There are people who don’t agree with peer-to-peer and other file-sharing networks, and then there are people who really don’t agree with peer-to-peer and other file-sharing networks.

It would seem that someone in the latter category has taken umbrage with BitTorrent, and has taken it upon themselves to take BitTorrent out.

So it was that on Wednesday BitTorrent sustained ten solid hours of DDos (distributed denial-of-service attacks), aimed at the central BitTorrent directories. According to one of BitTorrent’s administrators, the unknown number of attacking systems completely maxed out BitTorrent’s 100-megabit connection.

The way that BitTorrent works is actually quite clever and elegant. A large file, say a movie, is broken up into little chunks in little files, and each of those little chunks is hosted on a different computer belonging to a different user. When someone wants to download that movie… [Continued]