Napster, hatched by a teenager, signals a new era of peer-to-peer computing--a Net that functions just fine without big expensive servers.

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While Napster is a consumer example of peer-to-peer computing, with the right networking technologies in place, businesses will be able to use it to harness the power of multiple computers connected to the Internet to run compute-intensive applications, he said.

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But what exactly is peer-to-peer computing?

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That task has fallen to an unlikely open source project that is based on cryptography protocols and peer-to-peer distributed computing.

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