Still, BitTorrent Sync does have some major advantages over Dropbox – especially in terms of transfer speed, which the company claims (and we can at least roughly verify) is around seven times faster than Dropbox. Since that time, Dropbox has grown to more than 200 million users. Dropbox’s growth rate in this chart is based on statements from the company uttered between 20 – the latest date being almost four years ago. According to the chart above, BitTorrent Sync “is growing 2X as fast as Dropbox.” Sounds impressive – but it’s a bit misleading. Services like Dropbox appear to be BitTorrent Sync’s most direct competitor, and BitTorrent takes direct aim at the cloud storage provider in its latest press blast. “Our personal information is now property of a few corporations subject to dragnet data collection by our own government.”īitTorrent – a company most commonly associated with illegal file-sharing – used the NSA revelations earlier this year as a centerpiece in it’s rebranding efforts, which included a series of enigmatic billboards in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. “2013 will be remembered as 1984: the year we woke up to the reality of server farms and stacks,” wrote BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker on the company blog. Because BitTorrent Sync uses no middle-man servers, users’ files are theoretically more secure, and less susceptible to subpoena from law enforcement. The rising success of BitTorrent Sync comes as a result of users’ renewed concerns about the privacy and security of their digital information thanks to the ongoing revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, according to the company. BitTorrent sync also allows users to encrypt their file transfers using a automatically generated key or a scannable QR code. Instead, it uses BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer technology to enable high-speed file transfers. Unlike Dropbox or any other cloud storage service, BitTorrent Sync uses no central servers. The company announced today that the app’s userbase has jumped from 1 million to nearly 2 million users over the past four weeks.īitTorrent bills BitTorrent Sync as a privacy-centric alternative to cloud storage services like Dropbox, allowing users to share files of any size with other users, or between separate devices. Fitbit Versa 3īitTorrent’s super-secure file-sharing app, BitTorrent Sync, has had a dang good month. However, if I do ever find myself in a position where my life and liberty depend on secure communications, I won't be using anything that isn't open source. In the meantime, I figure I might as well go ahead and use it the only files of mine that really require strong encryption is the aforementioned KeePass database, and that's already encrypted. The BT Sync team have stated that they're considering the option of taking it open source. Looking through the Bittorrent forums, this has all been debated to death. Likewise for the other open source software I use, I trust that there's enough people looking at the code that someone would raise a stink if something was awry. I trust KeePass with my passwords because anyone can check the code to make sure it's not transmitting all my passwords to the NSA, GCHQ, GCSB, any other alphabet soup agency, Google, Facebook, or the Russian Mafia (to list just a few possible nefarious organisations). While I would probably never do any more than glance at the source code if it was open, I would feel much safer in the knowledge that people much more clued up than me about security had most likely pored over the code looking for bugs and security holes. The problem is that anyone who knows anything about computer security and cryptography also knows that a security solution that no-one else can inspect is a potentially insecure solution. After all, Dropbox is closed and everyone (including me) trusts them to a certain extent (with non-critical stuff), though it doesn't exactly have the strongest reputation for security. It sounds like such a good system, and just because it's not FOSS doesn't mean it's not a really good piece of software, and as perfectly secure as it's possible to be these days. Then I had a sudden thought: "Wait, is Bittorrent Sync open source?". I was thinking about installing it on my systems today, to act as a secure, decentralised alternative to Dropbox. Bittorrent Sync has been getting a lot of press lately for being a really good file synchronisation solution.
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