The internet is entering a new phase of collaboration that many developers think Many Internet developers think will shift power away from old-line media and software companies while rapidly bringing about an age of computerized "augmentation" by blending the skills of tens of thousands of individuals.
Scientists concerned about the vulnerability of the Internet to failure or hacking envision a next-generation system that would use the collective power of users' computers to become more secure.
The U.S. military is looking to peer-to-peer technology to help it share information on the fly across its many branches, agencies, ships, airplanes, tanks and ground troops -- here and around the world.
For several decades, the military has been using large-scale client-server systems to build networked environments where soldiers can train in simulated battle conditions. Now the military is looking at peer-to-peer technology as a way to build these simulations without a vulnerable central server.
A group of software developers has released a peer-to-peer virtual aquarium, an experiment in distributed artificial life that is attempting "to realize the living global digital Gaia: a virtual ocean distributed across machines that span the entire non-virtual world; a community of millions of users all taking part in building this virtual ocean, creating the ecology and the life forms that inhabit it; the life forms seamlessly swimming from one machine to the next..."
A radical research proposal by two Australian scientists calls for turning the Internet into a giant Napster. It could transform the Web into its most natural form -- a free communication device operated entirely by its users in a vast, so-called peer-to-peer network.