Well, we released the code as open-source software so that anyone can take the ideas and implement them elsewhere. And we're happy to help anyone who wants to port it.

(From one of the software authors)
Obviously this is a real concern, so by default SwarmScreen does nothing until you tell the software where to find content to download. It will only get content from the sites you tell it to.

(From the one of the software authors) UTorrent doesn't support plugins and is closed source. If that were to change, we'd happily develop for it.

This is slightly OT, but your brother might find it helpful to check out what these guys are doing: http://people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~bfranke/csreq/index.html There is a movement toward making CS a graduation requirement for high school, something tells me a few of your here would agree with this.

Actually, I've seen this effect before when testing transfers between two machines behind the same router (one Linux, one XP), both sending data to the same destination in an alternating fashion. Linux was consistently faster. At the time, the source of the difference was that Linux was using a more aggressive default TCP stack than Windows. This might be the reason.