re: Peer Authentication

Vittorio Bertocci - MSFT — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 05:44:55 GMT

Thank you for the comment, Sebastien.
I agree with your comment if we consider classical P2P, then we are not really adding a lot to the expressiveness of the model.
What I think will be a game changer here is that you will be allowed to do things by phisical proximity. With Vista you can turn on 2 machines in the same room, and they can interact right away without being joined to a preexisting network; a bit like bluetooth, with a more powerful security model and none of the topology & bandwidth limitations.
The phisical place you are in gives you a powerful context in which you can frame your services, and that's something that traditional P2P didn't provide. Furthermore: proximity means that you can follow up out of band, or in other words you can look around you and maybe spot the person you are dealing with; or that after having met a person you can decide to itneract at the machine level, too, with something more significant than the classical IrDa exchange of vCards. This enables an entirely new level of trust (or distrust, for what matters) :-)

re: Peer Authentication

Sebastien Lambla — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 23:55:15 GMT

It's a very nice picture you paint there, but from my experience, we thought that back in 2000 when working on gnutella / gpulp / etc.

The question is not what we can do with p2p but what fills a gap in computing. File replication (a la foldershare), collaboration, yes. Chat, maybe, although i'm doubtful it'll replace messenger any time soon.

God knows i was enthusiastic about what could be achieved. But today, looking back, I don't think there will be any revolution.