Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Bram Cohen, a co-founder of BitTorrent, the company which oversees the development of eponymous P2P protocol, has left its board, he told TorrentFreak. The revelation comes weeks after the file-sharing service provider said it had been acquired by blockchain startup Tron. It remains unclear exactly when Cohen, who also served as a lead engineer at the firm for years, made the decision to part ways with the company. He hinted to TechCrunch last year that, as of August, he was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. The departure of Cohen underscores BitTorrent's long battle to find a lucrative business model. The company, the services of which are used by more than 100 million customers, has long struggled to find new applications of its platform and avenues to bring home some cash. In 2016, the company announced a mobile music and video streaming service [called] BitTorrent Now, which it abruptly shut down months later while also firing its co-CEOs. Last year, the company shut down its much hyped live streaming service BitTorrent Live, which Variety described as a brainchild of Cohen.

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today launched Project Maelstrom, the company's distributed browser, in beta. The company also released new tools on GitHub that let developers and publishers build content for the browser. Announced in December, Project Maelstrom, then just an invite-only alpha, was described as "the first torrent-based browser." The launch today is an open beta, meaning anyone can now try an early version of Maelstrom. You do, however, need a Windows computer. Windows users can download the beta now from here. Since the alpha, BitTorrent says it has improved stability, integrated support for automatic updates, and added DHT visualization for users when loading torrents.

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today launched Project Maelstrom, the company's distributed browser, in beta. The company also released new tools on GitHub that let developers and publishers build content for the browser. Announced in December, Project Maelstrom, then just an invite-only alpha, was described as "the first torrent-based browser." The launch today is an open beta, meaning anyone can now try an early version of Maelstrom. You do, however, need a Windows computer. Windows users can download the beta now from here. Since the alpha, BitTorrent says it has improved stability, integrated support for automatic updates, and added DHT visualization for users when loading torrents.

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today outlined the company's plans for its file synchronization tool Sync. Next year, the company will launch Sync 2.0, finally taking the product out of beta, as well as three new paid Sync products. Ever since its debut, Sync has provided a wide variety of solutions to various problems, BitTorrent says, from distributing files across remote servers to sharing vacation photos. BitTorrent thus believes it needs to build three distinct products for each of these separate audiences, including a Pro version for $40 per year.

An anonymous reader writes "The folks at Ars Technica have discovered evidence that Netflix is actively researching the possibility of using peer-to-peer technology to stream its videos to its customers. The evidence: a one-month old job listing seeking a software engineer with extensive experience developing and testing large-scale peer-to-peer systems. In addition: Netflix's admission of wanting to 'look at all kinds of routes.' A recent blog post by BitTorrent's CEO explains how, in a peer-to-peer architecture, 'Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses — from addresses all across the Internet.'" In other Netflix news, the company has "reached an agreement with three smaller cable companies that, for the first time, will let U.S. subscribers watch the streaming video service’s content as though it were an ordinary cable channel."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jacob Kastrenakes reports on The Verge that as part a response to the NSA's wide-reaching surveillance programs, BitTorrent is unveiling a secure messaging service that will use public key encryption, forward secrecy, and a distributed hash table so that chats will be individually encrypted and won't be stored on some company's server. 'It's become increasingly clear that we need to devote hackathons, hours and resources to developing a messaging app that protects user privacy,' says Christian Averill, BitTorrent's director of communications. Because most current chat services rely on central servers to facilitate the exchange of messages, 'they're vulnerable: to hackers, to NSA dragnet surveillance sweeps.' BitTorrent chat aims to avoid those vulnerabilities through its encryption methods and decentralized infrastructure. Rather than checking in with one specific server, users of BitTorrent chat will collectively help each other figure out where to route messages to. In order to get started chatting, you'll just need to give someone else your public key — effectively your identifier. Exchanging public keys doesn't sound like the simplest way to begin a chat, but Averill says that BitTorrent hopes to make it easy enough for anyone interested. 'What we're going to do is to make sure there are options for how this is set up,' says Averill. 'This way it will appeal to the more privacy conscious consumer as well as the less technically inclined.' For now, it remains in a private testing phase that interested users can apply for access to. There's no word on when it'll be open to everyone, but with all of the recent surveillance revelations, it's easy to imagine that some people will be eager to get started."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jacob Kastrenakes reports on The Verge that as part a response to the NSA's wide-reaching surveillance programs, BitTorrent is unveiling a secure messaging service that will use public key encryption, forward secrecy, and a distributed hash table so that chats will be individually encrypted and won't be stored on some company's server. 'It's become increasingly clear that we need to devote hackathons, hours and resources to developing a messaging app that protects user privacy,' says Christian Averill, BitTorrent's director of communications. Because most current chat services rely on central servers to facilitate the exchange of messages, 'they're vulnerable: to hackers, to NSA dragnet surveillance sweeps.' BitTorrent chat aims to avoid those vulnerabilities through its encryption methods and decentralized infrastructure. Rather than checking in with one specific server, users of BitTorrent chat will collectively help each other figure out where to route messages to. In order to get started chatting, you'll just need to give someone else your public key — effectively your identifier. Exchanging public keys doesn't sound like the simplest way to begin a chat, but Averill says that BitTorrent hopes to make it easy enough for anyone interested. 'What we're going to do is to make sure there are options for how this is set up,' says Averill. 'This way it will appeal to the more privacy conscious consumer as well as the less technically inclined.' For now, it remains in a private testing phase that interested users can apply for access to. There's no word on when it'll be open to everyone, but with all of the recent surveillance revelations, it's easy to imagine that some people will be eager to get started."

