‘Peer-to-peer’ networks enable millions of Internet users to exchange files of any size and all types. The authorities have increased their efforts to ensure that the legal requirements for the transmission of certain contents are respected. However, another type of social networking, of the Facebook type, works in a different way, enabling the anonymity of users swapping data to be protected, and the confidentiality of exchanges to be preserved, so that they can be carried out with complete impunity.
Social Networking Comes to the Aid of Peer-to-Peer Networks
In 1999, the Napster company launched a new Internet service. Using the software provided, users could swap music files directly using the Napster Internet site as an intermediary. This was the start of ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) services, i.e. the direct exchange of data between Internet users.
This was a revolution in a world where the dominant paradigm was ‘client-server’; up to then, the only services available were those provided by web servers. Millions of users began to use the Napster file-sharing service. After a long series of lawsuits brought by big record companies, the site was bought and closed down in 2001.
But P2P was not dead. Several networks (Kazaa, Gnutella, DC) sprang up, with a common characteristic: the Napster example had shown them that depending on a central site made the network vulnerable, so the new networks were completely dispersed. They required no infrastructure to work and were self-organizing as a function of the connections and disconnections of the users.
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