BitTorrent Launches Project Maelstrom, the First Torrent-Based Browser

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.

Comments

Private?

[buchner.johannes]

For normal websites, I can see the benefit of requesting data blocks identified by hashes. But doesn't bittorrent require that all data you download is shared between peers? How can any secure, private connections be handled, like banking or shopping?

Re:Private?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect that the torrent aspect would not function for anything using https, session variables, or a few other similar html gimmicks.

As for practicality, the server's connection speed is rarely the bottleneck in web browsing. Something like this would mostly serve as a potential user-defense against accidentally DoSing a popular page (if enough people join the maelstrom).

Re:Private?

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:Private?

[Bengie]

I wondering how BT will work for CDN style static data.

Re:Private?

[NotInHere]

I guess very well. In fact, there is a project called peerCDN, which P2P based on WebRTC as a CDN. So Maelstrom can already be achieved by firefox and chrome.

Freenet?

[halivar]

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?

Re:Freenet?

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Re:Freenet?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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.

Re:Freenet?

[phorm]

I don't think that the GP was indicating the *project* was shady, but more likely many of the visible uses.
Like many things, freedom affords benefits to both paragons and scoundrels, but the latter may often be more high-profile or visible.

Interesting if done right

[amaurea]

One of the reasons why the world-wide web is buried in a sea of advertising is that the costs associated with hosting a web-site increase as the site becomes more popular. So you might be ruined by your site becoming too popular. Advertising fixes that problem by giving income proportional to the popularity. But it comes with the undesirable side-effect of the ads themselves.

A peer-to-peer alternative to HTTP is a very different way of solving the same problem. If people who visit a page help upload it to other visitors, then the available resources will scale with the number of visitors without the server's bandwidth needing to increase. Bittorrent does this very successfully for large files and demonstrates that this mechanism can work. But bittorrent's latency is too high to serve as a replacement for HTTP. If this new protocol fixes that, and manages to get supported in many browsers, then things could get interesting. If they are to have any hope in the protocol gaining acceptance, it mustn't only be low latency, it should also be open and well-documented. So let's hope they don't pull another "Bittorrent Sync" here, and keep the protocol closed.

Re:Interesting if done right

[DigitAl56K]

One of the reasons why the world-wide web is buried in a sea of advertising is that the costs associated with hosting a web-site increase as the site becomes more popular.

Costs per visitor are usually extremely small.

The main reason the www has so much advertising is that almost nobody wants to pay for content, yet content is not free to produce, and even if you come up with a schema for which some people will pay, your competitors will steal all your volume by offering something closer to free (or supported by advertising), and volume is essential for almost all internet-based businesses.

None of this will change because of the distribution method. Content is still not free to produce.

Re:Interesting if done right

[xonen]

As you say, the costs per visitor are extremely low. That's also why i, personally, wouldn't mind to pay a few cents to have access. However, such is not possible. Either one pays reasonable high fees, up to multiple dollars per month, either it's free and filled with ads. There is no such choice as donating 1 cent.

So, what is lacking is a proper micropayment system that works, in an unobtrusive way. That's something that a *random big player in the market* has to solve. 20 years of consumer internet. The word micropayment is about just as old. And it still does not exist.

Re:Interesting if done right

[amaurea]

Not all websites are for profit. In fact, the majority probably isn't. This approach would only be a moderate help for for-profit websites, but it would help for popular noncommercial websites like wikipedia, discussion forums, open source software pages, etc. It could also be used to make a noncommercial youtube alternative. Just because something takes an effort to produce doesn't mean that somebody is looking to get paid for it. Some people are just looking for an audience, or others to collaborate with, or are just trying to make the world a better place.

Just a few stories back here on Slashdot we heard examples of people who had their webpages grow so popular that they were forced to put ads on them, even though they didn't wish to. That's the sort of case that would benefit the most from a distributed system.

Re:Akami is dead

[omtinez]

Wanting to "break the internet" seems to be a hot trend these days.

Interesting as an alternative for CDNs

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously this works only for static resources. I can see this work as an alternative for CDN's, and as such it's really interesting. Cache invalidation is annoying. Distributed cache invalidation is a headache in a whole different ballpark

Re:No centralized servers?

[codebonobo]

There are many examples of decentralized sites: openbazaar, twister, bitmarkets, ect ... all which require no centralized servers and are created with DHT and the blockchain protocol.

Multiple "central" servers

[davidwr]

And yet somehow, there is always a key - some centralized process somewhere that is the Achilles' heel.

And this is why there are hundreds of root DNS servers with over a dozen "names" (list).

TOR has (or had) "directory servers." Although it was discarded as not being practical, TOR or its predecessors considered using fully-distributed directory information (see 2004 documentation). TOR now has the option of using bridge-nodes. The addresses of these nodes are typically distributed "out of band" (e.g. by email or personal contact) on a need-to-use basis.

In short, "centralized servers" are not a bad thing as long as there are enough of them without any significant risk of common failure (short of a catastrophic event that would take down the whole Internet or for that matter the whole planet).

Re:Imagining torrented streaming

[Bengie]

This shouldn't be used to replace normal web browsing, but to help augment it. The web server can always been around to seed the data.