There seems to be more and more applications looking to move p2p file-sharing into the cloud. For example Gygan - a propriety application that allows users to upload their own files to Gygan's servers for storage. So far, sound like existing applications that offer cloud-storage; but they also allow users to search though what other people are storing and take copies.

As laws come in to allow the identification of p2p users, one would expect that p2p users (and developers) would move towards systems that seek to make the user anonymous and/or enforce privacy for their users, rather than stop using p2p. Well that happened in France, and now it is happening in the UK...

Anyone who's used Twitter much will have noticed the frequent service outages - aka Whale Fail - after the image us users see then this happens. Given Twitter's enormous growth of the past few years (sometimes exceeding 1000%!) then the demands on it's central servers must be huge. Which is where p2p technology could help - as it scales with demand because as more people join they also bring their capacity too;

One of the authors of the p2p paper I looked at in my last posting emailed me with an update of thier work worth sharing with you..

P2P algorithms can offer robustness and communication efficiency over more centralised GRID methods. So authors compared to p2p algorithms performance searching in large-scale and unreliable networks.

I've been made aware of a new torrent indexing website, TorrentFactory.org - it's interesting as a development as it seems clear that the PirateBay is under severe threat this year - so the question arises; what will replace it?  I don't mean this question in the sense of what will replace it as the the bogey-man of copyright, I mean the question more in a technological sense; where next for torrent indexing.  I mean this beca

The blog TorrentFreak has got a few interesting stories up both looking back at the last decade and also forward into 2010.  A couple of things caught my eye...

One was the article talking about ways that users in France may use to avoid the new '3 strikes' law;

A few news links of interesting stuff going on in the p2p world...

I've had a read of 'Robust vote sampling in a P2P media distribution system'.  It is a very interesting research paper.  The idea that grabs me most is the one about using gossip-based network systems to decentralise metadata.  Let me explain; if you think of a book on Amazon,

I suspect most people's use of the torrent protocol comes in the form of a separate p2p software client (e.g. Azureus or Transmission), indeed, this is the method I have been looking at for my research.