Well recently you may have seen in the news that the Limewire pear to pear operations has been shut down and if you visit the Limewire website you will see a notice stating why.
LimeWire Legal Notice
So LimeWire p2p got shutdown because they allowed people to download illegal content. Not all content on the network was illegal but most people abused it. Some people will make a version of Linux or do podcasts and use the Network to send them out without having to host it using bandwidth transfer and disk space on their own web server/hosting plan. This is the same with torrents. So the Torrent and LimeWire technology can be used for good but it sadly abused. LimeWire is a client that connects to the Gnutella network. There are still clients out there that can connect to the Gnutella network not made by LimeWire. The way P2p file sending works is someone will add a file to the network and with their client open, the file is accessible. Each client acts as a node on the network. Clients can search Gnutella index or the torrent trackers index. A client will then start downloading from all the nodes with that file on the network. So basically Gnutella or Torrent Tracker stores information that contains where the file is located. The file itself isn’t on the trackers server. LimeWire use the Gnutella network by default or you could give it a torrent file from some other tracker/network. This is my understanding on this technology and please correct me if I am wrong.
So lets put this in context. Your web browser of choice is a client. Google is the network Index. Some other server hosts the file. Continue reading
