BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms(blog.bittorrent.com) |
BitTorrent Bleep Now Publicly Available Across All Major Platforms(blog.bittorrent.com) |
Meebo (remember them?) was also staying afloat with toolbar installs.
Same with BitTorrent Live...
In the beginning it was all amazing. But we all know we can't have nice things.
Proprietary software is fine for a lot of things, but anything concerning security and privacy absolutely requires the additional transparency and scrutiny offered by open-source.
I guess they are planning to market it to people who are worried about privacy but not tech-savvy enough to be able to understand these fundamental deficiencies of proprietary software, but that just seems really unsavory to me... But then again this is the same company that tried to sneak crypto-mining software as a value added offer to their installers so I can't really say I'm surprised.
http://2014.hackitoergosum.org/bittorrentsync-security-priva...
These concerns were amplified by the difficulty of auditing a closed-source product. Their argument that hashes are one-time secrets and not permanent keys is difficult to validate without access to the source.
Then You'll Love Bittorrent Bleep!
EDIT: I didn't say it was a good mindset. I just think Bittorrent is trying to leverage it's name into new markets, while alienating it's core users and promoters.
Every time a closed source nightmare reoccurs, we can just let newbies find the related open source alternative.
Also, if you don't trust the other to not want to log your conversation, don't send sensitive stuff. But then again people do seem to like snapchat and thelike, so I shouldn't judge too much there maybe.
You can say you make it harder to take screenshots but you cant promise a secure way to prevent people from saving the data you send them. That's unfeasible, its promotion of false security.
They claim to support "all major platforms" then completely skimp out on Linux and BSD.
Bleep isn't open source.
They claim to provide privacy, and their testimonials read:
Software Engineering at it's finest. If you haven't read
the blog post on this app then you need too. Once you see
how it works your gonna want it. Most secure messaging
I've seen yet.
Publish the git repository. Make it run on GNU/Linux and *BSD.
Or get the fuck out and stop making claims you cannot back up.
DDDD i t h TTTTT h i sss
D D ttttt ccc h T h s
D D i t c hhh T hhh i sss
D D i t c h h T h h i s
DDDD i tt ccc h h T h h i sss
BBBB U U L L SSSS H H I TTTTT !
B B U U L L S H H I T !
BBBB U U L L SSSS HHHH I T !
B B U U L L S H H I T
BBBB UUU LLLL LLLL SSSS H H I T !However, I think it's important that they open the source up for this project and even potentially offer the ability for me to install and run my own server. I think until they take those steps, it will be difficult for them to gain any kind of large following.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/05/snapc...
- Doesn't require your mobile phone number to use it
- Not dependant on google services on Android
Downsides:
- Cant beat Textsecures crypto - Not opensource
The last two points make this a no-go for me.
I wouldn't consider it a top 5 priority right now, but I do hope OWS takes into consideration making Signal P2P as well in the future (perhaps with some new technologies that may appear or mature by then).
My own priorities for what I want to see in Signal/Textsecure next:
1) integrated Android app
2) desktop client (ideally web/browser-based, but if that's not too secure, I could live with a native app, too, maybe one that works only through Windows 10's store for the sandbox security and digital signing benefit, as well as for the new auth features)
3) video-chat support
BitTorrent Inc is evidently scrambling to find a way to monetize the core technology having raised money and promised investors it would do that.
They just laid off a %age of their staff, which indicates to me the end of the road might be nearing and Bleep maybe one of the last attempts they have to pull something off.
I love Bram, but IMHO Bit Torrent should return to being a true open source technology developed by the community.
(The cynic in me thinks: Bleep 2 offers many new features, buy Bleep 2 Pro if you communicate with more than 10 contacts.)
1. Bleep
2- Tox
3. Ring (formerly SFLphone, DHT based authentication)Also very little information about how everything works on its website (the technical stuff, especially for security).
Just kidding, we know there are too many exhibits for even Unicode to enumerate.
Their response to using AES IGM? It's along the lines of "yeah this strange mode no one uses has issues but not in the way we use it so whatever. We've got math PhDs, so trust us."
