Current popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy.  OneSwarm is a new file-sharing application that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. It was developed by UW computer scientists Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy and PhD students Michael Piatek and Tomas Isdal.

Read the Slashdot post here.

Read earlier coverage of BitTorrent here.

Read the article here.

“Ever since Bram Cohen invented BitTorrent, Web traffic has never been the same … Peer-to-peer networking, or P2P, has become the method of choice for sharing music and videos … Experts estimate that peer-to-peer systems generate 50 to 80 percent of all Internet traffic … Tensions remain, however, between users of bandwidth-hungry peer-to-peer users and struggling Internet service providers …

“To ease this tension, researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University propose a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet’s major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle.”

Read the article here.

Research by UW CSE professor Arvind Krishnamurthy has yielded dramatic bandwidth conservation for peer-to-peer file sharing. Extensive press coverage of Arvind’s P4P includes:

• “Throttling P2P traffic is shortsighted, experts say” (ITbusiness.ca) (8/22/08)
• “The Internet’s New Shortcut” (Forbes) (8/21/08)
• “Can P4P Solve Bandwidth Bloat? (GIGaom) (8/21/08)
• “Comcast Does About-Face: Declares Love for P2P” (Wired) (8/21/08)
• “Share Locally, Unclog the Internet” (Chronicle of Higher Education) (8/20/08)
• “Local Sharing Saves Bandwidth on BitTorrent/P4P Tests” (Slyck News) (8/20/08)
• “The 160-mile download diet: Local file-sharing drastically cuts network load” (UW News) (8/19/08)

See the P4P paper here.