DIVE INTO SOFTWARE /
	clients for file sharing
	In a Peer to Peer network, each node is governed by the same rules and has the same ability to initiate and negotiate connections with other nodes. This may sound very dull, and maybe it is, but it has offered some interesting ways to get around idiotic intellectual property law enforcement. Traditional network models are a legacy of the olden days, when users used terminals to timeshare connection to a mainframe. The 'client/server', or 'master/slave' network model of a big, powerful computer serving many small puny computers still prevails, and makes it farily simple for the owners of big powerful computers (or people who have the cash to sue them) to control access to network resources. However, now that most consumer desktop computers are extremely powerful, and broadband access is growing, the Peer to Peer network model in which each computer fulfils the same function has become increasingly useful. Peer to Peer has become a more general term for file sharing software that stores data on user machines. This is a bit confusing because if there is a central server that catalogues and tracks the files, and does the searching etc., the network is not genuinely Peer to Peer, and is just as simple to control centrally as a client/server network. Napster, for instance, was one of these sort-of-peer-to-peer-networks, most of which have now been sued off-line. The genuine Peer to Peer networks such as Gnutella that still function on the Internet distribute data, but also distribute search processing and databases of file locations, so cannot be knocked off-line so easily by removing one component node. The route around Intellectual Property law that these networks offer has depended on the technical and legal inability of IP owners to track and persue such a huge mass of uploaders and downloaders. Recently, after lots of high-level lobbying, IP owners are being given licence to hack by the US Government (under the proposed Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) and have already started persuing some 'offenders', and generally sabotaging the networks with semantic attacks (uploading millions of badly named files to confuse people). There seem to be two possible ways to maintain Peer to Peer's useful legal workarounds; to use strong encryption and increased security to prevent corporate hacking and snooping (as the Freenet project attempts to do), and/or to move off the Internet and onto Free Networks where node owners can control who accesses their resources, and who they swap files with.