The company responsible for working in the background of protocols of Bittorrent is striving hard to produce similar features to file synching algorithms without interfacing with cloud servers. The issue of extent of trusting the cloud storage companies was raised last year by National Security Agency. It monitored the data from websites like Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. It was evident that data is not entirely safe over the cloud storage.
Bittorrent has recently introduced a new feature of synching your data on different sources as laptops, computers, hand held devices, and mobiles. It is playing very much the same role as Dropbox. Its most interesting feature is that it syncs files without placing them for storage on a central database. The new feature is referred to as Bittorrent Sync. Cloud storage of Dropbox and Skydrives keep a copy of the files on their servers. Bittorrent Sync directly contacts the concerned device for updating the files without copying them on its server.
This interesting feature makes the people quite relax about their content against the risk of being exploited for wrong means. Since, there is no intermediate source to provide the data to the requesting device, so the source device must be powered on for accepting the request. Moreover, the security agencies will have to directly access the consumer’s computer to observe the data being shared. However, the risk of data being theft over the internet is great since NSA is picking data from the origins of the internet. The Bittorrent has additional guard against data theft by encrypting the data while transferring it with latest techniques.
Bittorrent Sync is available to use for free but its beta version is not user friendly at the moment. Bittorrent CEO said that he aims to put control of the data of users in their own hands instead of handing over the data to intermediate servers that are not trust worthy.
The statistics show that the sync feature of Bittorrent is being employed by plenty of people, more than two million. Some users have applied this feature for classified purposes. One Beijing user applied Bittorrent sync to transfer the blog posts containing the sensitive information related to Chinese government.
Kinker revealed that another major use of Bittorrent Sync is to reduce the dependence on intermediate storage for storing data. This will reduce the cost of storage in central database. Although, it is transparent, yet its source code is a secret. Many people argue that Bittorrent should release the code as open-source that is not feasible according to Kinker.
