FastTrack is a
peer-to-peer (P2P)
protocol that was used by the
Kazaa,
Grokster,
iMesh, and
Morpheus file sharing programs. FastTrack was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, and used mainly for the exchange of music
mp3 files. The network had approximately 2.4 million concurrent users in 2003. It is estimated that the total number of users was greater than that of
Napster at its peak.
History
The FastTrack protocol and Kazaa were developed by
Niklas Zennström from Sweden,
Janus Friis from Denmark and Estonian programmers headed by
Jaan Tallinn, the same team that later created
Skype. It was introduced in March 2001 by their
Dutch company Consumer Empowerment. It appeared during the end of the first generation of P2P networks –
Napster shut down in July of that year.
There are three FastTrack-based networks, and they use mutually incompatible versions of the protocol. The most popular clients on each are Kazaa (and its variations), Grokster, and iMesh.
For more information about the various lawsuits surrounding Kazaa and Sharman Networks, see
Kazaa.
Technology
FastTrack uses
supernodes to improve scalability.
To allow downloading from multiple sources, FastTrack employs the
UUHash hashing algorithm. While UUHash allows very large files to be checksummed in a short time, even on slow computers, it also allows for massive corruption of a file to go unnoticed. Many people, as well as the
RIAA, have exploited this vulnerability to spread corrupt and fake files on the network.
Clients
The FastTrack protocol uses
encryption and was not documented by its creators, and the first clients were all closed source software. However, initialization data for the encryption algorithms is sent in the clear and no
public key encryption is used, so reverse engineering was made comparatively easy. In 2003,
open source programmers succeeded in reverse-engineering the portion of the protocol dealing with client-supernode communication, but the supernode-supernode communication protocol remains largely unknown.
The following programs are or have been FastTrack clients:
- KCeasy (requires the gIFT-fasttrack plugin)
- MLDonkey, a free multi-platform multi-network file sharing client
See also
