The Mandelbear's Musings

This article about Bit Torrent, Comcast, and spam led me to briefly contemplate carrying BitTorrent traffic over email, which one might call "BotTorrent". Keep track of available and requested files using a mailing list. Break a file into chunks, forward them to a few friends who have indicated interest, let them forward them, and so on. Keep track of where each chunk has been so you don't send duplicates. Of course, everything would have to be base64 encoded, which makes it bigger. And big files would take a lot of chunks. So the carriers would figure out how to label it as spam, and block it. Nevermind.

There are, however, other protocols that are harder to block. Notably HTTP. And you can request a range of bytes from a file. So if you could locate a number of servers all of which had the file, you could spread your requests among them. Hashes are good both for identifying files and for randomizing requests. Alternatively you could just use the Coral content distribution network. I still think there's a pony in there somewhere.