Vortexmind: free your mind Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito

Peer to Peer: what next?

In these days one of the major peer-to-peer networks (Edonkey-Emule) has recieved a severe blow, when one of its major servers (RazorBack 2) had been shut down by the belgian police. This causes some concern by people utilizing those technologies: the majority of people using peer-to-peer technologies and software doesn't really know how they work, neither they do know what kind of information and data they are REALLY sharing over the network.

In this short article, I will show you some of the "technologies" involved in those project: where are you connecting? What are you sharing? What kind of info do you broadcast over the network? Are you anonymous? Are you allowing third-party content (illegal, copyrighted, whatever!) to be dropped on your PC? We are going to know a little more what is the application logic of two big known p2p clients (Emule and Bittorrent), and two less known clients (Freenet and Waste).