For those of you interested in Gnutella, Freenet, and other peer-to-peer
and distributed computing infrastructures, here's a good paper on the
topic, with some other more popular news stores on closely related issues:
FREE RIDING ON GNUTELLA
ABSTRACT:
An extensive analysis of user traffic on Gnutella shows a significant
amount of free riding in the system. By sampling messages on the Gnutella
network over a 24-hour period, we established that almost 70% of Gnutella
users share no files, and nearly 50% of all responses are returned by the
top 1% of sharing hosts. Furthermore, we found out that free riding is
distributed evenly between domains, so that no one group contributes
significantly more than others, and that peers that volunteer to share
files are not necessarily those who have desirable ones. We argue that free
riding leads to degradation of the system performance and adds
vulnerability to the system. If this trend continues copyright issues might
become moot compared to the possible collapse of such systems.
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/adar/index.html
Or a PDF version (22 pages, compared to 11 pages for the above version):
http://www.parc.xerox.com/istl/groups/iea/papers/gnutella/Gnutella.pdf
Some other, less academic reports:
Harnessing the PC's power
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-3248711-4.html
Show Them the Money:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-201-3248711-3.html
Will P2P companies thrive or die?
http://news.cnet.com/news//0-1005-200-2758911.html
Onward!
Max
----------------------------
Max More,
max@maxmore.com or more@extropy.org
www.maxmore.com
President, Extropy Institute. www.extropy.org
Senior Content Architect, ManyWorlds Consulting: www.manyworlds.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:31 MDT