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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

#181

Post by GhotiFish »

twoodfin wrote: post #148
joshaidan wrote: post #109

What I think will be an interesting use case for this technology is public file sharing. If I want to share files with the general public I could just give them a read-only key and then they'll have a folder that syncs with whatever files I put into it. It's a new way of content distribution. Will this be how people distribute music and TV shows? Will this be the way people subscribe to content in the future? I could…

This is indeed a great technology. The "push" analog to the original BitTorrent's "pull". But there's also potential for abuse (or greater freedom depending on how you look at it!). Say I create a sync folder containing a bunch of popular films and then widely distribute the read-only key. Thousands subscribe. Now I have access to what amounts to a botnet that will widely distribute whatever content I see fit to depo…

That sounds like a brilliant thing for free speech, but watch out, I'm not sure there's a guarantee of anonymity in crowds for people who have read-write access, they may be identifiable.

Still reading the analysis of the system. Have to read through the spec.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#182

Post by twoodfin »

GhotiFish wrote: post #181
twoodfin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed a great technology. The "push" analog to the original BitTorrent's "pull". But there's also potential for abuse (or greater freedom depending on how you look at it!). Say I create a sync folder containing a bunch of popular films and then widely distribute the read-only key. Thousands subscribe. Now I have access to what amounts to a botnet that will widely distribute whatever content I see fit to depo…

That sounds like a brilliant thing for free speech, but watch out, I'm not sure there's a guarantee of anonymity in crowds for people who have read-write access, they may be identifiable. Still reading the analysis of the system. Have to read through the spec.

What are you reading that has the details?

It would seem to me that read-only peers would have to have the ability to propagate writes across the network. Why would they have to identify the origin of the change if they obviously have cryptographically secure evidence that the change is valid?

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#183

Post by mikemoka »

Floegipoky wrote: post #124
mikemoka wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This project is useless if they don't figure out a way to serve files without both machines being turned on, there is also the problem of syncing with multiple clients beside that. I see two key use cases that could cause trouble: 1)a co-worker turned his computer off and went home from work, the syncing couldn't complete even if only a single doc was left 2)Because there is no central server if all of my coworkers i…

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

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#184

Post by ephoz »

javanix wrote: post #178
ephoz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many gamers are using BitTorrent through Valve's Steam. By which I mean, that p2p file sharing is hardly nefarious. It's just a clever use of bandwidth.

Is Steam actually using BitTorrent? I thought they were using something proprietary. If they are not using BitTorrent then Sync would provide a new, plausible way to stop ISPs from blocking that specific protocol.

I think I got a little ahead of myself here, sorry. Bram Cohen (who is known for inventing BitTorrent) has worked shortly with Valve on Steam. I can't find a source quoting Steam as using BitTorrent though, so let's assume that no.

Well, apparently Blizzard does. :) Quoting http://www.wowpedia.org/Blizzard_Downloader

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#185

Post by pm90 »

api wrote: post #163

And the wheel turns: http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht... The wheel of reincarnation I'm referring to in this case is the cycling between a mainframe/thin-client architecture and a PC-based distributed architecture. In ye olde days it was mainframes and dumb terminals. Then it was PCs and LANs/the Internet. Then it was web browsers and tablets (dumb terminal 2.0) and The Cloud (mainframe 2.…

Indeed. It seems fortunate that this got released a few days after CISPA was passed.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#186

Post by pm90 »

javanix wrote: post #178
ephoz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many gamers are using BitTorrent through Valve's Steam. By which I mean, that p2p file sharing is hardly nefarious. It's just a clever use of bandwidth.

Is Steam actually using BitTorrent? I thought they were using something proprietary. If they are not using BitTorrent then Sync would provide a new, plausible way to stop ISPs from blocking that specific protocol.

I remember that Ubuntu used to be available via torrents

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#187

Post by riobard »

gdw2 wrote: post #121
ritonlajoie wrote: post #2

What are the differences with AeroFS ?

AeroFS currently does not support ARM.

Nor PowerPC, which apparently many NAS units are using. Mine is a WD My Book Live Duo running Debian/PowerPC.

Additionally, AeroFS relies on Java, which is pretty big dependency (read: pain) to have on resource-restricted environments like a tiny NAS box. The daemon process of AeroFS consumes about 110MB of memory (I guess due to JRE), but my NAS unit has only 256MB memory in total with less than 100MB free, which means even if AeroFS supports PowerPC, there is still no way I could run it smoothly on my NAS without killing its performance.

Bittorrent Sync supports all of x86/x64/ARM/PowerPC, and the download is just a single 3.7MB binary without dependency other than glibc. Running it on my NAS shows it consumes less than 10MB memory. This is just so much nicer for deployment on a wider selection of devices.

I'm definitely going for BTSync now.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#188

Post by tunesmith »

api wrote: post #163

And the wheel turns: http://www.retrologic.com/jargon/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.ht... The wheel of reincarnation I'm referring to in this case is the cycling between a mainframe/thin-client architecture and a PC-based distributed architecture. In ye olde days it was mainframes and dumb terminals. Then it was PCs and LANs/the Internet. Then it was web browsers and tablets (dumb terminal 2.0) and The Cloud (mainframe 2.…

Isn't the ideal kinda both/neither?

Get a "dumb" laptop with plenty of horsepower/space, sign in to something and sync everything over (chef/puppet/btsync/dropbox), do a bunch of work locally, then wipe the laptop.

I'd love to have my whole laptop identity work that way. It's sort of possible now but it takes forever to convert all your data and apps over to that approach.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#189

Post by MatthewPhillips »

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…

For me, Dropbox uploads are painfully slow.

Re: BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

#190

Post by evoltix »

fastball wrote: post #152

> Those in the closed Alpha have already synced more than 200TB since we started the program,” BitTorrent announces. Umm, how do they know this if the sync is secure and only peer-to-peer?

Good point.

Not sure if this has anything to do with it but by default, "Use relay server when required" is checked for each folder you share. But I would hope that it doesn't go through a relay server all the time.

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