On Monday, peer-to-peer service  BitTorrent announced that it will bundle its content-sharing system with routers, media servers, and storage hardware from ASUS, Planex, and QNAP.
According to Lily Lin, BitTorrent's director of communications , embedding BitTorrent's software as a native feature on devices will simplify the file-sharing experience for everyone. For instance, two of the new devices mentioned in the announcement can be configured to download BitTorrent content without the need for a PC.
Convenient? Yes. And offloading BitTorrent functions to a dedicated media or storage server might also be a bit more secure . After all, an unattended PC downloading files from peer-to-peer networks can expose private data and make it vulnerable to viruses, Trojan horses, or other pieces of malicious software.
A P2P system embedded in a dedicated server also shifts power consumption and strain away from the user's PC, saving pennies that could add up for users who leave their systems running overnight to download large documents.
P2P for Business?
BitTorrent was introduced in 2001 by Bram Cohen and hit what Lin calls "an inflection point" in 2003, gaining a great deal of popularity through word of mouth and the adoption of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol in many popular P2P applications.
Today the service boasts some 80 million users with five million running the software at any point in time.
Lin also said that BitTorrent has found its way into the corporate world. "Think of it more as a B2B play," she said, noting that not all P2P users are teenagers swapping songs after school.
Plenty of Legitimate Uses
Two of the devices mentioned in today's announcement, the QNAP TS-101 and TS-102 servers, are business-grade tools designed for high-speed data storage and retention.
The TS-102, for instance, offers features such as hot-swappable drives and redundant backup, technologies that are unlikely to pique the interest of home users.
Why the business adoption, if only partial, of peer-to-peer products?
According to Lin, peer-to-peer technology is an efficient way to distribute high-quality -- and legitimate -- content, and BitTorrent doesn't expose end users' machines the way other P2P systems do.
"It's different from the KaZaas and Morpheuses of the world," said Lin, "where you can troll through people's hard drives and see what they've got."
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