In what can only be described as “bound to happen,” the popular BitTorrent file sharing network is succumbing to spyware in its mix.

File sharing networks are notorious distribution mechanisms for spyware. And Direct Revenue, who is supposedly behind the hidden executables in the multimedia files circulating on the BitTorrent networks, is a (supposedly) notoriously sneaky advertising company.

I don’t use any file sharing mechanism, but up to this point, BitTorrent was considered a reliable and effective way of grabbing goodies such as Linux distros. I even used it once for that very purpose. With this type of file sharing, you never know exactly where the file is coming from, as the program shares files both up and down the pipe. For that reason, I’ll hold off next time, and you should too.

***UPDATE***

But just in case it isn’t true, which some people are now suggesting, you should read this post from Slashdot. The commentary regards John Dvorak’s theory on a Microsoft conspiracy against BitTorrent.

So I am mulling this real time streaming data concept when I come across this article from Forbes: Data On The Fly. It talks about Michael Stonebraker of Ingres and Postgres fame, who started a new company called Streambase. This outfit has produced a derivative of SQL they call StreamSQL, and the claim is it can process data as it comes in the pipe, before it is written to disk. Great for big hedge funds and market makers.

Seems like this StreamSQL could prove a pretty interesting tool for a peer-to-peer database network. Finding out what data you really need to hold on to before you write would fit into the limited storage capacity scenario likely existing at each node in such a network.

Could BitTorrent be used to share information between disparate databases? For example, I have an SQL database full of information, and you have one too. Now I go searching for something in my database, it is not found, so instead of giving up, it would then look on your database. Any thoughts?