What actually got me thinking about this topic originally was this comic: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/ It brought me back to my BBS days when I co

What actually got me thinking about this topic originally was this comic: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/ It brought me back to my BBS days when I could send a file directly to a friend's system with no intermediaries. I didn't even need them to be there when I uploaded it to their machine! Even if they didn't run their own, I could post it somewhere on my own system and let them grab it at their convenience. It was easy, it was direct, it was as fast as you could get at the time, and it was private. There were no intermediate computers or networks which had to bless your traffic. Like the xkcd suggests, there are size limits, filters, and all sorts of other crazy things once you start relying on those systems.