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“The 160-mile download diet: Local file-sharing drastically cuts network load”

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“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.”