P2P File Sharing

File sharing is the distribution of computer files such as music, movies, and even computer programs, from one computer to another. There are multiple ways to do this, you can either burn what you want to share onto a CD, which in a sense is pretty useless because only one person can really use it, or you can copy it to a USB drive and essentially keep passing on the USB drive to others to copy the file from. Another way is to use software, you can use software such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and even upload files to websites like MEGA.

P2P File Sharing is known as peer-to-peer file sharing, which is when you share files through a network and in a sense, "directly" download files from other people's computers; while not accessing those computers physically. What makes this different from regular file sharing is the sense that, the more "peers" you are downloading from, the quicker your download because you can download different parts of a file from each person, while with standard file sharing, you would only be able to download it from one location and one host.

The most common example of P2P is when you Torrent a file. Torrenting is essentially P2P file sharing, the peers act as the host for the file. One example of a Torrenting client is BitTorrent. In the article on Wired.com, Clive Thompson, talks about how Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent realized that "chopping up a file and handing out the pieces to several uploaders would really speed things up." What this is talking about is having a file get divided into parts based on how peers or seeders are available, and then for the client to download all these different parts, while your Torrenting client works like magic, and pieces your file all together. So this can make doing things like downloading TV episodes, movies or even something like Microsoft Office, much quicker, opposed to relying on download links, which slows it down.