Peer-to-Peer

by Andy Oram

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 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, and David 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 Jon Udell of BYTE and Nimisha Asthagiri and Walter Tuvell of Groove Networks, on security Brandon Wiley of Freenet, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems

You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.

Genres: Computer Science, History

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Dave Peticolas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of articles by technologists and thinkers in the "Peer to Peer" movement. This book was published at the height of the peer-to-peer buzz and introduces many of the projects and technologies that comprise (or comprised) peer-to-peer. There are articles about specific projects like SETI@home, Jabber, Gnutella, Freenet, Groove, and many others. There are also articles about concepts that are import in peer-to-peer like metadata, privacy, trust, performance, and reputation.

The articles are primarily technical, making this book feel something like a conference proceedings. Also, much of the book's emphasis is on wide-scale, anonymous publishing and file-sharing, with little treatment of small-group collaboration. Also, in the passage of time since this book was published, several of the represented projects and companies have become defunct. Nevertheless, this is a very good introduction to peer-to-peer.

[Gabriel Chartier · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting part about this book (written in 2001) to me is how it all amounted to (kind of) nothing. It makes me sad to see how close we were to creating the foundations for a better web that had decentralization baked into it. So many of the things I see being talked about today in the web3 space, specifically in DAOs, are just now catching up to some of these essays. Where did we go wrong?

First section had some good insights about p2p that still hold up today and it was fascinating to read the excitement of the future of p2p hot off the tail of Napster.

Skimmed the second section because, while it was interesting, it was a bit too outdated and technical.

Third section had some great topics that are important for conversations happening now in web3: Trust, Accountability, Reputation, Security, Interoperability.

It's been over 20 years since this book came out and we're still having these conversations. Will it take another 20 years to implement a web that isn't morally bankrupt? Fuck if I know

[Gabe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doesn't mention bittorrent at all... so that's a huge hit right there.

The other technologies are interesting but are not as prevalent.