Uprizer, a new commercial peer-to-peer (P2P) service was launched
yesterday with funding from Intel and others. Its co-founder also
created Freenet, a P2P service with the potential to make Napster
look copyright-friendly by comparison.
The new company provides “decentralised, distributed networking
technology for internet and enterprise customers.” It is the first
company to develop proprietary technology based on Clarke's Freenet
architecture.
Like Napster, Freenet is software that allows one user to access
files stored on the hard drive of another PC if that PC is on-line
with Freenet installed. The differences are that it is a
non-commercial venture, any files can be swapped by those with the
free software (not just MP3 music files) and, most importantly, it
is decentralised, so there is no single server to shut down to
disable the service. Basically, there is nobody to sue for
infringement if copyrighted material is swapped by users except the
users themselves.
However, unlike the similar Gnutella service, Clarke developed
the Freenet system to be anti-copyright and anti-censorship, giving
complete anonymity to users – thereby protecting users from legal
action. The current drawback for users is that the software is
still being developed and, although available in beta form, it is
not yet user-friendly.
Uprizer says it is developing applications that are designed to
allow customers to globally scale in ways that are currently
limited using conventional, centralised networking approaches. The
company's technology is expected to include the added benefits of
increasing both network efficiency and reliability, and
significantly reducing the total cost of network ownership.
Intel has likely invested because the growth of P2P computing
relies on PCs with significant processing power – and the supply of
processing power is where Intel profits.
