What is Peer-to-peer? What is a peer-to-peer?

Peer-to-peer is a technology, but it's more of a thought that has the potential to change the fundamentals of the Internet.





(1) peer-to-peer concept





Peer-to-peer is peer-to-peer abbreviation, peer in English has "(status, ability and so on) equal", "colleague" and "partner" meaning. In this way, Peer-to-peer can also be understood as the meaning of "partner to partner", or Peer-to-peer networking. At present, it is believed that it has great future in enhancing the communication, file Exchange and distribution calculation of the people in the network.





simply, peer-to-peer links people directly, allowing people to interact directly through the Internet. Peer-to-peer makes communication on the Web easier, more directly shared and interactive, and really eliminates middlemen. Peer-to-peer means that people can connect directly to other users ' computers, Exchange files, and not connect to the server to browse and download as they used to. Another important feature of Peer-to-peer is to change the Internet's current status as a big Web site, return to "Non-core" and return power to the user. Peer-to-peer may seem new, but Peer-to-peer is not something new, just as it is a common thing for the real world to be transplanted to the Internet. In real life we communicate and communicate with each other on a daily basis, face-to-face or by telephone.





Even from the network, Peer-to-peer is not a new concept, Peer-to-peer is the basis of the overall framework of the Internet. Internet most basic protocol TCP/IP does not have the concept of client and server, all devices are the equal end of communication. 10 years ago, all systems on the Internet had both server and client functions. Of course, the software that developed later on TCP/IP did take the client/server structure: browsers and Web servers, mail clients, and mail servers. However, for servers, they are still peer-to-peer. Take email as an example, the Internet does not have a huge, only mail server to deal with all the email, but the Peer-to-peer network of mail servers to collaborate with each other to send email to the corresponding server.　　Another user email has been the equivalent of the contact channel. Of course, but over the past 5 years, the development of the Internet at least from the surface away from the peer-to-peer, the vast majority of the Internet nodes can not communicate directly with other nodes. Napster has awakened the Peer-to-peer network behind the Internet. Napster's file-sharing feature is a common thing to share directories on a local area network. But the success of Napster has led to the realization of the possibility of extending this "Peer-to-peer" network across the Internet. Of course, in the eyes of many, Napster is not purely peer-to-peer, and it still needs a central coordination mechanism.





in fact, many of the services available on the Web can be grouped into Peer-to-peer ranks. Instant messaging systems such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Pager, Microsoft's MSN Messenger, and Oicq in the country are the most popular peer-to-peer applications. They allow users to communicate and exchange information and exchange files with each other. The exchange of information between users is not direct, need to have a server in the center to coordinate. But none of these systems, such as search, is very important for a lot of information sharing, and the lack of this feature may be one of the reasons why instant Messaging has been a long time but has not been able to produce such effects as Napster.





another can be classified as a Peer-to-peer auction site such as ebay, people in the summary of the ebay model used Consumer-to-consumer, is not the same as Peer-to-peer? ebay is a community that links people and deals and makes it easy for users to search for goods that other users peddle. Ebay offers services that allow transactions to proceed smoothly, but transactions are done directly between users. If the concept of "trading" is promoted, Consumer-to-consumer is a special case of Peer-to-peer, where people exchange merchandise.





But if you look closely, Napster and instant Messaging can give users the ability to communicate directly, while ebay allows users to trade directly, destroying the server-side idea of peer-to-peer networking that existed at the start of the Internet because they all needed a central server to coordinate, Instead of many servers that are Peer-to-peer networks that are distributed across different parts of the world. This is precisely what Gnutella and Freenet constantly claim to have created "pure" peer-to-peer, without a peer-to-peer service with a central server.





(2) The source of Peer-to-peer thinking: back to the nature of the Internet





If you look back, we will find that at the beginning of the WWW peer-to-peer is one of the essential characteristics of the Internet. People build Web pages and make links to each other, and people surf the internet along the links. The web at that time was the real "web". But when Yahoo! and Lycos established search engines and portals, the way people surf the internet was changed, and people went to a place to get all the information. Remember _blank "> Sina once said that they are" target site "mode, but if you ask one more, now people read _blank" > Sina's News, in the mind there is a "net" concept? The biggest problem is that these sites control the flow of information, flood outdated information, hinder real communication, or, for many people, too much advertising. Peer-to-peer means bringing control back into the hands of users. People can share files, directories, and even the entire hard disk on a hard drive by Peer-to-peer. This energy is very exciting, and the things that have bothered to store on their hard disk are certainly what we think is most valuable, and everyone shares what they consider to be the most valuable, which will greatly enhance the value of the information on the Internet. Is there a similar excitement when the www just appeared? A little.





because each peer represents the people that follow, the web-based community based on self-organization is also emerging. Unlike the way portals build communities from the top down, people will form communities in a spontaneous way.





When people join a peer-to-peer network, everyone has an equal opportunity, and everyone has the opportunity to create "content" on the Web very easily. Of course, there are only a handful of people who actually create or deliver content on the web, and only 2% per cent of the Gnutella users have provided content to other users, even 7% of users who have posted articles in more active Usenet. But for the first time, Peer-to-peer makes all the Internet people have equal opportunities.





tries to use three words to reveal the effect of Peer-to-peer:





Peer-to-peer Networking: The end of a read-only network (Peer-to-peer is the "the" Read-only Web)





Peer-to-peer Networking: Get you back on the Internet (Peer-to-peer allows to participate in the Internet recycle)





Peer-to-peer Networking: Keeping the network away from television (Peer-to-peer steering the internet Moz from TV) as noted above, Peer-to-peer is not a new idea, from some point of view it is even the most basic idea that created the Internet in the first place. We might as well take the time to review.





the development of the Internet in modern science and technology of many cutting-edge models are not different, that is, the first in the military industry to form, and then transferred to the civilian domain. The internet originated from what seems to be a novel strategic idea: what should we do to prevent the enemy's destructive weapons from hitting the national military Command and control center? The traditional approach is to try to keep the enemy from knowing the exact location of the center and to improve the center's ability to withstand the attack.





but in today's nuclear age, the other side has even a planet can be blown up bombs, and then impregnable defensive measures once the attack must immediately vanish. And as long as there is a secret exists, there is always a way to pry out secrets, so rely on the location of the Security Center is not a long-term measure. In this case, the United States military personnel to give full play to reverse thinking, since it is not possible to long-term, effective protection of the center from attack, then it is better not to set the center!





So that each base and every computer can operate independently, so there are countless centers, unless the enemy really blew up the planet, or one of the base or computer damage, does not affect other bases or computers continue to play a role. It is this "non-centric" idea that has become the most basic concept of the Internet.





But many technologies often do not follow the original design, the server/client architecture has gradually become the mainstream of the Internet, browsing has become the most important way for people to live on the Internet. The average user of the Internet seems to be slowly degenerating, as the TV viewers are passively browsing the content created by big websites.





People's main activities on the web are visited on such portals, reading news, participating in discussion groups, chatting. But this makes the design of the Internet a feature of the disappeared-if Yahoo interrupted service if what happened? This assumption is not easy to see, but the confusion caused by hackers attacking major websites at the beginning of the year seems to give us a hint of association.





mentioned above, such as Napster and instant messaging or the need for servers at the center, the words on the Gnutella Web site May express the "non-centrality" of what they promote as "pure" Peer-to-peer: Design Gnutella for survival in nuclear warfare ( Gnutella is designed to offspring nuclear War).