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SHH... dont let Mike of Gnutella II know.... or else he'll hijack the protocol and call it Gnutella9...

Can you say DDoS? Would be fun and easy to get an entire network of gnutella clients to respond to one ip.

In an environment where a single query injection may result in a number of responses, acting as a virtual "traffic amplifier", it is desirable to verify that the return address is indeed that of the original sender. This prevents the network from being used as a method of generating a large-scale traffic generator.

The Gnutella2 network uses a system of "query keys" to solve this problem.

Before a search client can transmit a query to a particular hub, it must obtain a "query key" for that hub and include it in the transmission. Query keys are unique to the hub generating them and the return address with which they are associated and generally expire after a relatively long period of time.

Search clients request a query key by sending a query key request to a hub, which includes the intended return address for the key. The hub generates a key unique to that return address and dispatches it there. This makes it impossible to get a query key for an IP which is not controlled, and prevents keys from being shared between two nodes (key stealing).

When receiving a query from a foreign node, Gntuella2 hubs check the query key against the one they have issued for the query's requested return address and proceed only if there is a match. If and only if the query key matches will the query acknowledgement be sent, or the search processed locally and forwarded to local leaves and neighbouring hubs.

This has several positive effects. If a query does not have a valid key for the receiving hub, it will not be processed and will thus not generate a traffic amplification effect which may be used in a denial of service attack on a third party host. Secondly, the query key mechanism ensures that queries are only processed if they were transmitted from a host which has control over the host in the return address (in the normal case, this is the same host). This means that flood control mechanisms can remain just as effective as in the TCP case. Similarly, host blocking is possible as the original query source can be verified.

You aren't going to get thrown in the slammer for P2P File Sharing. Your going to get thrown in the slammer for illegal P2P File Sharing of copyrighted material. Granted that 99.99% of P2P File Sharing done now is illegal, it is wrong to label all P2P File Sharing as illegal.

Just because you don't know of any legal P2P File Sharing doesn't exist. Here is Open Office v1.2, Matrix Reloaded Superbowl Trailer, and this website has a lot of legitimate P2P content including Linux Distro's. Do note that all of the content above is on the Gnutella2 Network using Shareaza.

Have you tried Shareaza (w/Gnutella2)? Gnutella2 is currently the most powerful/sophisticated and advanced P2P network yet. The Shareaza client is Free/No Spyware/No Ads. You can also set it up to work on a LAN environment, so you can make your own private Gnutella2 network which would work pretty well (since it has Global search).

Shareaza isn't open source but Gnutella2 is. Or it will be, as the specs have yet to come out (though are expected soon).

Good friends, newsgroups, and IRC are 10x better than KaZaA... and I don't even have to look at Ads.

I don't understand why they added Xolox. Nobody uses Xolox anymore. It's infested with spyware and it's GUI sucks. It is also very behind in Gnutella technologies (I think it only recently added Ultrapeers, yikes). I don't think MP3Newswire is too informed in P2P because they should of at least listed Shareaza which has been hailed as the leader of the "new Gnutella" (Shareaza's Gnutella2, noteably). Frankly, Shareaza is currently the most advanced and best looking P2P client out there.

Oh well, maybe next year.

Interesting prediction.

If Microsoft were smart, they'd just buy out (like they do everything) some existing P2P company and clean it up a bit. And if they did, I'm sure it would be Shareaza which has created the Gnutella2 Protocol which beats Gnutella1 (as it is now, and probably forever) hands down. Shareaza is currently the best P2P client has the best network in the P2P sector. Only problem is they have a lack of users (and thus files). Though, it easily rivals any Gnutella1 and probably WinMX.

Gnutella1 doesn't, but Gnutella2 scales just fine. It uses UDP style searching, and it's spec-developer (Mike) informs his users that it can withold millions of nodes and still have a good stable global search.

Whee.