Nerval's Lobster writes "BitTorrent Sync has reached its Beta milestone. The tool, which allows for secure file-syncing between devices, has been under development for quite some time: BitTorrent released a limited pre-Alpha program in January, planning to use any feedback to refine the software before release. Key features include the use of peer-to-peer technology for direct synchronization, rather than storing files in the cloud—a key differentiator from similar storage services on the market. 'It fits into our overall goal of making a better Internet using P2P,' BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak when that pre-Alpha rolled out. In the intervening months, of course, former federal contractor Edward Snowden leaked a variety of top-secret documents about NSA surveillance to The Guardian, kicking off several weeks' worth of discussions and handwringing over government snooping. Several of those documents suggested that an NSA program codenamed PRISM siphoned user data from nine major technology companies, including Google and Microsoft; the named companies have stridently denied any involvement. Those revelations about the NSA—even if totally unsurprising to the paranoid—could kick off renewed interest in software tools capable of securing data against prying eyes. In other words, this could be just the moment for something like BitTorrent Sync to hit the market. 'Sync is a response to what we see as real, fundamental challenges to personal data movement: the limitations on speed, size, space, privacy, and security that come with cloud dependency,' read a July 17 note on the BitTorrent Blog."

Nerval's Lobster writes "BitTorrent Sync has reached its Beta milestone. The tool, which allows for secure file-syncing between devices, has been under development for quite some time: BitTorrent released a limited pre-Alpha program in January, planning to use any feedback to refine the software before release. Key features include the use of peer-to-peer technology for direct synchronization, rather than storing files in the cloud—a key differentiator from similar storage services on the market. 'It fits into our overall goal of making a better Internet using P2P,' BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak when that pre-Alpha rolled out. In the intervening months, of course, former federal contractor Edward Snowden leaked a variety of top-secret documents about NSA surveillance to The Guardian, kicking off several weeks' worth of discussions and handwringing over government snooping. Several of those documents suggested that an NSA program codenamed PRISM siphoned user data from nine major technology companies, including Google and Microsoft; the named companies have stridently denied any involvement. Those revelations about the NSA—even if totally unsurprising to the paranoid—could kick off renewed interest in software tools capable of securing data against prying eyes. In other words, this could be just the moment for something like BitTorrent Sync to hit the market. 'Sync is a response to what we see as real, fundamental challenges to personal data movement: the limitations on speed, size, space, privacy, and security that come with cloud dependency,' read a July 17 note on the BitTorrent Blog."

