Topic: P2P – Ctrl blog

A privacy review of Tribler, the onion-routed BitTorrent app

2021-08-17T10:41:00Z

Tribler is a free and open-source file-sharing app for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It adds something unique to the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol: onion routing. Onion routing, best known from the Tor Browser project, is a network routing scheme that relays connections via multiple proxies. Tribler encrypts your connections in layers, so that each relay proxy only knows the IP address of the next and previous hop in the routing chain. This system can help provide more anonymity and obscure what you’re downloading and from where from prying eyes.

How to make Windows Update prioritize Delivery Optimization downloads

2021-08-09T13:22:00Z

Windows Delivery Optimization is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service for software from Microsoft. It works with Windows Update and updates from the Microsoft Store. The service can help reduce your data/bandwidth usage, and free up limited internet bandwidth for other activities. It can optionally also download from other Microsoft customers over the internet.

Brave adds support for IPFS distributed P2P websites

2020-12-30T00:39:00Z

The Brave browser recently added support for the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol in its beta release channel (desktop only). IPFS is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that can be used in web browsers to visit websites that are hosted by the website’s visitors instead of a central web server. This is called the distributed web. For the last two decades, the open web has been on a steady course into the hands of a few behemoth multinational companies. The distributed web is a tool that can wrangle back control from the few and hand it back to the many.

What happened to BitTorrent’s Project Maelstrom web browser?

2020-09-23T20:21:00Z

In April 2015, BitTorrent Inc. announced the public beta of Project Maelstrom; its new experimental peer-to-peer web browser. The browser reimagined the web using the company’s name sake file-sharing protocol. Websites would be distributed equally by its visitors instead of being hosted by an expensive central web server. The company published a beta and some blog posts, but then never mentioned Project Maelstrom again. What happened to it?

P2P apps’ connection amnesia makes them less fault-tolerant

2020-05-22T03:49:00Z

Peer-to-peer (P2P) applications discover peer devices either using a centralized tracking server (e.g. Syncthing, Dat, BitTorrent) or a “server-less” distributed hash table (DHT). Server-less solutions like DHT are never truly serverless, though. I’ve previously discussed how DHT clients are overly reliant on centralized bootstrapping/introduction servers and how that acts as a single-point-of-failure.