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BitTorrent Sees Sync Users Share Over 1PB of Data
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."
I guess that's why it was closed-source only?
The fact that you in turn save encrypted copies of their data.
You only share among people with same shared key. So, no, you are not spreading your encrypted file to other people. At 1:1 it's pretty much direct peer-to-peer transfer. If more nodes are participating, then it can leverage distributed transfers from other nodes that may have part of the whole part of a file.
I might be wrong but I was under the understanding that it is primarily aimed at syncing your own data between your own devices (think Dropbox but without a centralised file server). You could choose to sync it with other users but they would then have access to your unencrypted data.
My understanding is that your data is only sync'd among your own computers. Specifically, when you create a shared folder, it has an associated secret (random string used as an encryption key), and only computers that have that secret have a copy of the data.
Indeed, I thought this was going to be the perfect thing for say two friends to use as a backup method between each other - not so much a randon anyone on the internets has the backup... If it does pick users off the internet, I am less interested in it - I thought the concept of peer to peer based backup (but selecting your peers) was brilliant.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
/me slaps Anonymous Coward with a rainbow trout
Take that!
The Ubuntu £inux parasite is in full force. I have returned to tell you once again about the dangers of the Ubuntu £inux conspiracy. Ubuntu is taking over the world using BitTorrent to infect hard drives with abnormal software configurations. It is a virus spreading over the net and nobody, not even Microsoft can stop them. The knights at Microsoft are entering emergency preparation for a last plan to save users from the Ubuntu virus, but it is unlikely such a small company can compete against the Ubuntu Tycoons. Ubuntu is an invasion of privacy: It keeps work from getting done by handicapping users with LibreOffice, and it relays all data that passes through it to the NSA and Amazon.com . Will the forces of good prevail? Probably not. We should prepare for the armageddon of computing.
That's FUD. Ubuntu is a very good OS, at least more secure than Windows.
FYI, they're transferring file blocks based on their hash. They aren't doing delta comparisons as this would require you to cache the previous version of the file. So if you insert a byte at the start of your file, expect the whole thing to be re-transferred.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
the mars rover is tracking and recording our brainwaves also
That would explain this
You only share among people with same shared key. So, no, you are not spreading your encrypted file to other people.
At 1:1 it's pretty much direct peer-to-peer transfer. If more nodes are participating, then it can leverage distributed transfers from other nodes that may have part of the whole part of a file.
I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like Sync may accomplish the very significant task of getting users to easily share and manage (and use) keys like it was just something you do while working with your files.
That would be far more significant than merely attaching a distributed filesystem to a P2P protocol.
I think you may have misunderstood (that figure is total data transferred by all their users), Aerofs is a really good p2p sync tool that you might want to look at for what you want though.
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Transferring "blocks" based on hashes, not files. You don't need to re-transfer the entire file, just the entire block. You know, just like how BitTorrent works.
From reading the descriptions on the sync site... no. Anyone with the key can access the files. This provides some security, but it is pretty brittle. As long as everyone using it understands the level of security that should be applied to that key. i.e. anyone who steals the key can access the files. So, for example, never send the key over email.
This seems like a reasonable solution for either just syncing personal files, where one individual has control of the key(s). Or syncing among a small technical group where everyone understands the relevance of the security of the key(s). Or syncing low-risk files among a less formal group. So it provides "some security" but you shouldn't really call it "secure", where "secure" would be per-user authenticated based on unique, private credentials for each user that they will not, in practice, give to others.
Actually, the case that was illustrated in the earlier comment can throw things off pretty bad. By inserting a bit at the beginning of the file, it'll pretty much shift the offset of the block for the whole file thereafter invalidating all the blocks, unless the actual data of files are considered. (Which I believe BitTorrent Sync is NOT doing.)
That's the one thing that I love about it.
It reduces onboarding process for the user as simple as typing in the secret. One of the pet peeves I had with most of P2P file synchronization services were that they required registration with the central server. It's much easier directing my peer installing software, then typing in secret instead of "install the software, now go to their website and register, wait for E-mail confirmation, and then confirm your E-mail...what? You can't remember the password you have set?"
Their Windows installer even provides an opportunity to type in the secret right after installation, which makes the cases like above very easy to handle.
I have no idea how this is even possible, but BT Sync kills my home Mac's network connection. It's so weird. I can ping out from my mac fine, but pinging TO the mac results in 90% packet loss. Needless to say, this makes the network quite useless. Quit the app, no more packet loss. Took me quite a while to track that down!
no longer working for cnet