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BitTorrent Sync Beta Released
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."
The BTSync team has been perfectly clear that they do not intend at any time to open BTSync to the public. We were told that when we were using Skype, that it was safe and encrypted. Now we learned that it wasn't. Open source Sync and we will trust you.
Yup! They have to serve your sentence for you.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The advantage of synching and sharing with random peers is increased bandwidth and more redundancy in case one or more of your devices are not working or have limited network connectivity.
Please people, seed my personal files that you can't see!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
as long as they open their standard. If I can choose an open-source implementation written by someone else, I'm much more interested and inclined to really use the service.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
>Those revelations about the NSA—even if totally unsurprising to the paranoid
Don't those revelations imply that the people labelled as paranoid were in fact not paranoid at all?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So it's basically a distributed, but private dropbox thingie, sounds nice.
Is there any open-source that does a similar thing ? (as in: works on linux and android, and is fairly lightweight)
Owncloud is the closest I could find, but it requires a central server, I think.
I doubt BitTorrent will open source this, as it's a for-profit company that hasn't had luck monetizing open source in the past.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I just love when bittorrent is tied into freedom of speech and human rights. It just shows people don't know shit about fuck with regards to freedom of speech and human rights.
First world problems for sure.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
but we need to go further. How cool would it be to have an XMPP based initiation protocol instead of a LAMP stack? Place your jabber server credentials of choice into two devices and then have some form of pairing over XMPP. Initiate a direct connection if possible but use XMPP as a fallback. Extra points for communicating over SSL via generated public-private key pairs per device with a graphical fingerprint for pairing the two devices together.
Of course the ultimate extension of this is a bittorrent filesystem sync. Imagine you have a lot of music or movies and want to keep them in sync in multiple locations securely. Maybe allow friends to get a read-only sync copy of your media but not your financial data. Maybe sync everything to a NAS in your parents.
Benefits of just using rsync (which I use now) is obviously the torrent part of it, but an additional part is that you can likely do it without punching an extra hole in your network's security if you live behind a couple layers of routers.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
EULAs generally idemnify the company from liability do to the program's use (although it's questionable how legally enforcable EULAs are). False advertising might be a better way to go after companies making claims like that. That said, what company or software makes the ridiculous claim of be unsnoopable and/or having unbreakable encryption?
Yup! yup! yup! They misGood
Wuuhuuu
As cool as using bittorrent protocol would be, at least owncloud's developers do release the source code, and there are sync clients too. It may not be distributed (it requires a regular server setup), but I'll take that over not having the code.
So this thing stores segments of your synced stuff in a distributed fashion across multiple unknowns computers. right? I've been following a recent article series on Arstechnica about cracking passwords, and that left me worried. Now, what is to stop anyone participating in my sync from forcefully cracking and viewing encrypted parts of my files?
I've been looking for a good solution to "divorce" myself from the cloud storage trend for quite a while and I'll started using BitTorrent Sync as soon as it was announced. They also now have an Android version for testing and it also works quite well. They use a secret key for each folder shared that is generated by the software, or can be created by you. Each folder has a full access and read only key, so you can share files at two different levels. These keys can be changed anytime and it has a key delivery mechanism of one-time keys that can be more easily shared. Obviously, in order to keep your files safe, you need two locations that separate, such as home and work or you could sync your files with a friend. The features have been coming very quickly and I'm pleased by all they have added. You can choose how much you want to use the BitTorrent network (your files are always encrypted with your key though so they cannot be viewed over the network) from using their trackers, a relay server, and the DHT network, to just using the LAN and hardcoding the host IPs into the software configuration. The more of the network you use, the easier it is to access your files from anywhere. So, if you don't trust BitTorrent, then you don't have to use them. The Android application (and the iPhone one when it come out I'm sure) has some additional features, such as the ability to easy transfer files between mobile devices by simply scanning a QR code and things like that. So far, I am very pleased with this software and have been recommending it to everyone.
BitTorrent does NOT know your secret. They create a hash that is derived from your secret (and some other information) and use the BitTorrent protocol to publish that hash. When a device sees another device with the same hash, they start to communicate and that is how they ultimately connect with each other, but each one still needs to have the same secret key.