I'm no expert, but I get a really bad feeling about them, since it's the totally wrong attitude to take.
I can't comment on the other arguments, but the client of Telegram is certainly FOSS [1]. Their service being open source is irrelevant, since you couldn't verify it anyway.
Also, bittorrent did bait and switch with btsync, and had supplied utorrent with spyware. I just don't trust the company.
It seems though that they store the message on the sender's device until the peer becomes available:
http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/11/21/offline-messages-come-...
Edit: it is fully asynchronous now: http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/12/22/bleep-now-supports-asy...
No. The documentation says it is 10 shares with any number of subfolders and that is also my experience - when the Pro trial expired, I could sync 10 shares with a large number of subfolders without any problems.
Of course, changing the number of shares from unlimited to 10 was a bait and switch move, and a scam because their website said that they wouldn't remove any functionality from the free version.
Also, it's very weird that they switched to a subscription model. You bring most of the infrastructure (bandwidth & disk space) and they bring mostly software (and some infrastructure). Why not just let people buy the software?!?
Its one simple node which address is hardcoded in the clients. So, it is a tracker, just not a full bittorrent tracker.
Because it's closed source, we don't /know/ how secure btsync is. However, we do know that microsoft, google and dropbox will just hand your shit over if the US government asks.
Something is better than nothing. The only open source competitors in this space are owncloud, who /still/ won't let me upload to both a work and person cloud at the same time, and syncthing, which I have high hopes for but which currently has a workflow so bad I think I'd rather just use a thumb drive.
I've stuck with btsync 1.3.94, the version with the beautiful workflow, just before it went off the rails. It solves my need to avoid google/facebook etc. /Maybe/ it doesn't protect me from the US government, but that's still better than dropbox.
I think bleep's gonna struggle, because it requires me to get /other/ people to buy into my disquiet, which turns out to be really hard if my experiments with XMPP over skype tell me anything.
You know what I might actually pay for? A gateway to facebook/gtalk/skype. I'd be willing to pay $5 per month for a bleep-to-everything gateway, either from bittorrent or someone else. Half of bleeps value is simply in my not needing another account (e: I could say the same about btsync).
Plus, pre-2.0 shares had a killer feature: read-only encrypted peers. These were peers that would only retrieve the encrypted data in read-only form.
Using read-only encrypted peers, you can have an always-on node in the cloud, with the security of end-to-end (client-side) encryption.
I hope they will bring this back in Sync 2, but it seems much harder now that they switched to the identity model.
Now if it were a verifiably half-assed solution, I'd agree with your statement.
But I agree that it would be far more trustable (and popular) if Bittorrent Sync were open source. And there is still a profit model with an open source BTSync: let people (who need it) get a tracker, relay server, and always-on (read-only encrypted) peer subscription.
- There is no tracker/relay server infrastructure. As a result, Syncthing doesn't work if two peers are behind a firewall/NAT without uPnP or manual port forwarding. The number of peers behind carrier-grade NAT is only growing (IPv6 migrations) and if you are often on the move (hotels, etc.) you have no control over the firewall.
- Syncthing does not support selective sync yet, let alone with the ease of BTSync where it is a Finder/Explorer extension.
- Syncthing does not support link-based sharing, which is handy if you quickly want to share something with family/colleagues.
- Syncthing is too hard to set up for most family/colleagues.
tl;dr Syncthing is great for synchronizing two machines on networks under your own control, but it is not a nearly-complete P2P replacement of Dropbox like Bittorrent Sync is.
Yes it does, it uses local discovery to find the nodes.
> Syncthing does not support selective sync yet
Yes it does, but admittedly it's not user friendly.
Sorry, I didn't formulate that clearly: two peers on different networks without uPnP or control over port forwarding.
Yes it does, but admittedly it's not user friendly.
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/issues/193
suggests otherwise. .stignore is not the same as selective sync, but more akin to BTSync's .sync/IgnoreList, it allows you to not sync files at all.
Selective sync means that e.g. all peers have file X, but you don't want to synchronize it on your laptop because it is too large.
https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/175
http://help.getsync.com/customer/portal/articles/1908818-wha...