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mous e-mails and Web surfing. Zero-Knowledge's system was fairly ingenious. It designed each request for information from a Web surfer like an onion, with layer wrapped around layer. When one of Zero-Knowledge's servers received the request for information, by necessity revealing where the request was coming from, the server peeled off that information in the first layer and sent the rest on to another server. That second server had no way of knowing where the original request had come from. The process was then repeated, making communication untraceable.

Napster tried to make a deal with Zero-Knowledge that would have given its users absolute invisibility. Even more provocatively, it would have allowed Napster to keep reaching users at corporations and campuses that had banned Napster access. "As more and more institutions block access to our service, finding way to continue delivery of our service becomes more and more urgent," Ritter wrote in January to a Zero-Knowledge executive. Inside Napster, Ritter pressed Kessler to help put the deal together, using Shawn's desire for continued hypergrowth as a mild threat. "Shawn (napster) and I are both getting very fidgety over the blocking of our service at various institutions, and would like to at least see something happen," Ritter wrote. A minute later, he added: "And you know Shawn, if something doesn't happen soon, we're likely to see a cowboy roaming the halls." The talks with Zero-Knowledge failed because the demand for bandwidth from millions of users would have been too large for the architecture to handle.

CONSUMERS HUNTING FOR FREE MUSIC and hackers looking for something to do were not the only groups inspired by Napster's innovation and raging popularity. Big companies also took note and began to respond, in some cases by striking alliances with hackers barely older than Shawn. Peer-to-peer, they realized, was a very, very big deal. Longtime Intel Corp. chairman Andy Grove, the head of the world's largest microprocessor maker and a man not known for hyperbole, declared: "The whole Internet could be re-architected by Napster-like technology." Intel wrote its own programs for allowing employees to grab files from one another. With improved network flow and cheaper storage off the main servers,

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