(file sharing) morpheus rules!

[Adam Back]

If any were looking for a replacement for napster since
it buckled to pressure from RIAA, it's here: morpheus.

It's distributed like gnutella, but it scales, it has
fast searches, downloads work, and are not sensitive
to individual machines being switched off mid download.

It tries to download from network topologically close
machines.  (It downloads from multiple machines at
once to speed up download, and so that one machine
can go down without losing the download).

The architecture is a self organising network which
promotes some peers to being super-nodes based on
their bandwidth.  Super-nodes act as search hubs,
which avoids the gnutella melt-down which arises
due to their broadcast searches.

I've been informally plotting the growth of morpheus
for the last 3 weeks, and I figure it stands a 
fair chance of reaching 1 peta byte (1000 Terabytes)
in storage by the end of this month.  Last seen
with 600,000 simultaneous users sharing 50 million
files and 300 Tb of data.

windows only but worth rebooting into windows for.

on a side note napster deservd to die -- it's like
evolution for file sharing networks.  It's central
point of failure and central server involvement in 
searches made it too vulnerable to legal attack.

Gnutella wasn't but didn't scale, morpheus appears
to be scaling and if anything performance is improving
as the data density gets higher so the sharing surface
can give you the content you want from closer and closer
nodes.  There may be an inflection point where it
starts to really take off as the number of users
is still improving the usability, performance and
variety of content.

Adam