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P2P counter attack

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1 minute read

After losing the eDonkey battle, the P2P community responds with:

1-1, I would say...

Web office

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After the rumor of a browser-based office application suite by Google and Sun resulted in nothing, let me point you the browser-based office application suite by ThinkFree.

Mail storage war, again

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So, we have gmail with is "growing every second" mail storage capacity (aproximetly 2.5 GB). Yesterday, I found 30gigs.com, a invite only free 30 GB mail capacity service. And when I was almost bloging about it, the heavy height contender debuted: the first TB (as in Tera Bytes, as in 1024 Giga Bytes) free(!) mail service, mailnation.net.

eDonkey is closing

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1 minute read

Seems like RIAA is going to win another battle, closing the p2p eDonkey network. In a testimony at a U.S. Senate Judiciary Hearing on the future of P2P, MetaMachine president Sam Yagan said his company (owner of the eDonkey network) was throwing in the towel.

The battle is lost, but the war continues: eDonkey is a server based p2p network, so all you need to shut it off is going for the servers. eDonkey is the most used p2p network, as stated by Slyck, so this decision seems to be a huge drawback in the war.

But if we look at the remaining networks, like FastTrack, Gnutella or BitTorrent, they all share the "no servers, use supernodes instead" implementation, there is, the supernode functionality is built into the client; if a powerful computer with a fast network connection runs the client software, it will automatically become a supernode, effectively acting as a temporary indexing server for other, slower clients.

And since supernodes come and go, all over the IP space, like digital mushroms, they are much harder to identify and shut down. So, light infantry is down, but we still have tanks and planes for the next battle.

Mashups

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I heard this term for the first time last week in Boston. I understood "sites that use two or more external sources to provide a new service". The first reference was Mappr, which uses Google Maps and Flickr APIs to geographically organize Flickr photos. But mashups are more than this, they have a huge fun potencial, as stated by this Zdnet's post.

Update: While thinking on the subject, I decided to make my first movie mashup: five pixar movies and a soundtrack, and you have it, an all new video clip for Birds of Prey by Fat Boy Slim. While you wait for the download (6MB for a 6m49s clip) you can take a look at the Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix.