BitTorrent Blog

(Full disclosure: movies.io admin here)

Right now, it's hard to tell. I like that their current protocol is published as an IETF draft [1], but it doesn't include anything about their 'proxy layer' which is touted in the TF article.

From the details in this article, it seems to work a bit like Tor, which raises a few questions: who is going to run the ProxyNodes: is that their business model: making people pay a subscription to access their vast network of ProxyNodes? (Will they claim innocence because "they don't inspect the content passing through", even though it'll be mostly pirate content).

PPSP (the IETF version) looks like a more modern and lightweight BitTorrent that runs on UDP. I like that, but as every network, we'll have to see the adoption rate. People stay on BitTorrent the same reason they stay on Facebook: everybody's there.

The Tribler guys are not the only one to want to do P2P on top of UDP though: uTorrent came out much sooner (and with reasonably good adoption) with μTP [2].

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protocol/?include_text=1

[2] http://blog.bittorrent.com/2009/10/05/changing-the-game-with-%CE%BCtp/

It wouldn't be the craziest thing people do with docker:

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/10/22/sync-hacks-deploy-bittorrent-sync-with-docker/

http://blog.docker.io/2013/07/docker-desktop-your-desktop-over-ssh-running-inside-of-a-docker-container/

There has been discussion of taking the git analogy further. We actually experimented with a lot of that early on (https://github.com/dotcloud/cloudlets) and I can tell you it's definitely possible to take the scm analogy too far :)

I do think we can still borrow a few interesting things from git. Including, potentially, their packfile format and cryptographic signatures of each diff. We'll see!

Here's a relevant discussion thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/docker-user/CWc5HB6kANA/oHyw-rgjJoYJ

It doesn't look like ipfs has human friendly named pointers yet either? At least that's what I gather from their documentation:
http://ipfs.io/docs/commands/#ipfs-name

In answer to your question: bookmarks have been a long standing solution to remembering names. I absolutely understand that it's not the most ideal solution - but hopefully acceptable for a beta.

Unfortunately, the linked to TechCrunch article doesn't do much to explain how the browser works. One of the original-source blog posts does a (slightly) better job of explaining how things work - or at least points you in the direction:
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2015/04/10/project-maelstrom-developer-tools/

The hashes directly represent the infohash for the created torrent website.

OwnCloud is quite nice, but its Dropbox-like feature isn't his best asset. We have big shared folders and the client app does weird stuff sometimes (and given the way things are architected, I'm not confident it will change).

On the other hand, it gives you a nice web-based file browser, CardDav, CalDav, and a RSS webapp. And there's a basic iPhone app.

The approach posted somewhere else in the comments[0] seems interesting. Use BTSync for the synchronization, and put ownCloud over that for the web interface and other goodies. I'm tempted to experiment with that.

[0] http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/05/23/how-i-created-my-own-personal-cloud-using-bittorrent-sync-owncloud-and-raspberry-pi/

I don't know yet if BitTorrent has pulled this off in a way that is reliable, secure, truly decentralized and easy-to-use, but this at least points to future we want.

They claim[1], "Bleep offers the freedom to communicate without the risk of metadata being exposed.", and that it is good for "Journalists communicating with sources without exposing their identity or their content."

This line worries me: "In typical Silicon Valley fashion, we’ll evaluate monetization models down the line." I'm sure idlewords (Maciej Ceglowski) would agree.

[1] http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/07/30/bittorrents-chat-client-unveiled-bittorrent-bleep-now-in-invite-only-pre-alpha/

I love that Thom and Nigel continue to experiment in this space, and having been previously unfamiliar with Bundle I was pleasantly surprised to see that several of my favorite artists/labels have released material via this channel in recent months.

But I'm not sure if I really see the benefit of this (for artists or listeners) over e.g. Bandcamp, and the more I dig into BT's messaging about Bundle[0] the less I feel I understand about the overall strategy.

[0]http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/06/16/bittorrent-bundle-hits-100-million-downloads-and-streams/