BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public

Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by Angostura on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @04:58PM (#5597970)

Is this the first time that a product has been launched with the primary motivation of showing that a particular protocol is good for things other illegal filesharing?

Up until now BitTorrent aficionados have tended to be forced back to the "I use it for Linux distros" when defending the protocol against ISPs and businesses looking to shape or block BT traffic.

If this takes off, then the "its only used for nefarious purposes" argument will be much harder to make.

I suspect that this is the real reason it's being launched - not that that's a bad thing.

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by AllTheThings on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @05:45PM (#5598199)

That's an interesting way of looking at things, but I think Sync has a long way to go before it becomes a textbook case for BitTorrent advocates to point to productive usage. I think that supporting anonymous, distributed protocols like BitTorrent should be our prerogative as proponents of a free society.

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by ephoz on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @05:44PM (#5598197)

Many gamers are using BitTorrent through Valve's Steam. By which I mean, that p2p file sharing is hardly nefarious. It's just a clever use of bandwidth.

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by javanix on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @06:28PM (#5598386)

Is Steam actually using BitTorrent? I thought they were using something proprietary.

If they are not using BitTorrent then Sync would provide a new, plausible way to stop ISPs from blocking that specific protocol.

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by ephoz on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @06:56PM (#5598509)

I think I got a little ahead of myself here, sorry. Bram Cohen (who is known for inventing BitTorrent) has worked shortly with Valve on Steam. I can't find a source quoting Steam as using BitTorrent though, so let's assume that no.

Well, apparently Blizzard does. :) Quoting http://www.wowpedia.org/Blizzard_Downloader

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by pm90 on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @07:06PM (#5598547)

I remember that Ubuntu used to be available via torrents

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by e12e on Wednesday April 24, 2013 @03:59AM (#5600372)

Still is? http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/alternative-downloads

There's also http://debtorrent.alioth.debian.org/

Apparently CCP is planning to use bittorrent for the next generation launcher for EVE online:

http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/74573

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Re:BitTorrent’s Secure Dropbox Alternative Goes Public by jacoblyles on Wednesday April 24, 2013 @03:42AM (#5600338)

Facebook uses bittorrent for deploying new versions of the site to machines in their data centers.

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