Tiny P2P - the world’s smallest P2P application
Peer to peer (P2P) applications are used to allow users to share information in a network. Some, such as Napster, need centralized servers to maintain an index of who is offering what data where, others are more decentralised. Ed Felton has written a P2P application in only 15 lines code, each containing eighty characters or less. The program was developed to show how easy it is to develop a P2P application, as Ed says:
I wrote TinyP2P to illustrate the difficulty of regulating peer-to-peer applications. Peer-to-peer apps can be very simple, and any moderately skilled programmer can write one, so attempts to ban their creation would be fruitless.My goal in creating this program is not to facilitate copyright infringement. I do not condone copyright infringement. Nothing about the program’s design is optimized for the sharing of infringing files. The program is useful mainly as a proof of concept. A more practical program would be faster, more secure, and more resilient against failure.