What is a Peer To Peer Network?

What is a Peer To Peer Network?

There are lots of different uses for a p2p network, and mostly they're good uses.  At lot of people are looking for free mp3 downloads or trying to get pirated or copyrighted movies or music for free.  Probably the most famous examples of this was the Napster network.  Whether it was the first p2p network or not is debatable, but it was definitely the most popular and widley known about p2p network.  Napster basically brought the concept of illegal sharing of mp3 music to the mainstream.

p2p networks have several characteristics which make it a great network configuration, but also make it attractive to people who are looking to use it for less than admirable reasons.  One of those characteristics is that a p2p network is what you would call 'distributed.'  A distributed network is one where your information, data, or hosts and nodes in the network are not centrally located.  They're not all in one place; they're spread all over, or geographically disperse.  So what?  What makes disperse nodes in a network a good thing?  There are several reasons.  First, you can tell your node in the network to look for your information at the closest available node with the data you want.  That way, you ensure the fastest possible transfer rate and lowest latency.  It also means a p2p network is resilient to outages.  One node goes down, get your download somewhere else.

Now to really complicate things you can break apart large files into smaller pieces or fragments.  This is beneficial because then you can simultaneously download multiple parts of the same file!  Now you're really smoking with your download speeds.  If you have a bunch of stuff to share or your getting free mp3 downloads from the internet, using a p2p network works really well.

There is one final characteristic about a p2p network that makes it good for illegal file sharing or downloading mp3s or movies and stuff.  Anonymity.  In most p2p networks, data is not stored centrally, this means there's no 'big brother' looking over all the traffic between nodes in the network.  In some p2p networks each client maintains a small database which lists the available files and the nodes where those files are available.  So each client or node will just connect directly to the clients that have the files they want.  Who's going to monitor that and say you're not allowed to do that?  Or to check and see that the files you're sharing aren't protected by copyright or something?  It's very difficult to monitor and control p2p networks.