'Evil' P2P - The One Microsoft Way

P2P is evil and the scourge of the Internet. Or so those that seek to part everyone from their hard earned cash at every available opportunity keep telling us.

Now, Microsoft enters the world of evil P2P with its own file-sharing software, codenamed 'Avalanche', which is based on Bram Cohen's well established and respected BitTorrent protocol.

Microsoft researchers said 'Avalanche' could be used to help distribute software and security patches, which The Antagonist finds rather odd because Microsoft recently invoked the nonsense DMCA against P2P group Downhill Battle for doing just that.

With regard to 'Avalanche' the software - Stable doors, horses and bolts.

In reality, it promises nothing that some bright kid somewhere won't improve upon immediately, if not before, 'Avalanche' starts rolling down the Microsoft mountain. Such is the fluid, dynamic and fast-paced nature of the Internet. So fast and fluid, in fact, that the traditional, behemothic industries of yore are finding it increasingly more difficult to compete and stay afloat.

The Internet paradigm has, since its inception, forged new, diverse, cooperative communities of inter-connected people that traditional supply/demand economic market models cannot entertain and simultaneously survive.

This new international community of peer-to-peer users, Internet Relay Chatters and Instant Messengers, where users of these services share globally their local and invidual forms of culture, music and ideas in a mass-rejection of the hard-copy, solid-state, media channels of yesterday, is now a living, breathing entity outside of anyone's direct control and it has high-speed access to the world's single biggest information resource.

This Internet community has built itself, almost from nothing, in the space of just 20 years and is only now starting to be recognised, or perhaps just openly acknowledged, by those that have denied it for so long, for the force (read: threat) of prominence and escalating conscience that is its very essence.

Those that stand to lose that over which they had no legitimate claim originally, will necessarily endeavour to hold back the unstoppable march of progress, or continue to jump on the bandwagon a short while after it's already too late.

Microsoft's 'Avalanche' is a shining example of the latter.