Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Confused about Napster

Author:William Crim
Posted:7/27/2000; 1:01:41 PM
Topic:Confused about Napster
Msg #:19215 (In response to 19198)
Prev/Next:19214 / 19216

Freenet is fully distributed. It also does load balancing by caching a document along the way as it is transfered, hop by hop, from one computer to another. This has the effect of load balancing, so that if someone else requests a file, they can get it from one of the nearby caches. It also means that it more anonymous since you actually recieve the document from the closest person, rather then the source. Freenet has little to no searching capability. This is being fixed, but not there yet.

Gnutella is only distributed searching.(One of the most chatty, shitty, cpu/bandwidth intensive search routines, at least last I looked) Once you find the document, you open a point to point connection with the owner of the document.

Both Gnutella and Freenet run on arbitrary port numbers. They are designed to try to circumvent firewalls and censorship.




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