FastTrack
FastTrack is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that was used by the Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh and Morpheus file sharing programs. FastTrack was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, and used mainly for the exchange of music MP3 files. The network had approximately 2.4 million concurrent users in 2003. It is estimated that the total number of users was greater than that of Napster at its peak. History The FastTrack protocol and Kazaa were created and developed by Estonian programmers of BlueMoon Interactive headed by Jaan Tallinn, the same team that later created Skype. After selling it to Niklas Zennström from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark, it was 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. There are three FastTrack-based networks, and they use mutually incompatible versions of the protocol. The most popular clients on e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kazaa
Kazaa Media Desktop ( ) (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012. Kazaa Media Desktop was commonly used to exchange MP3 music files and other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents over the Internet. The Kazaa Media Desktop client could be downloaded free of charge; however, it was bundled with adware and for a period there were "No spyware" warnings found on Kazaa's website. During the years of Kazaa's operation, Sharman Networks and its business partners and associates were the target of copyright-related lawsuits, related to the content distributed via Kazaa Media Desktop on the FastTrack protocol. By August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active. History Kazaa and F ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Janus Friis
Janus Friis (; born 26 June 1976) is a Danish entrepreneur best known for co-founding the file-sharing application Kazaa, and the peer-to-peer telephony application Skype. In September 2005, he and his business partner Niklas Zennström sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 B. Friis has maintained ownership interest in Skype through Silver Lake Partners, which sold Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion (~$ in ), in May 2011. Friis and Zennström also developed Joost—an interactive software application for distributing TV shows and other forms of video content over the Web. The assets of this service were sold to Adconion Media Group in November 2009. Independently, Friis founded video streaming startup Vdio in 2011. Friis and Ahti Heinla founded Starship Technologies in 2014, to develop small self-driving delivery robots. Career Friis had no formal higher education, dropping out of high school before starting a job at the help desk of CyberCity, one of Denmark's first Internet ser ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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UUHash
UUHash 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. This weakness makes it trivial to create a hash collision, allowing large sections to be completely altered without altering the checksum. This method is used by Kazaa. The weakness of UUHash is exploited by anti- p2p agencies to corrupt downloads. How it works The UUHash is a 160-bit string that is usually Base64-encoded for presentation. It is a concatenation of an MD5 hash and a CRC32 sum of selected chunks of the file. file ''sig2dat.c'', function ''GetHashWin32'', retrieved 2014-08-20 The first 307,200 bytes (300 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jaan Tallinn
Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian computer programmer and investor known for his participation in the development of Skype and file-sharing application FastTrack/Kazaa. Recognized as a prominent figure in the field of artificial intelligence, Tallinn is a leading investor and advocate for AI safety. He was a Series A investor and board member at DeepMind (later acquired by Google) alongside Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other early supporters. Tallinn also led the Series A funding round for Anthropic, an AI safety-focused company where he is now a board observer. Tallinn is a leading figure in the field of existential risk, having co-founded both the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom and the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Life Tallinn graduated from the University of Tartu in Estonia in 1996 with a BSc in theoretical physics with a thesis that cons ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grokster
Grokster Ltd. was a privately owned software company based in Nevis, West Indies that created the Grokster peer-to-peer file-sharing client in 2001 that used the FastTrack protocol. Grokster Ltd. was rendered extinct in late 2005 by the United States Supreme Court's decision in '' MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.'' The court ruled against Grokster's peer-to-peer file sharing program for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, effectively forcing the company to cease operations. The product was similar in look and feel to Kazaa, marketed by Sharman Networks, and Morpheus, which was distributed by StreamCast. Grokster, along with Morpheus and Kazaa, are considered second-generation peer-to-peer file sharing programs. Unlike their predecessor Napster, these file sharing programs allowed users to trade files directly between one another, without these transactions passing through a centralized server. Because Napster maintained this fraction of control ov ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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File Sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include removable media, centralized servers on computer networks, Internet-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking. File sharing technologies, such as BitTorrent, are integral to modern media piracy, as well as the sharing of scientific data and other free content. History Files were first exchanged on removable media. Computers were able to access remote files using filesystem mounting, bulletin board systems (1978), Usenet (1979), and FTP servers (1970's). Internet Relay Chat (1988) and Hotline (1997) enabled users to communicate remotely through chat and to exchange files. The mp3 encoding, which was standardized in 1991 and substantially reduced the size of audio files, grew to widespread use ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node (networking), nodes. In addition, a personal area network (PAN) is also in nature a type of Decentralized computing, decentralized peer-to-peer network typically between two devices. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage, or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model in which the consumption and supply of resources are divided. While P2P systems had previously been used in many application domains, the architecture was popularized by the Internet file sharing system Napster, originally released in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Napster
Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002. The P2P model employed by Napster involved a centralized database that indexed a complete list of all songs being shared from connected clients. While effective, the service could not function without the central database, which was hosted by Napster and eventually forced to shut down. Following Napster's demise, alternative decentralized methods of P2P file-sharing emerged, including LimeWire, Gnutella, Freenet, FastTrack, I2P, and BitTorrent. Napster's assets were event ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node (networking), nodes. In addition, a personal area network (PAN) is also in nature a type of Decentralized computing, decentralized peer-to-peer network typically between two devices. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage, or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts. Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model in which the consumption and supply of resources are divided. While P2P systems had previously been used in many application domains, the architecture was popularized by the Internet file sharing system Napster, originally released in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Client (Computing)
is a computer that gets information from another computer called server in the context of client–server model of computer networks. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network. A client is a program that, as part of its operation, relies on sending a request to another program or a computer hardware or software that accesses a service made available by a server (which may or may not be located on another computer). For example, web browsers are clients that connect to web servers and retrieve web pages for display. Email clients retrieve email from mail servers. Online chat uses a variety of clients, which vary on the chat protocol being used. Multiplayer video games or online video games may run as a client on each computer. The term "client" may also be applied to computers or devices that run the client software or users that use the client software. A client is part of a cl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hashing Algorithm
A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values, though there are some hash functions that support variable-length output. The values returned by a hash function are called ''hash values'', ''hash codes'', (''hash/message'') ''digests'', or simply ''hashes''. The values are usually used to index a fixed-size table called a ''hash table''. Use of a hash function to index a hash table is called ''hashing'' or ''scatter-storage addressing''. Hash functions and their associated hash tables are used in data storage and retrieval applications to access data in a small and nearly constant time per retrieval. They require an amount of storage space only fractionally greater than the total space required for the data or records themselves. Hashing is a computationally- and storage-space-efficient form of data access that avoids the non-constant access time of ordered and unordered lists and structured trees, and the often-exponentia ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |