Decentralization - Implications of the end-to-end principle (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization) - A mailing list exclusively devoted to the architecture of P2P-systems, with a lot of traffic and interesting ideas passed around. Founded by Lucas Gonze, with lots of high-profile subscribers from the P2P field. Open since July 2000, and still running past Nov 2002.
The GDF (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gdf/) - The Gnutella Developer Forum is a group for discussing extensions of the Gnutella protocol. It is the largest standards body for the Gnutella network, and anyone working on a servant should be a member.
The Napster Experience (http://www.napsterresearch.com) - Critical consumer research (Markus Giesler, York Universisty) analyzing file-sharing as a form of gift giving and consumer emancipation.
A Method of Free Speech on the Internet: Random Pads (http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/misc/freespeech.html) (by David A. Madore) - Discusses how information can be completely separated from its creators by XORing it with chunks of random data. The resulting "pads" can then be distributed across so-called "pad archives". A pad archive neither knows what it is hosting nor does it host provably controversial data, since the data cannot be distinguished from noise. It's mainly a legal question: If the courts would outlaw hosting random data, it wouldn't work. Other than that, it's pretty safe -- interesting read, and there are already quite a lot of pad archives (thanks to Slashdot).
SafeX (http://david.weekly.org/fexnet.php3) - Secure and Anonymous File EXchange. Just a draft with many interesting ideas to use in other projects.
The Free Haven Project (http://www.freehaven.net) - Similar goals to Freenet, with different solutions. Some interesting papers. Not much code yet.
The Big Hack: Home of the OFF System (http://www.thebighack.org) - A crusade originaly started to create a peer-to-peer system of file exchange where everything exchanged is legal. Originally designed, created, and coded by a blind community activist naming himself WhiteRaven, he has since left that site due to the fact that it was in fact a part of a interactive media companies sick joke. After being abused by the company in question he left taking part of his notes and code with him, but not before the company stole his source forge account and took over the project in the hopes of using it to band the p2p community together in order to sell them site merchandise. WhiteRaven went on to help with the creation of Monolith ( http://monolith.sourceforge.net/ ).
OceanStore (http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/) - OceanStore is "designed to span the globe and provide continuous access to persistent information". "Data is protected through redundancy and cryptographic techniques. To improve performance, data are allowed to be cached anywhere, anytime. Additionally, monitoring of usage patterns allows adaptation to regional outages and denial of service attacks; monitoring also enhances performance through pro-active movement of data. A prototype implementation is currently under development."
Fling (http://fling.sourceforge.net/) | Sourceforge page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fling) - An attempt to provide anonymity on the protocol level (i.e. replace TCP/IP). Still in the planning stages as of Nov 2002.
Ben Houston's P2P Idea Page (http://www.exocortex.org/p2p/index.html) - Ben Houston has written a lot of interesting analyses of distributed systems, among them proposals for more efficient, self-organizing and self-optimizing networks.
The Eternity Service by Ross Anderson (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/eternity/eternity.html) - This paper is a rather simple suggestion for a redundant, anonymous storage system with payment features.
Intermemory Project (http://www.intermemory.net/) - Aims to create "large-scale, self-organized, survivable, available, and secure widely-distributed storage". See papers.
Who's on First Proposal (http://skuz.net/potatoware/wof/) - This page introduces the Who's On First (WOF) anonymous network, which is the working title of a proposal for a more flexible and reliable anonymous communication network than that provided by current Type I and II remailers.
JetFile (http://www.sics.se/cna/jetfile.html) - Proposal for a scalable distributed file system (some parts are centralized).
Peer-to-peer goes legitimate (BBC, 17th December 2004) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4104827.stm) The article explains how some new and established artists are using file sharing to market themselves and then how they can use pay-sites to make a living, all without the involvement of record companies.
Sources
This article was partly based on public domain material from the infoAnarchy wiki.
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