In praise of p2p

Imagine an ideal global information-storage system. It would have to be huge, capable of delivering any one of millions of files, some of them of enor­mous size, to anywhere in the world with­in moments. It would have to be self-configuring and self-healing, rather than centrally controlled, to ensure there was no single point of failure. And it would have to be secure, capable of supporting millions of users, while resisting constant assault both from physical attacks on its infrastructure and from malicious soft­ware circulated within the network.

Such a system sounds highly desir­able, particularly when compared with the internet, which has become a piece of critical economic infrastructure but is be­set by constant security scares and can be­come clogged up if too many users try to do the same thing at once. Yet this ideal system already exists, in the form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks such as eDonkey and KaZaA.

The technology, which is used by mil­lions of music lovers to download songs-usually infringing copyrights-is reviled by the entertainment industry. In Amer­ica and Europe, music and film compa­nies are using the courts and lobbying for new laws to outlaw P2P technology. In October, trade groups representing the entertainment industry went so far as to petition America's Supreme Court to con­sider whether makers of P2P software should face "secondary liability" for copyright infringement by their users. Of­ficials at America's Department of Justice have even suggested that using P2P sup­ports terrorism. The technology is also condemned as a distribution system for il­legal pornography.

Yet rather than being demonised, there are good reasons why the technology should be celebrated-and its benefits more widely studied and exploited. Argu­ing that the internet's robustness and se­curity could be improved using technology generally associated with music piracy might seem strange, admits Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School, who raised the idea in a recent paper, but the suggestion is a tribute to "how robust these systems are". P2P networks have, after all, withstood years of legal, techni­cal and physical assault but still work.

The widespread equation of P2P with piracy has obscured the fact that the same technology is also being constructively applied in all sorts of fields, from content distribution and internet-rooted calls to distributed storage and Peer-to-peer technology is emerging as a powerful new approach to building large-scale computer systems, regardless of the entertainment industry's legal efforts.

Technically, "peer-to-peer" refers to a computer's ability to communicate di­rectly with other computers running the same software, without having to go through intermediaries. While this might appear to describe the internet itself, the reality is slightly different. Although the internet was originally designed to be de­centralised, it has evolved into more of a hub-and-spoke system. Personal comput­ers at the edge of the network connect to powerful servers in the centre to do things such as send e-mails or retrieve web pages. What was once a network of equals, made up of machines that were both producers and consumers of con­tent, became something that "looked like television with packets," says Clay Shirky, a technology consultant.

Strength in numbers

Peer-to-peer connects computers di-rectly-and once enjoined, personal com­puters can do things they are unable to do alone. Most P2P systems let users pool re­sources, be it processing power, storage capacity or bandwidth. In the case of mu­sic file-sharing, users are, in effect, creating an enormous shared filing system from which they can all retrieve songs. Over half of all internet traffic is now generated by peer-to-peer applications, accordir. \ CacheLogic, a P2P network-services com­pany in Britain. Figures from BigCham-pagne, an internet-research firm in Beverly Hills, California, suggest that at least io% of the content on P2P networks is legal, and does not violate the entertain­ment industry's copyrights. The most active P2P system, account­ing for an estimated 35% pf all internet traffic according to CacheLogic, is called BitTorrent. It is an open-source software project that is free to use and enables very large files to be stored and retrieved effi­ciently at essentially no cost. Though it is used for pirated music, it comes into its own when distributing really large files such as movies, games and large pieces of software such as the Linux operating system—things that would otherwise be very costly for companies or individuals to make available for download.

Part of BitTorrent's success stems from the way it creates incentives for users to give as well as to take.

16.

Read and summarize the article.

AUTHENTIC HERO.

LINUX, the free computer operating system developed by thousands of volunteers collaborating over the Internet, is still not taken very seriously in corporate circles. It is used for niche tasks, such as running web servers, but it is generally deemed to be too immature for the most demanding environments, such as heavy-duty database systems. Recent events, however, suggest that Linux—whose mascot is a cheerful penguin—may have outgrown the commune of its birth. On January 4^th Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who co­ordinates the development of Linux, quietly released the latest version of the Linux kernel—the software that, as its name suggests, is at the core of the operating system. Many of the enhancements in this new kernel (version 2.4) make Linux more suitable for corporate use. In particular, they make it more "scalable"—in other words, as capable of working on very large computer systems as on small ones. Linux 2.4 can support more processors, more memory, and raster networking and disk access—all prerequisites for industrial-strength corporate use. Just as the software itself has become more solid, so support for Linux within the computer industry has also been growing. IBM, which has embraced Linux across its product range, from PCS to mainframes, announced in December that it would spend $1 billion on Linux-related activities in 2001. And this week the Open Source Development Laboratory, an independent, not-for-profit research centre financed by such in­dustry giants as ibm. Intel and Dell, opened its doors. It is intended to accelerate the adoption of Linux in business computing, and to allow developers to test their software on the largest systems. In other words, with the notable exceptions of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, the industry is pushing Linux for use in corporate computing. Linux is also proving a popular choice for powering Internet appliances, such as handheld computers and smart telephones. And. at the other end of the scale, it is emerging as a powerful force in the specialist field of supercomputing. By connecting hundreds of PCS Running Linux in a "cluster", it is possible to construct an enormously powerful machine for a fraction of the cost of a conventional supercomputer, ibm recently started installing a 1.024-processor Linux supercomputer at Shell's research centre in the Netherlands, where the oil company plans to use it to analyse geophysical data and to help it find oil. And on January 16th. Amer­ica's National Centre for Supercomputing Applications said that it had agreed to buy two Linux supercomputers from IBM. one of which will be the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world when it is switched on this summer. There are some fears that the embrace of Linux by big computing companies could prove a mixed blessing. George Weiss of Gartner, a research firm, suggests that IBM. in particular, "looms like a shadow" over the future of Linux: its obvious enthusiasm, he says, might deter new firms from entering the market for Linux support and services. Any attempt by big computing companies to hijack Linux, declares Eric Raymond, an open-source guru, would be counter-pro­ductive, since it would alienate the very people from whom Linux draws its strength. Yet it is inevitable, as Linux becomes increasingly popular, that it will shed the revolutionary cachet which, for some of its supporters, is its greatest appeal.

17.

Read and summarize the article.

rebel code: linux and the open-source revolution. By Glyn Moody. When, during its antitrust trial in 1999. Microsoft had to name some competitors to prove that Windows was not a monopoly, it could point to just two. One was its old enemy, Apple, which had been briefly resurgent under Steve Jobs but these days was utterly dependent on Microsoft's willingness to carry on producing a version of its Office software that would run on the Mac operating system. The other was Linux, a free operating system that was the product not of a rival company, but of the work of thousands of anonymous hackers choreographed by a young Finnish student called Linus Torvalds. In truth, Linux as an operating system for desktop pcs provides as little real competition to Windows as docs' old Apple. That may come, although it is far from certain that something made for geeks by geeks will ever win widespread acceptance among consumers. But in the vital market for the operating systems that run the millions of small-to-medium-sized server computers that offer web-pages, handle e-mail and do countless other routine administrative tasks. Linux is already more ubiquitous than equivalent versions of Windows. Even more worryingly for Bill Gates. Linux, actively supported by powerful companies, such as ibm. Dell and even Intel, is getting ready to move up the computing food chain and into the corporate data centre—which is precisely where Microsoft is determined its strategically vital and expensively developed Windows 2000 should prevail. That something created by "hobbyists", as Mr Gates calls them, may be doing more to threaten Microsoft's hegemony than wealthy and aggressive rivals, such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, is nothing short of revolutionary. This alone makes the story that "Rebel Code" tells important. In its way, Linux and other open-source products are as disruptive to the "traditional" software business as is the Internet. The Internet and open source reinforce each other, the former making possible new models of collaborative working, the latter supporting the Internet's preference for open, non-proprietary standards. It is no accident that open source is better suited to developing reliable utility-type software than sophisticated applications. The virtue of "Rebel Code" is that it largely eschews hype and is clearly written, if at times in rather technical prose. Its weakness is that it conveys little of the unfolding drama and not nearly enough of the personalities and motivations of the extraordinary people who have helped to shape the open-source movement: its spiritual father, the quasi-communist coder. Richard Stallman: the libertarian polemicist - Eric Raymond whose love affair with free software is matched only by his passion for guns: or the enigmatic Linus Torvalds himself, who has guided Linux for ten years and who has become an authentic hero within a community that instinctively distrusts such things.