BitTorrent is shifting the
emphasis of its business to BitTorrent Sync,
a transformative file-sharing service that boasts NSA
resistance.
Last year, Belarussian Konstantin Lissounov threw together a
crude version of Sync at a BitTorrent hackathon. It allowed him to
“quickly and easily send encrypted photos of his three children
across dodgy Eastern European network lines to the rest of his
family.” Now, the peer-to-peer file synchronization tool boasts two
million users a month and is developing into BitTorrent’s
primary product. Wired shines
some light on the motivation for the move around:
A big part of the commercial opportunity for the tool,
BitTorrent executives believe, lies in the reality that large
corporations are aggressively reining in data following Snowden’s
revelations.
Like Dropbox, BitTorrent Sync enables easy transfer of music,
documents, and other files. But Sync’s decentralized structure
distinguishes it. Sync replaces data-storage centers, which the NSA
can easily
tap, with a peer-to-peer network. Like the BitTorrent
protocol, users can share files directly, from one device to
another. This leaves absolutely no opportunity for an agency like
the NSA to harvest bulk data, because it cannot penetrate a central
server. This method of file-sharing is somewhat less convenient
because, Wired explains,
“in order to synchronize files across multiple systems, all must be
online at the same time.” But CEO Eric Klinker believes that the
pros outweigh the cons for many consumers.
Sync has also been used as a platform for other exciting
projects. Wired reports:
Two open source programmers, one in Texas and one in South
Africa, have launched vole.cc, a
distributed social network built on Sync. Last month, an engineer
who works for Harvard University
unveiled SyncNet, a parallel version of the world wide web that
runs on Sync.
Decentralized technologies are stirring a productive excitement.
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency, similarly relies on a peer-to-peer
protocol. Projects like BitCloud, which aims to
“decentralize the internet,” are popping up. The sharing economy is
nurturing disruptive technologies that grant increased privacy,
cheaper access, and a decentralized protocol. The “Dropbox
killer” is embedded in that trend.
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