Indeed. First thing I thought of - that guy must have read way too much Neal Stephenson.

Thank you for that DUH. Bram Cohen originally designed the protocol to be an ultra-scalable file distribution approach, and every attempt to add security, encryption, or whatever is trying to add something against the grain of its origin. (It may still be worth doing it, in the same sense that steganography may still be worth doing.) Bittorrent is for above-board, everyone-knows-you're-doing-it file distribution. If you want to hide what you're doing, do it with something else.

Damn bugs. Always screwing up the teletype.

After working with VPS hosting for several years, and starting to build larger infrastructure proposals with virtualization and 'cloud' resources in mind, this particular paper is going to be very useful. We have already been running into serious portability, security/compliance, and QA issues. Nevertheless, since we have a pulse, we can still see how kick-a** the price points are, and would much rather work through these issues in a community rather than bumble around with them ourselves. Just try to move an EC2 instance to Slicehost, or vice versa, and then try to get any piece of your proposal through the compliance lawyers, and you'll feel the burn.