Given its association with illegal file-sharing, you may wonder why anyone would make use of P2P. Users could download the client from a website then connect to other “peers” to download files to their machine: unfortunately this gave the P2P protocol a bad name, as users often used the clients to upload and download copyrighted content like music. Some of the first early popular P2P file-sharing programs were Napster and GNUtella. This is very useful for operations like downloading files, as users can download fragments of the file from every other connected device in the network that already has the file rather than wait for it to be sent by a central server. In a P2P network, devices connect to each other to share resources. This is usually done with special software and has many uses : for instance IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an example of P2P in that anyone using the right software can send and receive messages from anyone else who’s connected to the network. Effectively, this means that each node is both a server and a client. Every device or ‘node’ can both send and receive data. The information is requested by the client, then sent by the server. This is known as the “client-server” model. When you visit a website on your computer to download train timetables, for example, your device (the client), is requesting information from the train operator’s computers (the server). It helps to understand this by comparing P2P to traditional downloads. In the context of networking, peer-to-peer (P2P) is a way in which devices can communicate with each other on equal terms.
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