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A few weeks ago, as I downloaded the enormity of XP SP2 to burn to CD, it occurred to me that it seems silly that Microsoft didn't leverage the power of bittorrent to distribute this update, and their patches in general. Imagine my dismay to discover that someone tried, and was promptly shut down using the DMCA. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised, but evidently Microsoft claims to be working on a similar "alternative" to bittorrent, which the creator of bittorrent is dismissing as nothing but vaporware.

But, further in this line of logic, why don't Anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors use it as well -- that is, build the bittorrent client right into the client's update code? These thoughts came home to roost a few days ago when the Mytob infections were running rampant, and as a result, AVG's free update site was overwhelmed and largely inaccessible all day. Something like bittorrent would never fall prey to this, and instead the result of the massive traffic load would be a benefit for everyone looking for this particular data. It's the perfect distribution method for these very time-sensitive spike-prone updates.

Naturally, security measures would have to be taken to prevent rogue bittorrent seeds posing as authoritative sources to inject bogus code/updates. Is PKI a viable answer to this? Are there any other pitfalls to using bittorrent to distribute these sorts of very sensitive updates?