David Nicol wrote:
So that's what UPnP is for!
Actually it's so that your toaster, PVR, printer, laptop, and refrigerator can auto-discover each other on the network. NAT traversal is just a small part of UPnP (but it's the part that will let a 12 year old in Kyrgyzstan shut off your freezer while you're on vacation).
You can see UPnP in "action" by listening on a LAN with Windows boxes present. Eventually you'll see them spit out SSDP packets. Other competing protocols include SLP (Service Location Protocol) and Jini.
i think a bittorrent proxy library, perhaps operated by an upstream ISP, would make sense just like "web page acceleration" which means, the ISP has installed a proxy server makes sense. Technically. Businesswise, installing and supporting dedicated bittorrent servers for the benefit of your users will not make sense until there is demand. And Torrent protocol would need to get extended to support the repository-proxy concept.
Why would you need to extend the Torrent protocol? Transparent proxies (whether they use direct intervention, WCCP, or something else) have existed for HTTP for a while now.