Technology Review has an interesting article on the uses of Peer-to-Peer technology other than violating copyright laws.

According to the author, P2P “technology can be used for good: It has the power to strengthen the Internet against terrorist attack, allow even the smallest publishers to distribute information to the multitudes, and protect controversial information against censorship and suppression.”

Most interesting to me, for a number of reasons, however, is this, regarding the use of P2P to fight spam:

And then there’s a clever peer-to-peer system called Vipul’s Razor, which is being used to filter spam. A small software agent runs on every computer attached to the network. This agent detects when e-mail arrives. The theory is that if the same message appears in multiple locations at more-or-less the same time, it’s probably spam. This approach is an excellent complement to content-based anti-spam systems: the content systems identify spam that looks like spam, while Razor identifies mail that is sent the way spam is typically sent, no matter what it looks like. Support for Razor is built in to the popular SpamAssassin anti-spam system. In an examination of my spam from September, Razor identified one out of three spam messages–pretty good considering that it doesn’t use any keywords at all.

Huh. Tracking spam by looking at the Internet from above, as opposed to looking at the incoming flow of mail in one account. Sounds good to me.

(via Geek Press)