 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 ] Next Last |
Kazaa and the FastTrack protocol are the brainchild of the Scandinavians Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and were introduced in March 2001 by their Dutch company Consumer Empowerment. It appeared during the end of the first generation of P2P networks – Napster shut down in July of that year.
As of 2004, three FastTrack-based networks exist, using mutually incompatible versions of the protocol. The most popular clients on each are Kazaa (and its variations), Grokster, and iMesh. References to "the FastTrack network" usually apply only to Kazaa's.For more information about the various lawsuits surrounding KaZaA and Sharman Networks, see KazaaKazaa Media Desktop (once capitalized as KaZaA , but now usually left as Kazaa ) is a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol. It is commonly used to exchange mp3 music files and is ( as of 2004) the most popular application for.
FastTrack is a so-called second generation P2P protocol. It is based on the GnutellaGnutella (pronounced with a silent "g") is a distributed software project to create a true peer-to-peer file sharing network, without a central server. History The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, a division of AOL, protocol and extends it with the addition of supernodes to improve scalability. The supernode functionality is built into the client; if a powerful computer with a fast network connection runs the client software, it will automatically become a supernode, effectively acting as a temporary indexing server for other, slower clients.
In order to be able to initially connect to the network, a list of supernode IP numbers is hardcoded in the program. The client attempts to contact these, and as soon as it finds a working supernode, it requests a list of currently active supernodes, to be used for future connection attempts. The client picks one supernode as its "upstream" and uploads a list of files it intends to share to that supernode. It also sends search requests to this supernode. The supernode communicates with other supernodes in order to satisfy search requests. The client then connects directly to a peer to download the file; this transfer is done using HTTPHTTP (for HyperText Transfer Protocol is the primary method used to convey information on the World Wide Web. The original purpose was to provide a way to publish and receive HTML pages. Development of HTTP was co-ordinated by the World Wide Web Consortiu.
To allow downloading from multiple sources, FastTrack employs the UUHashUUHash is a hash algorithm employed by clients on the FastTrack network. It is employed for its ability to hash very large files in a very short period of time, even on older computers. However, this is achieved by only hashing a fraction of the file. hashing algorithm. While UUHash allows very large files to be checksummed in a short time, even on slow computers, it also allows for massive corruption of a file to go unnoticed. Many people, as well as the RIAA, have exploited this vulnerability to spread corrupt and fake files on the network.
The FastTrack protocol uses encryptionThis article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. For an overview of cryptographic technology related to encryption, see cryptography. In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special and was not documented by its creators, and the first clients were all closed source software. However, initialization data for the encryption algorithms is sent in the clear and no public key encryption is used, so reverse engineering was made comparatively easy. In 2003, open source programmers succeeded in reverse-engineering the portion of the protocol dealing with client-supernode communication, but the supernode-supernode communication protocol remains largely unknown.
The following programs are or have been FastTrack clients:
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|