FastTrack/fr

Qu'est-ce que FastTrack ?

FastTrack était un réseau propriétaire fermé appartenant à Sharman Networks.Kazaa, Grokster and iMesh se connectaient à FastTrack. Un client devait payer une cotisation pour se connecter au réseau. Tous les programmes cité précèdement contenaient des adware où spyware et leurs utilisateurs devaient eux aussi payer une licence pour utiliser ces logiciels.

FastTrack est un large réseau P2P, mais malheureusement il a un système de hash très faible, d’où le nombre élevé de fichiers corrompus où altérés. C'est aussi un protocole Pair-à-pair qui est utilisé par Kazaa, Grosker, iMesh et Morpheus. En 2003, FastTrack était le plus populaire des réseaux de partage de fichiers pour l'échange de musique (*.mp3). A son apogée, le réseau comptait approximativement 2,4 million d'utilisateurs. On estime que le nombre total d'utilisateurs est supérieur à celui de Napster à son apogée.

History

The FastTrack protocol and Kazaa were created and developed by Estonian programmers of BlueMoon Interactive headed by Jaan Tallinn, the same team that later created Skype. After selling it to Niklas Zennström from Sweden and Janus Friis from Denmark, 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 (1.).

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.

Clients

The following programs are or have been FastTrack clients:

• Kazaa and variants
• KCeasy (requires the gIFT-fasttrack plugin)
• Grokster
• iMesh
• Morpheus, until 2002
• Apollon - KDE-Based
• giFT-FastTrack [1] – a giFT plugin
• MLDonkey, a free multi-platform multi-network file sharing client

References

1. How Overpeer was able to corrupt data on the FastTrack network.

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