher-performance PCs make it reasonable to predict that the next five years will be dominated by the "content-at-the-edge" model.

(5) Reinterpretation of P2P

Every epoch-making innovation may be misinterpreted when it emerges, and P2P is no exception this time around. Napster made people pay attention to P2P, but it also made many people think that P2P is just about exchanging songs and files, and even think that there is a definite connection between P2P and piracy. It can be said that people's understanding of P2P is misguided and incomplete.

Free software (FOSS) also faced the dilemma of misinterpretation when it first appeared. People initially interpreted FOSS as free, which made them think that FOSS was unreliable and that the FOSS movement was radical and "counter-cultural". In fact, Free is more about the freedom to explore ideas, express them in software, and ****enjoy the software. This came naturally to free software advocates, but it took someone to tell the business community, the media and the public that free software was economically and logically viable. O'reilly, a well-known publisher at the time, organized a Free Software Summit to redefine free software, renaming it open source software. This redefinition allowed people to begin to lift the clouds of misunderstanding and understand the nature of Free. Open source frees people from defective software, lock-in effects, and traditional software distribution channels. Free indicates that collaboration will be able to cross company boundaries, ****enjoy fundamental development, and allow people to focus on high value-added services. In August this year, O'Reilly organized another summit to help people realize the potential of P2P and to eliminate the negative impact caused by Napster and Gnutella that P2P is a piracy technology. In addition, he believes that the current state of P2P is akin to "blind men feeling an elephant", and that the leaders of P2P technology each see some characteristics of the "elephant" that is P2P. If they have the opportunity to exchange ideas, P2P will develop faster. The P2P Summit has three main objectives: to define P2P, what we want to get out of it and why; to describe the opportunities of P2P and the problems it solves; and to formulate a message to the general public about P2P and to eliminate the negative influences.

Participating in the P2P Summit were the developers of file-swapping services such as Napster, Gnutella, and Freenet, which are constantly covered in the media, as well as companies and organizations that are trying to tap into the distributed computing power of P2P such as Popular Power, SETI@home, distributed.net, etc. . The latter three companies hope to use P2P technology to pool the free CPU time slots, memory space, and hard disk space of computers connected to a network to replace "supercomputers". Other ongoing P2P applications include IBM, Microsoft, and Ariba are collaborating on a project called UDDI to standardize B2B e-commerce; Eazel is building the next generation of Linux desktops; Jabber has developed an XML-based, open instant messaging standard, and Jabber is considered to be the standard for establishing future P2P-enabled data exchanges; and a new P2P standard has been developed by Lotus. Jabber is seen as setting the standard for future use of P2P data exchange; Groove, created by the developers of Lotus Notes, is trying to "help people communicate in a whole new way"; and Intel is promoting its P2P technology to help make more efficient use of the chip's computing power.

It's a bit of a dry list, especially for readers who aren't interested in the specifics, but it's necessary. Because these descriptions give us a fuller picture.

(6) The not-yet-understood P2P

Napster is associated with devices, and users connect to the P2P networks it creates in order to get Mp3 song files. But it's quite different for P2P applications like instant messaging, where someone connects to communicate with another Peer regardless of whether they're using a computer, handheld, or cell phone. p2p provides the ability to communicate in real time over a network regardless of device.

This ability to connect users in real time is the most exciting feature of P2P. In fact, we can recognize this fact from the popularity of AOL's AIM and Oicq in China.

The ability to find and contact people in real time is a basic requirement for business applications, and the telephone can do this in a way that e-mail, which is most commonly used on the Web, cannot. So instant messaging will be more than just an interesting service, it will be the next most essential Internet business tool. Instant messaging now looks like it could become a platform for business applications such as customer service, supply chain management and more. Jabber, which has developed an open source XML and Java-based instant messaging service, seems to be creating just such a platform. the developers of Jabber seem to have deliberately focused on all the exciting things that exist on the Internet: P2P, Java, XML and open source. Does it have that potential? We'd better wait and see, but Jabber's model is at least much clearer than Napster.

Negroponte famously argued in his Digital Survival that "there will be more things on the Web than people," and that P2P will make it possible for these "things" to communicate directly with each other, with every device on the Web being an "active" device. Every device on the network will be "active", not passive as in the past where some were very active and some were passive, and sometimes the devices that are communicating directly with each other may be owned by one of the users, such as the synchronization of data between a Pocket PC and a desktop computer is the best example. If the user's Pocket PC has data and content that the desktop PC doesn't have, the desktop PC should be able to request that information from the Pocket PC, in much the same way that we can go to other users via Napster to search for and download mp3 songs.

The bottom line is that it's not the number of nodes on the network but how those nodes participate in the network that determines whether the network is strong and valuable. How do you make the hundreds of millions of people and many more devices on the network active and engaged?P2P is the beginning of a series of architectures, technologies, and strategies that are making this ideal of the Internet begin to become a reality. What people are seeing and predicting now is just a small tip of the iceberg, and much more is still underwater.

(7) The P in P2P is People!

Dave Winner's assertion that the P in P2P is people! This is probably one of the most profound interpretations of P2P I have ever read.

In fact, we live in a real-life P2P environment where people can communicate directly with other people. Information technology has brought us to cyberspace, where we still want to be able to communicate in the old P2P way. Although the Internet essentially supports peer-to-peer communication, the development of the Web has added many barriers to peer-to-peer communication.

As many technologists have pointed out, dynamic IP addresses, firewalls, and proxy servers have made peer-to-peer connections technically difficult. Not to mention the fact that the current dominant model of the Web has evolved into a server/client model, where people can only passively receive information from large corporations such as Yahoo! (Of course, in real life, spatial and social hierarchies also constrain peer-to-peer communication. But if the Web can open our eyes to the possibility of peer-to-peer communication, why not pursue it?)

The analogy can be made that the emergence of the Internet and the invention of the telephone are of the same significance, but the main feature of the Internet at the very beginning was non-real-time, more similar to faxes, and did not provide real-time communication like the telephone, and now the instant messaging of P2P may make the real-time communication on the Internet as common and indispensable as the Web page and E-mail.

For all P2P applications, the first order of business is to restore the peer-to-peer networking capabilities that the Internet once lost. That's where Napster suffers from its biggest conceptual flaw. (Email has the characteristics of P2P communication, but email lacks the ability to communicate in real time; it's similar to a fax, but we still need the "phone".)

From a "people" point of view, the point of P2P development is not so much the architecture of the P2P network, but the fact that P2P connects people on the web, so that they can deal with the problems that need to be communicated on the web, which is a much faster medium. This is the most important thing. While there are still people today who doubt the validity of the Internet as a medium for retail commerce and B2B, the fact that the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate is not up for discussion. There's no point in talking too much about "pure" P2P that completely eliminates control. Centralization or decentralization are just tools, created to enable people to communicate more effectively.

Human experience in real life is still only minimally applied to the web, such as news, B2C, B2B. now, the most common use of P2P is transplanted to cyberspace. p2p may change some of the products and services we are already familiar with and used to, and will create more.

What exactly will emerge? The best way to predict the future is to create it.