Subject: [P2Prg] P2P vs traditional client-server model

From: Tien Tuan Anh Dinh <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 11:52:55 +0100

Hi,

Let's look at the "traditional client-server model" in another way, with 
Google as an example. Apparantly, Google employs a very well-engineered 
distributed systems with thousands of machines all over the world, but i 
think in the essence, it still follows a client-server model. All 
searchs from a Web browser (client) goes directly to a Google server.

  We go on and on about how P2P systems allow decentralization of their 
services, hence difficult to take down and can be immuned from DoS 
attacks on their availability. Now look at google, i dont know how many 
times it suffered from such attacks. None ??

  What P2P services that google doesn't have ? Global searching ? You're 
taking about the master here. Global storage system ? Google has no 
problem in giving you 2-3Gb freely(emails, pictures and other spaces). 
Sharing ? Google video, Picassa and even Google music.

  So i come to think what the future of P2P would be like, especially 
when the day that all file-sharing networks got shut down by RIAA. In 
the user point of view, what advantage that P2P systems have over Google 
(or other client-server modeled system with load of money). Technically, 
is there any P2P service that cant be provided with equal quality by a 
very rich company ?

  Then, i stopped being depressed for one second, when looking at the 
security issues. Many ways to define privacy, but for me, it consists of 
anonymity and unlinkability (no correlation). You won't get anonymity 
when using Google (search, GMail ...). Is there any truly anonymous P2P 
systems out there ? At least there are undergoing development for such 
systems. Correlation is really a pain in the *ss, Google correlates all 
your search and your mail and store that on the database, it knows you 
better than you know yourself. Once that database leaks, or got seized 
by the police, your privacy is seriously violated, and worse thing is 
that nothing you can do about it. P2P behaves much better in this 
situation, as your activity (search) were distributed among all other 
peers, and they won't be interested in keeping your (log) information at 
all. It's also hard for the police to track down your activity on the 
net; they'd have to look at other peers' computers as well, and those 
peers will definitely not give in easily.

  In summary, my big question is, will there really be a bright future 
for P2P ?

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From: "Juuso Lehtinen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:31:05 +0300

Hi,

> is there any P2P service that cant be provided with equal quality by a

You point the key element here; for a client-server architecture to
provide 'equal quality' as P2P, you need this 'very rich company'.
Google has enormous infrastructure with which it can handle the
millions of page-views it gets every day. Google has grown little by
little, day by day. Certainly, Google at it inception, wasn't capable
of handling its current traffic loads.

Below are some thoughts why P2P is important:

There are some services which inherently work better in P2P fashion.
For example, person to person communications, e.g., voice and video,
(and even instant messaging) are better sent directly between
communicating parties than routed via centralized servers.

Then there are the file sharing services. Sharing large and
potentiality unpopular files between relatively few people is more
efficient in P2P. If the files are never needed, they are not
transmitted a single time over any network. Also, if the files are
popular, they are hosted at many places, and new downloads are thus
automatically distributed evenly across the network.

Last, peer-to-peer services can handle the flash crown phenomenon
better than centralized client-server architecture. This means that if
some service becomes suddenly hugely popular, the service scales with
the number of participants in P2P. In client-server model, you have to
actually throw more hardware into your data center.

> systems out there ? At least there are undergoing development for such

Tor  (http://tor.eff.org/) and Freenet (http://freenetproject.org/)
provide anonymity for web surfing and file sharing, respectively.