Freenet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.
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.
Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is IBM's proprietary networking architecture, created in 1974. It is a complete protocol stack for interconnecting computers and their resources. SNA describes formats and protocols and is, in itself, not a piece of software. The implementation of SNA takes the form of various communications packages, most notably Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM), the mainframe software package for SNA communications.
giFT Internet File Transfer (giFT) was a computer software daemon that allows several file sharing protocols to be used with a simple client having a graphical user interface (GUI). The client dynamically loads plugins implementing the protocols, as they are required.
Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system.
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a class of a decentralized distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
Ares Galaxy is an open source peer-to-peer file sharing application that uses its own decentralized supernode/leaf network. It was spun off from the gnutella network in 2002, and is hosted on SourceForge.net. Ares Galaxy has a simple, quick access interface with a built in audio/video viewer. The latest versions also support the BitTorrent protocol and Shoutcast radio stations.
An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.
A wireless mesh network (WMN) is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. It is also a form of wireless ad hoc network.
A distributed data store is a computer network where information is stored on more than one node, often in a replicated fashion. It is usually specifically used to refer to either a distributed database where users store information on a number of nodes, or a computer network in which users store information on a number of peer network nodes.
An overlay network is a computer network that is built on top of another network.
In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the hash of a data block, and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.
The Skype protocol is a proprietary Internet telephony network used by Skype. The protocol's specifications have not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are closed-source.
In circuit theory, a supernode is a theoretical construct that can be used to solve a circuit. This is done by viewing a voltage source on a wire as a point source voltage in relation to other point voltages located at various nodes in the circuit, relative to a ground node assigned a zero or negative charge.
n2n is an open source Layer 2 over Layer 3 VPN application which utilises a peer-to-peer architecture for network membership and routing.
JEM, the BEE is a Java, cloud-aware application which implements a Batch Execution Environment, to help and manage the execution of jobs, described by a Job Control Language (JCL). JEM, the BEE performs the following functions:
A distributed ledger is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. There is no central administrator or centralized data storage.
