Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi

Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by doctoboggan on Friday July 19, 2013 @01:59PM (#6071781)

Yes I agree. I am hoping someone reverse engineers the sync protocol so we could build an open source client.

But like I mentioned in the article I am using this to replace a closed source cloud solution I was previously using so it is a step in the right direction.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by seunosewa on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:59PM (#6072177)

Writing a new protocol with an open source reference implementation will probably be a better idea, because:

1) Reverse-engineering isn't clean and can be circumvented.

2) BTsync has not reached a point where it can't be beaten by a competing protocol.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by danielsiders on Friday July 19, 2013 @04:34PM (#6072802)

We're actively developing an open source Dropbox type app that's powered by Tent (https://tent.io).

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by rohamg on Saturday July 20, 2013 @01:31PM (#6075829)

you should have a landing page with an email sign up form that you can link people to.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by bascule on Friday July 19, 2013 @07:25PM (#6073588)

Tahoe-LAFS is a mature project of this nature: https://tahoe-lafs.org/

I am writing a similar project which is fairly immature: https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by TheCraiggers on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:26PM (#6071943)

The particulars of the BT protocol are beyond me, but I thought it would already do a compare between the copy you had and the one on the external server, and only send the relevant bytes to bring everything up to sync again.

Between that and a "compare timestamps to figure out the newest file" I wouldn't think it would be that hard to re-create? What am I missing here?

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by Osiris on Friday July 19, 2013 @04:17PM (#6072687)

BitTorrent creates a hashes of your file. The file is broken down into certain size chunks and hashes taken of each chunk. If you already have a piece with a given hash, you won't download it. If a hash differs, it'll be transmitted. The receiver verifies the hash. If it fails it re-requests that piece.

I assume the sync protocol works the same. It hashes the file, checks if any chunks have changed, sends the hash meta-data to the recipient, who then requests and pieces that have changed.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by dman on Friday July 19, 2013 @04:26PM (#6072751)

What about hash collisions?

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by tokenizerrr on Friday July 19, 2013 @05:34PM (#6073090)

SHA-2 has no collisions found as of yet [1]. The collision attacks on md5 required a lot of junk data, so not sure how much of a problem that would be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2#Comparison_of_SHA_functi...

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by paraxisi on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:12PM (#6071857)

Steve Gibson of GRC/Security Now has mentioned (if I remember correctly,) that the protocol/spec will be published, or at least shared with people who have an interest.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by jlund on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:20PM (#6071904)

That's better than nothing, I suppose, but unless the source is open it's still impossible to trust the proprietary binary.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by chongli on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:35PM (#6071999)

impossible to trust the proprietary binary

If the protocol is published properly you won't have to: people will write their own free software implementations.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by cenhyperion on Friday July 19, 2013 @02:36PM (#6072009)

If the spec is published it should be a lot easier to build an open source client.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by sk3w on Friday July 19, 2013 @03:39PM (#6072437)

Take a look at git-annex. It's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison with btsync, but I find that it meets my needs quite well.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by jlgreco on Friday July 19, 2013 @04:09PM (#6072634)

I'm using git-annex-assistant right now and while it is really nice and promises to replace dropbox for me, it would still use a lot more loving. There seem to be some weird states that you can easily get it into (I've had issues with the files syncing properly but the webapp claiming that the syncing was failing (or rather, that item is colored red, has an "!", and doesn't say anything else), it does not handle very large numbers of small files well (something git by itself does well),and a few other assorted problems).

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by mlinksva on Friday July 19, 2013 @08:34PM (#6073814)

Looks like the developer is going to be giving it more loving full time for the next year -- https://campaign.joeyh.name/ almost funded.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by jlgreco on Friday July 19, 2013 @09:31PM (#6073953)

Yup! Joey is dedicated as hell which makes me really optimistic about the future of git annex.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by stinos on Saturday July 20, 2013 @10:04AM (#6075253)

Are you implying you actually investigate every piece of code you are running right now? I doubt it. And to do it properly you'd also have to review all hundreds of thousand of lines of code needed to build and run this source else you'll never know if there's a backdoor somewhere. Oh man, and what about your bios? God knows what lowleve packet sniffer is setup in there :]

Just kidding. Partly.

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by jimmaswell on Friday July 19, 2013 @06:15PM (#6073328)

Then how would you know they were using the same source in their binaries?

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Re:Replace Dropbox with BitTorrent Sync and a Raspberry Pi by icebraining on Friday July 19, 2013 @08:33PM (#6073810)

Why use their binaries? I rather have Debian compile mine.

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