The Gnutella technology, originally developed by programmers inside America Online's Nullsoft, works much like Napster but without a central server. A computer running the program connects directly to a handful of other computers, each of which are connected to another handful, creating a daisy chain of members that quickly becomes enormous. Developers say this has led to problems with a different kind of spam, as beta or badly written versions of the Gnutella software send poorly formed results onto the network, using precious bandwidth . But it's the deliberate spam such as advertisements that developers are now looking to stop before it gets out of hand. Flatplanet defends its practice, saying Gnutella ads aren't spam because they're not as intrusive as unsolicited bulk email.
People are upset that they have to look at an ad because it gets in the way of stealing music.
Most Gnutella advocates aren't sympathetic. Some people have mounted campaigns to track down early advertisers and contact their Internet service providers, hoping to unplug the advertisers. A few Gnutella developers have put rudimentary filtering capabilities into their software. Still more are talking about ways to improve the filtering features inside the network. One idea , originally posted pseudonymously on the Slashdot.org community site, is sparking considerable interest among developers.