Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

blog.bittorrent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 72 posts

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#51

Post by Thlom »

dotBen wrote: post #39

Some things are highly valuable but just don't make sense to monetize. Bit Torrent is a great example of that. BitTorrent Inc is evidently scrambling to find a way to monetize the core technology having raised money and promised investors it would do that. They just laid off a %age of their staff, which indicates to me the end of the road might be nearing and Bleep maybe one of the last attempts they have to pull som…

They could potentially have sold BitTorent technology/software to companies that needs to move lots of data across multiple nodes. Instead most of them use libtorrent.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#52

Post by cbd1984 »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #15
userisuser wrote: post #10

Why not use Kik? Its a more popular closed source messenger.

Kik is not end to end encrypted. Kik the company can access any message you send or receive.

And how do you know the same isn't true here?

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#53

Post by zbyte64 »

Thlom wrote: post #51
dotBen wrote: post #39

Some things are highly valuable but just don't make sense to monetize. Bit Torrent is a great example of that. BitTorrent Inc is evidently scrambling to find a way to monetize the core technology having raised money and promised investors it would do that. They just laid off a %age of their staff, which indicates to me the end of the road might be nearing and Bleep maybe one of the last attempts they have to pull som…

They could potentially have sold BitTorent technology/software to companies that needs to move lots of data across multiple nodes. Instead most of them use libtorrent.

I don't think that makes sense. It is kind of like selling TCP/IP before the internet age ; network standards should be just that - an open standard that is open to all players.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#54

Post by chanux »

higherpurpose wrote: post #17
joshstrange wrote: post #6

I don't trust anything released by BitTorrent. Sync was a huge let down and frankly I'm not going to waste my time on any more of their software after the ad/toolbar/bitcoin-mining infested installers they put out for uTorrent...

Care to elaborate on why Sync is a huge let down?

Also they call it peer-to-peer (IIRC) and now it comes with an annual fee (how about, maybe a one time charge?). Also the software felt pretty complicated with the Pro update.

In the beginning it was all amazing. But we all know we can't have nice things.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#55

Post by microtonal »

Immortalin wrote: post #44
Sir_Substance wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's as dishonest as btsyncs statement, in it's own way. Because it's closed source, we don't /know/ how secure btsync is. However, we do know that microsoft, google and dropbox will just hand your shit over if the US government asks. Something is better than nothing. The only open source competitors in this space are owncloud, who /still/ won't let me upload to both a work and person cloud at the same time, and sy…

Try Syncthing

Unfortunately, Syncthing only supports a subset of what Bittorrent Sync does:

- There is no tracker/relay server infrastructure. As a result, Syncthing doesn't work if two peers are behind a firewall/NAT without uPnP or manual port forwarding. The number of peers behind carrier-grade NAT is only growing (IPv6 migrations) and if you are often on the move (hotels, etc.) you have no control over the firewall.

- Syncthing does not support selective sync yet, let alone with the ease of BTSync where it is a Finder/Explorer extension.

- Syncthing does not support link-based sharing, which is handy if you quickly want to share something with family/colleagues.

- Syncthing is too hard to set up for most family/colleagues.

tl;dr Syncthing is great for synchronizing two machines on networks under your own control, but it is not a nearly-complete P2P replacement of Dropbox like Bittorrent Sync is.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#56

Post by microtonal »

zaroth wrote: post #27
higherpurpose wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on why Sync is a huge let down?

Sync was great until it locked all my folders and demanded $39 to start working again. Their free tier makes it sound like you get 10 shares free but I think it actually turned out to be 10 folders including sub-folders within a share...

I think it actually turned out to be 10 folders including sub-folders within a share...

No. The documentation says it is 10 shares with any number of subfolders and that is also my experience - when the Pro trial expired, I could sync 10 shares with a large number of subfolders without any problems.

Of course, changing the number of shares from unlimited to 10 was a bait and switch move, and a scam because their website said that they wouldn't remove any functionality from the free version.

Also, it's very weird that they switched to a subscription model. You bring most of the infrastructure (bandwidth & disk space) and they bring mostly software (and some infrastructure). Why not just let people buy the software?!?

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#57

Post by microtonal »

joepie91_ wrote: post #42
Sir_Substance wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's as dishonest as btsyncs statement, in it's own way. Because it's closed source, we don't /know/ how secure btsync is. However, we do know that microsoft, google and dropbox will just hand your shit over if the US government asks. Something is better than nothing. The only open source competitors in this space are owncloud, who /still/ won't let me upload to both a work and person cloud at the same time, and sy…

The problem is that there's no "something". All BitTorrent does is make a promise, and that is worth nothing. Thus, "something is better than nothing" doesn't apply. Now if it were a verifiably half-assed solution, I'd agree with your statement.

They did let iSEC partners review their source code. So, it is not nothing.

But I agree that it would be far more trustable (and popular) if Bittorrent Sync were open source. And there is still a profit model with an open source BTSync: let people (who need it) get a tracker, relay server, and always-on (read-only encrypted) peer subscription.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#58

Post by microtonal »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #28
black_puppydog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8626931

That's as dishonest as btsyncs statement, in it's own way. Because it's closed source, we don't /know/ how secure btsync is. However, we do know that microsoft, google and dropbox will just hand your shit over if the US government asks. Something is better than nothing. The only open source competitors in this space are owncloud, who /still/ won't let me upload to both a work and person cloud at the same time, and sy…

I've stuck with btsync 1.3.94, the version with the beautiful workflow, just before it went off the rails.

Plus, pre-2.0 shares had a killer feature: read-only encrypted peers. These were peers that would only retrieve the encrypted data in read-only form.

Using read-only encrypted peers, you can have an always-on node in the cloud, with the security of end-to-end (client-side) encryption.

I hope they will bring this back in Sync 2, but it seems much harder now that they switched to the identity model.

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#59

Post by microtonal »

GutenYe wrote: post #47
mike-cardwell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run your own server? From my understanding there is no server involved. It is peer to peer and peers find each other by using DHT. It's closed source though, so you have to take their word on that.

How does it manage the offline messages without a server?

In principle this is not a problem in a peer to peer network as long as there are peers. You simply store the message encrypted on enough peers that are in the swarm.

It seems though that they store the message on the sender's device until the peer becomes available:

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/11/21/offline-messages-come-...

Edit: it is fully asynchronous now: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/22/bleep-now-supports-asy...

Re: BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms

#60

Post by microtonal »

One thing that is missing from the marketing copy: even if you accept a closed-source messenger and forget the whole uTorrent saga, what's the monetization model here? What costs can we expect in the future and where?

(The cynic in me thinks: Bleep 2 offers many new features, buy Bleep 2 Pro if you communicate with more than 10 contacts.)

Post reply on HN