One-click hosting services: a file-sharing hideout

File sharing using peer-to-peer (p2p) systems is a major Internet application and the leading source of network traffic today. However, the dominance of p2p systems for file sharing has been recently challenged by an increasing number of services, such as RapidShare and MegaUpload, which offer users the ability to share files through centralized servers, without relying on an underlying p2p infrastructure. These services, referred to as One-Click Hosting (OCH), have the potential to offer users better performance and availability than p2p systems. If they succeed, OCH services may become the leading platform for file sharing and eventually replace p2p systems for this purpose. In this paper, we present the first, to our knowledge, detailed study of OCH traffic and services focusing on the most popular such service: RapidShare. Through a combination of passive and active measurements, we attempt to understand their service architecture, usage patterns, and content characteristics...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IMC
• Authors: Demetres Antoniades, Evangelos P. Markatos, Constantine Dovrolis
• Keywords: IMC 2009, Internet Technology, P2P Systems, RapidShare, file Sharing