HAMBURG, May 12: A hidden function in the popular online exchange bazaar KaZaA software (www.kazaa.com) has brought the company that makes it under the critical gaze of authorities.

In effect, an additional programme from the US-based firm Billiant Digital Entertainment (BDE) is tucked into KaZaA, making all users of the popular, software into participants in a commercial Peer-to-Peer network (P2P) — even if they don’t want to be.

BDE is in the business of harvesting millions of private online PCs for the segments of their processing power that are sitting unused. Critics complain that most users have no knowledge of how BDE can take control of their machines over the Internet.

Peer-to-peer networks are simple computer networks that run without a privileged central server. Nevertheless, computers on a P2P network can exchange data — or work together on a task.

BDE hopes to use the KaZaa software to build its Own P2P network in order to more effectively disseminate online advertising, and to make possible so-called shared computation. Companies can buy computation, power or storage space from BDE; which the company then sends out over the P2P network.—dpa