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BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

torrentfreak.com

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Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#61

Post by manishsharan »

yid wrote: post #39
manishsharan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would respectfully disagree with what you seem to be implying. This service would mostly be used by us who are wary about trusting Google/Microsoft/Dropbox and the judgement of their automated decision systems with our life . Yesterday there was a HN story about a guy who got kicked off Google Docs because an automated program was trolling/mining through their users files and its judgement was not to be questioned…

Drop a TrueCrypt partition into your Dropbox [1], and you get the Dropbox QoS as well as the encryption for your kids' swimming pool photos. Plus, for non-swimming photos, you can just use the regular Dropbox folder. [1] http://tonyonsecurity.com/2012/08/05/securing-your-data-on-d...

I am not looking to hide stuff; I merely do not want my stuff accessed by third parties without either a search warrant or my explicit consent on a file by file basis. BitTorrent Sync seems to have a cool solution for me; my home desktop is almost always on.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#62

Post by fragsworth »

polarix wrote: post #60
Shish2k wrote: post #31

Looking at some of the examples, I'm starting to see a future where people trade entirely in hashes - send some amount of bitcoins to address X, receive access to read-only access to bittorrent folder Y which is automatically populated with the latest TV episodes for a series, etc. Any idea how to apply that sort of anonymity and convenience to the real world though? Scanning QR codes with a phone seems to be the bes…

You might think you could possibly have done this in the physical world for a few years now. Don't fool yourself. You have a face and DNA. You will not be anonymous (or even pseudonymous) as long as you carry a body.

Your actions can (and should) be anonymous in situations where there is an expectation of privacy.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#63

Post by niels_olson »

lifeguard wrote: post #51
buro9 wrote: post #9

Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing. One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where…

I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.

> I am a political activist ... Bt sync is an excellent solution.

I think it will need more cute cats before you can make that call.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_cat_theory_of_digital_acti...

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#64

Post by utnick »

lifeguard wrote: post #51
buro9 wrote: post #9

Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing. One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where…

I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.

your 3rd example would not be an ideal use-case

If one member of your affinity group gets arrested, the police would have access to all of your files plus all of the IP addresses of everyone in your affinity group

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#65

Post by goronbjorn »

This seems ideal for the enterprise use case, in particular because it's extremely performant, secure, and doesn't require a central/third-party server (e.g. AWS). The 'must always be online' requirement is actually a plus, not a minus for that crowd. Enterprises are generally very concerned about being able to revoke access to a given resource instantaneously. Any app that stores local copies complicates that quite a bit.

People will dismiss this as 'a toy that geeks use', but as Chris Dixon has noted, 'what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years' [1]

[1] http://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on-...

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#66

Post by niels_olson »

lifeformed wrote: post #47
buro9 wrote: post #9

Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing. One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where…

Nice bike.

Yeah, I'd like a little more info about the stem. It looks like a quill, but then there's that cam. I've had bad luck with those in the past, wondering how this one is done.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#67

Post by zepolen »

mseebach wrote: post #53
andrethegiant wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100Gb of Dropbox costs $10/month, BitTorrent Sync is free.

Dropbox has your stuff stored away in a fairly secure facility, while BitTorrent Sync just syncs between machines you've installed it on. That's worth something. Of course, you can just rent a cheap VPS somewhere and have it sync your BTS folders, but I think you'll be hard pressed to find a VPS with 100 GB storage for less than $10/month.

http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix_vserver/vserv...

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#68

Post by dmix »

utnick wrote: post #64
lifeguard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.

your 3rd example would not be an ideal use-case If one member of your affinity group gets arrested, the police would have access to all of your files plus all of the IP addresses of everyone in your affinity group

Well they could use a larger protective stack than just sync:

IP addresses = VPN

Files = Truecrypted

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#69

Post by ChuckMcM »

So now you have in place all the bits you need for a "members only" netnews feed, someone should go dig up the code and create a 'news' sync'd document. If you played your cards right you could use off the shelf news readers that look into a local repo of the news.

With just a tiny bit of crypto code you could add a repudiation feature (keys signed by the secret vs the secret itself) and control access to both individual groups and individual users.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#70

Post by buro9 »

lifeguard wrote: post #51
buro9 wrote: post #9

Really nice, but the thing is... Dropbox has gone beyond just file sharing. One example: I used to use Flickr for photo sharing, but cameras got better, images got bigger, and I have a lot of photos. I moved from Flickr to Picasa as it could cope with the directories full of photos and I didn't have to manually upload them and Google's storage space was cheaper. Then I ran out of space... over 100GB of photos, where…

I work for a startup and want to sync my dev machines at home and work and also a build farm. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a musician and want to sync my tracks with a few producers. Bt sync is a good solution. I am a political activist and want to ensure my data will be available to my affinity group even if Dropbox is threatened with a state security letter. Bt sync is an excellent solution.

And IMHO all of the scenarios above are why BT Sync is more a Box alternative rather than a Dropbox alternative. Or more accurately a Groove competitor, but they're not the cool kids on the block any longer.

Business scenarios make this good for us, but for consumers this isn't a Dropbox alternative.

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