Wow. Sorry for the deluge of tech posts today, but this is too cool to ignore. Maybe you've already heard of it.

I knew that downhillbattle made cool t-shirts; I didn't know they also made cool software. But check out BlogTorrent — particularly their technical explanation. It lets you run a BitTorrent tracker on any website with PHP! Installation is as simple as uploading a directory! And users don't even have to have BT installed... it wraps downloaded .torrents in a BT executable that works on Windows or Mac!

Frankly, it's taking a lot of effort to keep myself from installing this right away, opening it to the world, and getting sued for millions of dollars. But it does seem likely to doom the RIAA's strategy of going after tracker sites — any jerk can anonymously obtain some PHP hosting (often for free), set this up, and become a mini Pirate Bay. For a few weeks, anyway.

Or maybe I'll just set up a private tracker to distribute important TV shows* to Catherine, Susan and the rest of the 05/06 DC blog diaspora. Either way: I badly wanna play with this toy.

* for which I have obtained legal distribution rights, of course