An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent has come up with a new way to sell music. It's called BitTorrent Bundle, and it puts the music store alongside the torrent. At last, someone has come up with a way to turn all us entitled, lawless downloaders into paying customers. BitTorrent thinks of BitTorrent Bundle as a sort of 21st century band flyer. Post a torrent with a handful of live tracks from your latest tour, Bundle it with a store that lets your groupies buy the full album." Put simply, the idea is that bands publish a basic torrent with a few songs as a teaser. When users download that .torrent file from BitTorrent.com, they're shown a page asking for something — money, an email address, or social media interaction — in exchange for the rest of the album (or other bonus content). If they comply, they get a different .torrent file. It's not intended as a guard against piracy, but as a way to link up content creators with the torrenters who are actually willing to pay.

An anonymous reader writes with an update on the rapid adoption of BitTorrent Lab's Sync tool. From the article: "BitTorrent on Monday announced an impressive milestone for its file synchronization tool Sync: users have synced over 1PB of data. The company says over 70 terabytes are synced via the tool every day. BitTorrent first announced its Sync software back in January and released a private alpha. Between then and April 23, when the company release a public alpha, users synced over 200TB worth of data. In other words, over the past 13 days users have synced over 800TB of data. At this rate, the service will pass 10PB before even hitting a stable release."

An anonymous reader writes with an update on the rapid adoption of BitTorrent Lab's Sync tool. From the article: "BitTorrent on Monday announced an impressive milestone for its file synchronization tool Sync: users have synced over 1PB of data. The company says over 70 terabytes are synced via the tool every day. BitTorrent first announced its Sync software back in January and released a private alpha. Between then and April 23, when the company release a public alpha, users synced over 200TB worth of data. In other words, over the past 13 days users have synced over 800TB of data. At this rate, the service will pass 10PB before even hitting a stable release."

silentbrad sends this quote from TheWrap: "'It's a deal with the devil,' one studio executive [said]. 'Cinedigm is being used as their pawn.' Cinedigm announced this weekend that it would offer the first seven minutes of the Emily Blunt-Colin Firth indie Arthur Newman exclusively to BitTorrent users, which number up to 170 million people.... Hollywood studios have spent years and many millions of dollars to protect their intellectual property and worry that by teaming up with BitTorrent, Cinedigm has embraced a company that imperils the financial underpinnings of the film business and should be kept at arm's length. 'It's great for BitTorrent and disingenuous of Cinedigm,' said the executive. 'The fact of the matter is BitTorrent is in it for themselves, they're not in it for the health of the industry.' Other executives including at Warner Brothers and Sony echoed those comments, fretting that Cinedigm had unwittingly opened a Pandora's box in a bid to get attention for its low-budget release. ... 'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said. 'How people use it can be positive for the industry or it can hurt the industry. We want it help us make this indie film successful.' ... 'We'll be working with all of [the studios] one day,' [Matt Mason, BitTorrent's vice president of marketing] said. 'It's really up to them how quickly they come to the table and realize we're not the villain, we're the heroes.'"

An anonymous reader writes "We've recently seen a number of interesting projects come from bittorrent.com, including Sync and SoShare. I sometimes use torrents to move several GB of data, especially when pushing large bundles to multiple destinations. It's mostly a hodgepodge of open source tools, though. Apart from anecdotes and info from bittorrent.com, details are thin on the ground (e.g. the Blizzard Downloader). I have two questions for the Slashdot community. 1) Do you use BitTorrent to move data? If so, how? i.e. What kind of data and what's the implementation? 2) If you've looked at torrent clients/tools, what's missing in the open source ecosystem that would make it more useful for moving around large blobs of data?"

An anonymous reader writes "BitTorrent on Tuesday announced it has released its file synchronization tool Sync into open alpha. You can download the latest version now for Windows, Mac, and Linux over at labs.bittorrent.com. The company first announced its Sync software back in January, explaining at the time that it uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronize personal files across multiple computers and devices."

redletterdave writes "On Friday morning, BitTorrent launched the alpha test of a new, free public service called BitTorrent Sync, which allows users to securely back up and sync files over the Web using BitTorrent's platform. Unlike competing services such as Box or Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync doesn't store files on remote servers (which means that no third party has access to one's files), and also has no storage limits other than what your devices can hold."

An anonymous reader writes "Can you really do group chat with no central server? BitTorrent's Patrick Williams has developed a new app that leverages a distributed architecture to eliminate the need for any servers — even to host a buddy list. He says magnet links are the key."

