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BitTorrent Launches Project Maelstrom, the First Torrent-Based Browser

Posted by samzenpus on from the sharing-the-web dept.

An anonymous reader writes BitTorrent today announced the first torrent-based browser. Project Maelstorm, as the app is currently called, is being made available as an invite-only alpha to "a small group of testers." Although BitTorrent is in the very early stages of the project (testers are being asked to help assess for usability and reliability), the company strongly believes Maelstrom "is the first step toward a truly distributed web, one that does not rely on centralized servers." This is by no means a new idea from the company: it's the core behind the relatively successful synchronization tool BitTorrent Sync. "Centralized architectures have not scaled well to the volume and size of data moving across the Internet," a BitTorrent spokesperson told VentureBeat. Maybe, but building a file-sharing tool around the idea of decentralization is not the same as building a whole browser.

5 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Freenet? by halivar · · Score: 3, Informative

    There was a project a while back that was called Freenet (I think) that was supposed to be an P2P anonymous internet. Seemed slow as dog crap and more than a little shady. How will this project avoid the same fate?

    1. Re:Freenet? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Informative

      Freenet is not "shady". In fact its purpose was the opposite of shady: to enable legitimate internet use without being spied on by others.

      There are others, among them OneSwarm, created at the University of Washington.

      These projects were intended to promote freedom and privacy. That isn't a "shady" goal. Though people who want to spy on you (like the government) try to pretend that it is.

    2. Re:Freenet? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 3, Informative

      Freenet had some issues. Most of them won't apply to BitTorrent's offering.

      The main one is receiving content was dog slow compared to, say, Tor. This is simply an artifact of how it was routing connections and the distributed storage aspect.

      Second, but still contributing to the poor experience is that the app itself had some architectural flaws that made it and your PC run dog slow -- the choice was either use hundreds of threads or let the operations stall.

      The third, more of a security/philosophical flaw, is that the base protocol was not documented in any significant fashion. To review the protocol's security, you'd need to have an expert understanding of Java and a large part of the codebase. So it never really had many eyes on it looking for flaws.

      I haven't used Freenet in around 5 years, so this may have improved. It was pretty clear why it never caught on at the time.

  2. Re:Private? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Informative

    But doesn't bittorrent require that all data you download is shared between peers?

    No.

    Most bittorrent clients force you to upload to others as you download. But that isn't a requirement of the protocol, it was a judgment call on the part of the programmers. They felt that if you don't share what you download, then "the community" of sharers will fall apart.

    But the BitTorrent protocol has many perfectly legitimate uses today, other than just copyright infringement.

    At least some BT clients allow you to control how much (or whether) you upload when you download. Or to share things you didn't download in the first place.

    But the short answer is: no. There is no requirement in the BitTorrent protocol that you "share" everything.

  3. Re:Akami is dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Tor isn't anonymous anymore, and just using it probably puts you on a watch list somewhere. Insert tinfoil hat joke below.