On Tue, 17 Feb 2004, Mary Gardiner wrote: > SLUG committee has had a reporter request the contact details of people > who are making legitimate (by which I presume he means legal) use of P2P > technologies. He's looking for 'experts' to comment, but the article is > for laypeople. > > If you are willing to comment on your use of P2P technology, please > contact the SLUG committee, and we'll pass your details on.
I can't really think of legitimate or good uses (that are actually current) that could legitimise KaZaa and similar programs. However, BitTorrent really stands out as a great means for distribution of a single item, and has been used by a few distributions now I believe for distribution of their ISOs. Whilst I'm not sure if I could put anything together that would be useful for an article, it would be a great topic to focus on. For those who haven't used BitTorrent, it's basically a P2P application whereby you download a .torrent file, which contains references to a "tracking" server. Once there, you are given a few peers to download bits of the file from (peers being either seeds - people who have the entire file already, or other people who are still downloading the file aswell). This way, everybody helps add to the distribution of a file. This method works extremely well on new releases of files that are likely to cause a great rush of high capacity downloading (such as ISO releases of distributions), because instant of the server being instantly overcome by the load of billions of people downloading a file, the rush of people downloading actually causes there to be so many more peers that the actual drain on the original seed is minimal (or at least, in a relative context -- there would be a bit of load at first, but as soon as a few downloaders picked up and started peering, the initial downloads for new people would be handled by various people already downloading). This is very different to what the public have come to know as P2P, which is that you go in a search for something (usually illegal) to download, and get it straight away. Search-based P2P applications made for the distribution of (random) data to me are not really a good idea in a world where copyright infringement is such a hot issue, and where the public don't feel that the original content has the value that the price placed upon it represents. Hmm, I really didn't mean to write that much -- bye now! Andypoo. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