Mark.JUK writes "The San Francisco-based inventor of the hugely popular peer-to-peer (P2P) internet file sharing protocol BitTorrent has revealed that it is considering whether or not to release the broadband performance (speed) data for more than 9,000 ISPs around the world. The technology company claims that the data forms part of its new project, which is sadly still in the very early stages of development, but could one day give consumers a near real-time perspective of how their ISP is performing. It wouldn't just cover P2P traffic either, with BitTorrent also tracking general HTTP transfers too. BitTorrent claims that its service can, for example, display that most UK ISPs 'aggressively throttle BitTorrent traffic after 6 p.m. at night,' with speeds suddenly going 'off a cliff.' Suffice to say that such information could prove to be very useful for consumers and advocates of Net Neutrality."

drDugan writes "BitTorrent, Inc. announced this morning that they have launched a partnership with the Khan Academy to distribute open education videos. They launched with more than 2,000 videos, covering high school and college level curriculum, across science, math, history, finance and test prep. All of the videos are free to download and open licensed with Creative Commons."

The launch of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network came out today; there's the AP write-up, which is decent enough but the interview with Bram about it is more interesting. Tangentially, the the education of lawmakers on video DRM is an interesting countweight to all this.

1sockchuck writes "BitTorrent Inc. is boosting its network capacity as it prepares to become a centralized hub for legal video content. In May, BitTorrent announced a deal with Warner Brothers to distribute its TV and movie content via the BT platform. It has now lined up IP transit for streaming videos at one gigabit per second."

OnBeyondBeing asks: "A few of my friends and I are taking a class at a local university called 'Internet and Society' and we have to do a 'Technology Tour' on innovations that have social aspects or uses (like Google Maps, Kiko (an Internet-based calendar), LiveJournal and Frappr). We chose to do our presentation on BitTorrent. As part of our presentation, we have to do a lab in which the students and teachers use BitTorrent in some way. I was thinking of having people join some BitTorrent community that interests them and join a torrent, but most of these communities contain material that is not suited for an academic presentation. Aside from places like CommonBits and Etree (and others that were mentioned in a previous Slashdot post), what sites have you found that use BitTorrent as the basis of a community that are clean and legal enough for a class presentation? Alternatively, what other interesting, legal uses of BitTorrent have you found?"

DavonZ asks: "I have recently requested hosting from SourceForge for andLinux, a Windows based Linux distribution. Since andLinux is essentially an operating system, it is quite large (500MB for the first release), and SourceForge rejected the hosting request due to its size. Since andLinux will allow handheld development environments to be 'plugged in', hosting it could require gigs of space. I have looked into alternative distribution methods like ed2k and Bittorrent, but the FUD associated with such distribution methods can slow adaption of the project. I have also considered purchasing hosting, but that is costly, would require donations and the project is not yet presentable for even beta release...at least not yet. What alternatives to SourceForge are available for large projects like this that include the 'bells and whistles' that SourceForge has (CVS, forums, mailing lists, bug tracking, etc.)?"

brajesh writes "According to an AP story at Yahoo News, Hollywood studios announced an agreement with Bram Cohen, the creator of the popular BitTorrent file-swapping technology, that will keep him from helping users find pirated copies of movies online. The agreement requires BitTorrent to remove Web links leading to illegal content owned by the seven studios that are members of the MPAA. The agreement is a major breakthrough in MPAA's anti-piracy efforts. BitTorrent has been one of the major targets[.doc] of MPAA's anti-piracy tirade. However, Cohen's engine is far from the only tool used to find pirated BitTorrent files online. A handful of other online engines can search BitTorrent-specific sites, and ordinary search engines can also be used to find BitTorrent files."

zalas writes "AnimeOnDVD reports that David Williams of ADV Films is testing out using BitTorrent as a distribution method. Currently, he has a promotional video of Madlax, one of their titles, up for download via a torrent and has "much larger plans in mind." He is looking for feedback regarding this and can be left on the AnimeOnDVD Forums. ADV Films licenses Japanese animation from Japanese studios for distribution in North America and the UK."

