Someone ought to make an application that will allow you to download files from sites, but submit the URLs to a central service that’s a BitTorrent tracker, and see if anyone else using the service is also downloading those files, or has recently downloaded them, to try to accelerate the download a bit.

I’m currently downloading a file from a mirror that seems capable of about 100KB/sec, whereas I’m capable of something like 1MB/sec… And it’s a big file, which means I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs. In my case, the only benefit would be a speedup.

But then consider something like yesterday, when the Mozilla servers were presumably getting slammed. (Or anyone who uses sites like Digg/Slashdot, that result in a sudden flood of traffic to particular sites.) They could ease a lot of traffic on those sites, and also give users a bit of redundancy: sometimes the main site will die under the load, but there could potentially be hundreds of clients with the information.