Peer to Peer and SPAM in the Internet

In the past few years much attention is given to an information exchange framework called Peer-to-Peer (P2P). This paper focuses on the Gnutella project as a successful example of decentralized P2P network. The author gives an overview of original and present Gnutella network architecture, makes the detailed description of messages exchange within the network, provides the reader with own experience of using different Gnutella applications and depicts the main issues of the project.