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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

#281

Post by veidr »

aroemers wrote: post #257
davidjade wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have a look at https://www.cubby.com/ . It syncs existing folders you want to, and per synced folder you can decide to use their cloud or sync directly.

Cubby apparently also completely broken when it comes to symbolic links.

http://help.cubby.com/forums/169907-general/suggestions/3529...

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#282

Post by pixelcort »

visarga wrote: post #262

Instead of private (darknet) bittorrenting I'd rather have a solution for all those files with few seeders who are half dead, in the cloud. It's easy to torrent the latest episode. Everyone is in on that. But what about the long tail? We need a different scheme there. My idea would be to lump together all the files in a huge torrent. That would inevitably attract many peers, so the problem would be solved if users di…

There are other P2P networks that can give you files based on a hash of their content, for example ED2K and Kademlia. I think even Gnutella supports hash-based retrieval.

BitTorrent clients now have distributed hash tables accessible; it would be nice if magnet URLs could just point to a hash of the file, instead of to a specific torrent.

Bonus: Even ED2K links point to a tree of hashes, so you can verify the data while it is being downloaded.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#283

Post by X-Istence »

Wurlitzer wrote: post #272
X-Istence wrote: post #30

Wish the source was made available, I have an OpenIndiana server with several 1 TB drives running ZFS and I would love to use something like this... but only binaries are available.

That's one of the reasons I switched to ZFS on Linux ( http://zfsonlinux.org ). It has been stable for over a year now.

If I were to run any other OS with ZFS support it would have to be FreeBSD. I do not at all like the Linux eco-system.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#284

Post by Floegipoky »

mikemoka wrote: post #183
Floegipoky wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're getting at with 1- I don't think any service ever can transfer files to a machine that isn't on. As soon as the co-worker shows up on Monday, the transfer will finish. As far as 2 is concerned though, that is not the case. Don't forget, it's built on top of BT. As each piece of the file gets transferred to other clients by the original machine, the other clients will be able to send those pie…

1-Actually Dropbox lets everyone do just that, I can access the shared folder via the dropbox website whenever I want, download files in there and even access the old or deleted versions..something I see very unlikely in this case for now

Oh I see what you're saying. Bottom line, there needs to be at least 1 copy of each piece available to pull. It also definitely lacks a lot of the features that Dropbox provides on top of file syncing.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#285

Post by lucb1e »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #7

TLDR: >BitTorrent Sync’s functionality is comparable to services such as Dropbox and Skydrive, except for the fact that there’s no cloud involved. Users sync the files between their own computers and no third-party has access to it. > It is an ideal tool for people who want to share large amounts of data between computers without going through third-party services. >The Sync application is available for Windows, OSX,…

I'm more interested in the TLDR of how this works. Due to firewalls and such, it's technically impossible to have a peer to peer network without requiring port forwarding on at least one side. I wonder if they're really requiring that from users that want to use this.

Another way would be to do TCP or UDP hole punching, but that involves a third party for initial setup. Probably possible and probably safe, but I'd like to see a security review of that.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#286

Post by vy8vWJlco »

One of the comments on the TorrentFreak article compares BTSync to FTP.

In one sense, that is not an accurate comparison at all. And yet, it has enormous potential to fill a similar role.

The secret/passphrase amounts simply to a globally-addressable identifier to a set of folders that just happen to sync.

It will be trivial to script a loop to watch a control file in a folder to enable automatic FTP-like transfers between my friends. Even without keeping the "secret" secret, instead simply treating it as public but discardable, you have something that can rival (and is a faster-moving target than) file lockers like Mega and Rapidshare (300 TB do not need to be re-uploaded in order to change the secret/address).

The sad thing is that NAT and firewalls have starved the Internet to the point that that simple property (global addressing) seems almost miraculous. (And that is why IPv6 - or something permitting global addressability, instead of carrier-grade NAT - is so important going forward.)

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#287

Post by tobeportable »

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.

backupsify : 500GB @ 7$/month atm

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#288

Post by niels_olson »

gph wrote: post #274
zurn wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

True, but adding cute cats to the mix isn't going to fix that either. I wasn't trying to argue that it was technically infeasible for an Orwellian government to stop it, just that it would be near impossible to stop where this type of traffic isn't already blocked.

The cute cat theory posits the resource doesn't provably work at scale until it hosts a lot of simple, vacuous content. While 200 TB exceeds the number of cute cats I have ever seen, I'm afraid it may not exceed the youtube bandwidth.

It has to work before it can work well. Thus, while PGP technically works great, I haven't heard a lot of Egyptions, Syrians, etc, lauding Phil Zimmerman. Instead, they seem happier with Facebook.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#289

Post by deelowe »

__david__ wrote: post #119
deelowe wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about crashplan?

Isn't that a different use case? Crashplan creates a opaque encrypted binary blob on a remote computer which is useful for backup, but not really for syncing files around.

I think the encryption can be disabled, no?
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