What I am doing is hopefully creating a database of information of all the filesharing networks. I start out with Gnutella, I’ll be writing one a week (maybe more) and perhaps getting interviews with the lead developers. This the first of many I plan on doing, so being the first please excuse mistakes, and lack of content. Thank you and I hope you enjoy!
Gnutella- Gnutella has been highly touted as the best p2p application to date. It has been on countless television shows, been used by companies to distribute media, and probably has the most developers developing software to date. From Shareaza, XoloX, to Bearshare, all show similar features. It also has been the most GPLed software to date. Gnucleus could be considered the #1 used Gnutella application because it has been used by so many other companies including but not limited to Morpheus PE. So what does all this mean? It means a better network for Gnutella’s 300,000+ users. Originally released back from Nullsoft, during Napster’s rise, it took the internet by storm. Using everyone in the network as a resource was a new concept that was very nerve-wracking for some people. Others understood what was in store and immediatley began developing Gnutella. Before the fall of Morpheus (with fasttrack), Gnutella had a steady 75,000 users on at any given time. Before Ultra-peers, this was probably the most the network could handle. When Morpheus switched to Gnucleus’s established Gnutella source code, the Gnutella community immediatly doubled and tripled. But along with those new users came new problems. Scaleability Scalibility on Gnutella is different than in say fastrack. Gnutella works like this:
- Client A logs on via a server. The server is an entry point to the network, but after it is used once by the client, it is no longer needed.
- Once client A is established onto the network, it shares its bandwidth with Users B-Z.
- When a search is made, it goes through users B-Z and then returns results. Since everyone is in a sense its own entity in the Gnutella world, your search result must go through hundreds of computers before you get an answer, so long wait times were common
Images taken from Myster Networks.com
Then Superpeers came along and transformed the way Gnutella works. Superpeers eliminate slow computers from being in the “network/network” (if that makes any sense. Basically the superpeers are their own entity and they are searched through
instead of having all of the slow computers doing that too. It’s almost like a separate class of the network). Superpeers did alot more to Gnutella than just that, but you get the idea.
Lawsuits: The nature of the Gnutella network makes it very easy for someone to find out the IP address of another person. That’s just life on Gnutella until more forms of security are “uncovered”. As far as I know, Gnutella companies have not yet been sued, but heavy illegal contributors were sued. Or are in the process. The saftey of Gnutella lies in what you share, if you are a legal sharer, and use Gnutella as a network for your own personal items, then you are safe, or somewhat safe. But if you use it for illegal things it is very easy with programs like MediaEnforcer to find out who you are.
The Future: Gnutella out of all the networks has a bright future. Not only does gnutella have bright future in the P2P world, but in the “real world” as well. Cell phones may soon be on the Gnutella network or a variation there of, in order to recieve higher signal strength. In order to acheive this some major security loop-holes need to be addressed, but it could and probably will happen. XoloX took a large step in getting Gnutella generalized for the mainstream people. It is no longer a geeks toy. It gave people Fastrack like simplicity with the power of Gnutella behind it. Hashing is starting to be integrated with clients, that is a large step in the development of file sharing as a whole. Webmasters are starting to look at saving money by using the power of Gnutella to share their files.
To Sum It Up: Gnutella has more potential than any other system available to date. When it is fully scaled then we should start to see the general public using it instead of the geeks.
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- Shareaza G2 network expected to pass Gnutella by month’s end
- Zeropaid Exclusive: Inverview with Jed McCaleb of eDonkey and Overnet
- Zeropaid.com Exclusive: Hashing
- Zeropaid Interviews Creator of the Qube
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