Every so often, I will hear someone say that Bram Cohen clearly wroteBitTorrent to facilitate piracy (despite any of his claims to thecontrary) because it was deliberately designed to frustrate attemptsto monitor its traffic. This claim irritates me partly because it isclearly wrong, almost blatantly so.

(Disclaimer: I am talking here about classic BitTorrent, as it wasbefore ISPs started whacking things with hammers and people startedreacting.)

There are two important things in a BitTorrent transfer: the peers, thecollection of machines

My minimum technical requirements forreal web spiders are deliberately quite black and white. But there arealso a number of more fuzzy things that I expect from responsible webspiders. Bear in mind that these aren't hard and fast rules and I can'tgive precise numbers and so on.

(As before, this only applies to what I'm calling 'real' or 'legitimate' web spiders ; I can't expectany particular behavior from malicious web spiders.)

Disclaimers in place, here'

Suppose that you have been charged with building a traffic trackingsystem for your NAT gateway to be used when the campus NOC callsyou up to report that your gateway is doing too much of thewrong sort of traffic and gives you the remote IP addressesinvolved. At the same time you don't want to log too much information , so that all this juicy traffic datayou're gathering can't be used to do something like find out all thewebsites someone has been visiting.

No problems; you'