Spaced Out ::

Peer-to-Peer networking has been around for quite a while and is accompanied by the music industry’s paranoia concerning piracy. And they well might be right, but thats not the focus here. Rather businesses are starting to see the benefits of a variety of peer-to-peer networks and there are now a wealth of clients around using different network protocols.

One recent development in this area then is AllPeers, an Add-On for Firefox. So the first thing to note is that peer-to-peer is now integrated in to the browser, which in my opinion is a good thing. One piece of networking software to handle a variety of tasks. The second thing of note is that as a result, AllPeers takes advantage of the built-in SSL to offer encryption in file sharing. Finally, you have user-level control over the files you wish to share. Great if you want to make your holiday snaps available to just your Mum, whilst your stag-night video is only downloadable by those that attended!

So these are two huge advantages. AllPeers is currently in pre-release beta but offers a solid client that is highly functional. The system is server based in order to search for other clients and files. If they aren’t already on AllPeers then they are sent an email and, after downloading the plugin, can join in. As noted above, you can user level file permissions for sharing and it is as simple as dragging and dropping the file you want to share on to groups of users or individuals. Whilst it can be difficult to put a peer-to-peer UI within the paradigm of a web browser, All Peers have done a good job. As this is a pre-release version there are features still being added. An instant messaging client has recently appeared which is also pretty good.

And why might you want to use a peer-to-peer client? And why is this post in the GIS category? Well, I often find myself needing to file share spatial data with colleagues or students and as soon as they get too big for email (>10Mb) then it becomes a problem. In fact most of the time I drop back to sticking the files on a web server and emailing a link. All Peers adds convenience, encryption and permissions to help solve this problem.