EarthStation 5 - Peer-to-peer Services

Peer-to-peer Services

Earth Station 5 was based around a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service and a standalone Earth Station 5 file-sharing client. Initial versions of the software could only share or download files by using the ES5 network.

ES5's P2P network and client were announced on June 9, 2003. People associated with ES5 claimed in media reports that the network had more than 16,000,000 participants at its peak, but these numbers were unsupported and viewed very skeptically. The actual number of participants was probably several orders of magnitude smaller.

Largely due to the low availability of files on the small ES5 network, later versions of the ES5 client included the free software/open source giFT daemon which provided ES5 users access to the larger Gnutella and FastTrack networks. While Gnutella and FastTrack offered access to many more files, the functionality that let users access these networks did not take advantage of any of ES5's anonymity features, which decreased the advantages of ES5 over other P2P clients — in particular other FastTrack or Gnutella clients.