John Schwartz/NYTimes: Hackers Steal From Pirates, to No Good End:

...[The Trojan viruses] use the commandeered machines to form a peer-to-peer network like the popular Kazaa program used to trade music files. Each machine on the network can share resources and provide information to the others without being controlled by a central server machine.

"It's like Kazaa only without all the pesky copyrighted files," Mr. [Joe] Stewart said [a computer expert at the LURHQ Corporation, a security company based in Chicago]. And, as the music industry has discovered, when there is no central machine, "these tactics make it impossible to shut down," he said.

What does this mean to people sued for copyright infringement and distributing files, the companies that go after filesharers, and what does it mean for our attempts to find ways to compensate creators? Also, evidently 33% of spam is now sent from programs like this, working without people's knowledge on home machines, and trojans are used to install porn dialers used to secretly ring up charges. Spammers have a business incentive for creating trojans and that is a whole new ball game.