P2P

File sharing is a way for users exchange files between their machines, file sharing has been around since the 90's and has gone through many transformation throughout the years. file sharing can be legal or illegal, in the US the FBI is doing a really good job with anything that has to do with illegal content distribution, not once we herd a story about a friend of a friend that a warning letter about illegal downloading.

One of the most popular way of file sharing is P2P how popular? The Economist claims "P2P site The Pirate Bay, with its millions of unique daily users" P2P which stands for Peer to Peer meaning there is one user in one end who produces a unique signture to a file and start "seeding" it on the other end there is a user that started downloading the file in small packets and he now owns part of the file, what is it good for? well, here come the interesting part and the power of P2P lets say another user starts downloading the file, he can download it from the source or his peer to the other user allowing him to get more of the file in a higher speed and in a more efficient way, and this is how it continues to spread rapidly.

Some other examples to file sharing platforms are:

FTP Servers, Kazaa, Napster, Gnutella, eDonkey2000, BitTorrent