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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

#241

Post by zurn »

gph wrote: post #159
niels_olson wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Why? How is the government going to shut down what is basically a private decentralized p2p network? There isn't any central server they can take out and the traffic over the network would look like any other encrypted traffic. If they gained access to the sync group with full permissions they could destroy it and get IP addresses, etc. And the format itself might not lend itself to all the needs of a political activ…

> Why? How is the government going to shut down what is basically a private decentralized p2p network? There isn't any central server they can take out and the traffic over the network would look like any other encrypted traffic.

Many ISPs, schools, cafes and corporate networks do this today already. They only allow HTTP (which goes through monitoring) and HTTPS which is decrypted by a MITM proxy (you have to allow their CA cert on your machine, uncompromised HTTPS is blocked).

In many countries this type of shenanigans are forbidden by law (friendly governments exist too).

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#242

Post by stephengillie »

dombili wrote: post #234
urza wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transporterguy/transport...

Works globally, only ships within the US. That's awesome.

Looking at this, it looks like a 1-stop sharing solution. Im assuming that when a user shares files from this device, the connection is routed from Transporter's servers to the users device, allowing the downloader to directly copy the users file.

I wonder how replication between 2 devices would work...

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#244

Post by Blahah »

bad_user wrote: post #237
NicoJuicy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had a spreadsheet with passwords and usernames of his client (they were a lot of them). Automation of Google's algorithm thought he was a hacker, they fixed it and he got his account back. You should have read the whole story ;-)

So why is Google looking inside the uploaded files, if the files aren't public? If the guy was a "hacker", so freaking what?

No human is looking inside. Files are simply security scanned and assigned a probability of breaking the TOS.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#245

Post by davidjade »

nessus42 wrote: post #199
veidr wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right: Dropbox's behavior with regard to symlinks is fundamentally wrong . It is kinda lame that other services, e.g. Google Drive, just skip symlinks, but that isn't as dangerous. The hierarchical structure of a directory tree is often effectively part of an application's data, and Dropbox silently corrupts that data. This can cause crashes, or multiple conflicting copies of not-easily-merged data to be stre…

> You are right: Dropbox's behavior with regard to symlinks is fundamentally wrong. What's even worse, is that no matter how hard I try, I am not able to convince most people of how wrong this is--even those who claim to be and should be computer savy. E.g., on support forums for other sync services, users are typically clamoring for Dropbox-style syncing of symlinks, and they will not be convinced otherwise, in spit…

Yeah but the real problem, the ones users are trying to solve is the limits on having to move everything into one sync folder. Transparent symlinks are the cheap fix for them so that they can keep their files where they want and still have them sync. The better solution would be to just allow any folder(s) to be synced but none of the major cloud sync providers seem to want to enable that.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#246

Post by rurounijones »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #225
ebtalley wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this was all well and good to me until I saw that Google shut down someones account for violation of TOS. Im already mulling over alternatives. This might be one of them.

He had a spreadsheet with passwords and usernames of his client (they were a lot of them). Automation of Google's algorithm thought he was a hacker, they fixed it and he got his account back. You should have read the whole story ;-)

Hang on, that sounds like a "See, there is no problem"

They only fixed it because he pulled teeth, tapped friends on staff at google and generally had to scream and shout.

In no way was the trek he had to go through to fix an automation problem a good example of "Don't worry about it"

Plus the fact that if it happens to you and you don't have the inside contacts you have no guarantee of getting it fixed.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#247

Post by liotier »

k2enemy wrote: post #98
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…

> And consumers are not thinking in terms of encrypted sync, they're just thinking in terms of "I just want to do X, why is it so hard", and so I can't see this (very nice) solution really solving the problems that consumers have, that will make them prioritise security. I have a use case that is pretty common among my peer group and BT Sync has been the best solution I've been able to find. In a nutshell, I need to…

> rsync/duplicity/unison: needs extra logic for detecting file changes

Is it so difficult to add a one line configuration item to your inotify cron daemon (incrond) ?

/home/my/directory IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_CREATE,IN_DELETE /my/unison/sync/script.sh

It works.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#248

Post by [deleted] »

zepolen wrote: post #67
mseebach wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#249

Post by bad_user »

Blahah wrote: post #244
bad_user wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why is Google looking inside the uploaded files, if the files aren't public? If the guy was a "hacker", so freaking what?

No human is looking inside. Files are simply security scanned and assigned a probability of breaking the TOS.

> No human is looking inside

Where's the relevance? I asked why is Google, the entity, looking inside of private files?

> a probability of breaking the TOS

And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS?

Also, locking somebody out of their account because of a probability generated by a script, without manual confirmation by a human?

OMG. Some people can lose their jobs or money because of such flukes.

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