ByteWoopy wrote to mention a Wired article giving more coverage to the upside of BitTorrent. From the article: "Film and television executives no doubt wish the increasingly popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system never saw the light of day. Thousands of consumers are using the software to download hundreds of movies and hours upon hours of television programming. But one industry's threat is another's opportunity. There's an upside to allowing viewers to transfer copyright material content over BitTorrent. As noted by Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, fans of the Japanese anime series Naruto regularly post translated episodes of the show to BitTorrent, which attracts more fans to the series. The relatively obscure program has spawned a global following in online forums, internet relay chat channels and fan sites."

torrentnerd writes "If you're on the hunt for Linux ISO Torrents you might want to check out the long list of recently released distro torrents over at LinuxISOtorrent.com. They've got frequently updated torrents from A (Arch) to Z (Zen). The site only does one thing, but does it well - helps you get the latest Linux distros downloaded via BitTorrent, quickly."

starrsoft writes "The official BitTorrent search has debuted. The search engine was built by BT inventor Bram Cohen. The question? Will he get sued? The BT search seems to be down right now. (It'll really be down after this story is posted...) Spiegel has more (En): "Naturally other sites such as Bitoogle, Isohunt, SuprNova or Torrentspy have tried before, but either they became fast a goal of legal attacks on the part of the industry or they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results. BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast. The results come from a large number [of] more well-known and unknown... sites, and...permits sufficient restricting to the inquiry, in order to obtain really relevant results.""

AI Playground writes "Within two weeks, a BitTorrent search engine will be available at BitTorrent.com. From the Wired News article: 'Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen's popular BitTorrent protocol.'"

jgarzik writes "BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta."

jgarzik writes "BitTorrent development is occuring at a furious pace. At the beginning of May, an Azureus update added distributed tracker and database features. Yesterday, Bram updated BitTorrent to include support for trackerless torrents in the new BitTorrent 4.10 beta."

brokencomputer writes "There is an interesting interview with Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, on my site, WrongPlanet.net. Because there is already a plethora of information about BitTorrent, this interview takes a different approach and focuses entirely on Cohen's Asperger's Syndrome. In addition to being interesting to anyone interested in BitTorrent, Cohen's story is extremely inspirational to those of us who do have Asperger's, and will probably be so even to those without Asperger's Syndrome."

wintermute1974 writes "After sitting at a stable release of 3.4.2 since last spring, Bram Cohen's official BitTorrent client has been upgraded to version 4. In addition to its existing, rock-steady functionality, BitTorrent now sports a new queue-based UI. The revision details are on the BitTorrent site. Packets are now marked as bulk data too, which is significant considering that about a third of all Internet traffic is currently torrent data."

Jeff writes "In today's Seattle Times, technology columnist Paul Andrews highlights how legal torrent sites such as CommonBits may lead to wider adoption and acceptance of BitTorrent. With reports that illegal torrent usage may be more than a third of Internet traffic, sites like LegalTorrents, Torrentocracy, Prodigem and bt.etree may offer a compelling defense to future legal attacks while simultaneously promoting fair use rights. Andrews goes on to argue that the future of television may be no further away than integration of podcasting, RSS, tagging and BlogTorrent."

ChipGuy writes "The New York Times looks at MythTV (an open source PVR technology), Bit Torrent and Videora and how they are disrupting the television business, especially the lucrative business of selling TV DVDs. Unlike the music industry, television folks are trying to get ahead of the curve and offer TV downloads in a legal and easy to use manner."

kourge writes "Croquet Project previously has been slashdotted. Today, Croquet Project released its initial developer release, codenamed 'Jasmine.' Although it isn't a finished product, it still is complete enough for developers to develop in Croquet. Croquet itself is written in Squeak, a branch of the Smalltalk language. Please remember to download Croquet via BitTorrent, which provides faster speeds and won't overload the server." The idea is ambitious: An OpenGL-based "complete development and delivery platform" delivering "shared telepresence, shared authorship of complex spaces and their contents, and shared access to network-deliverable information resources" is only part of it. Croquet's license is blessedly simple, too.

deezl writes "Michael Moore released a controversial movie revealing 'facts' about the Bush Presidency. A new rebuttal has just been released called Celsius 41.11. I would think that time sensitive political commentaries would be available for download to ensure the widest possible distribution base. If documentary makers are so interested in getting their message out and arguments across, why not encourage free BitTorrent type distribution for their movies?"